[...]... attend two- and four-year colleges as opposed to the slightly less than 68 percent of boys who did so, according to the state Department of Education 8 Why Boys Fail Until the 1980s, more men than women attended and graduated from college But by the 1990s, women had caught up, and soon they overtook men The article gets interesting when the reporter attempts to answer the ‘ why ’ question Two reasons, local... develop with his own two sons ‘‘Their interest in reading fell off around the fifth and sixth grades The same was happening with their interest in writing and keeping a journal They were in a good school system and they liked school, but their desire and joy for reading and writing were evaporating Our oldest had more of an ‘attitude’ and our youngest was becoming apathetic, and here I was, state superintendent... highpoverty urban schools, where boys are losing sight of the girls In Chicago, the girls at Gen George Patton Elementary School outpaced the boys by fifty-five points on the 2007 state reading tests.3 Boys are four and a half times as likely as girls to get expelled from preschool and four times as likely to suffer from attention-deficit disorders In state after state, boys are slipping behind girls in... literally sweating through his last two courses of high school He made it—and I got to shake his hand and congratulate him as he walked across the stage But why did it have to be so difficult for him, and for the millions of other young men like him? There are countless factors other than literacy that can impact boys achievement, and what is impressive about Whitmire’s analysis is that, without oversimplifying... Introduction 5 Thanks to a reporting fellowship at the University of Maryland, I began a query into this issue that would persist for many years and include the launching of a website/blog, whyboysfail.com I quickly discovered that the boy troubles are international and that several countries, including Australia, are far ahead of the United States in probing the roots of the mystery The journey to answer the... for boys attention, often luring them away from achieving according to their astonishing potential It does not have to be this hard If we do our jobs right from the time boys are young, teaching reading and writing in ways that engage boys, it does not have to be a competition, and parents will not have to wring their hands wondering what went wrong, or feel their hearts break watching their sons. .. evidence, and offer an opinion Always, I will try to stick with what reporters do best, which is investigate And I will abide by my Missouri roots: Show me When I find schools where boys and girls both succeed at academics, I will draw lessons about what happens in those schools that is not happening in the many schools where boys lag far behind In the end, readers can decide for themselves what their... the girls Much of what I learned from this investigation can be found at my website and blog, whyboysfail.com Those who read my blog and freelance pieces might guess that the gender gap is my only education interest Actually, I write about a lot of other issues, including preschools, charter schools, and teacher quality The boys issue, however, is the only one I blog on and the only issue I’ve researched... and women need college degrees more than men This is their logic? As the article pointed out, the entire phenomenon of boys falling behind is only about twenty years old In that brief time frame boys suddenly became less mature? The economic explanation, that women need college more than men, makes more sense and until recent years was true Women did get a greater salary boost from a degree The changing... point out that boys were having unique problems in schools and then craft a solution—even though boys everywhere in New Mexico are falling behind, not just in Pojoaque On national tests, between 10 and 18 percent more boys than girls in New Mexico K–12 schools score ‘‘below basic’’ in reading and writing Sixty percent of the girls graduate from high school, compared to 53.5 percent of the boys Sixty-six . h0" alt="" WHY BOYS FAIL This page intentionally left blank Why Boys Fail Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind Richard. Cataloging-in-Publication Data Whitmire, Richard. Why boys fail : saving our sons from an educational system that’s leaving them behind / Richard Whitmire. p. cm. Includes