This author says development and lack of male teachers can affect boys' struggle in classroom

Boys are struggling in school. And Richard Reeves says it’s not just in one area, but in many. And, he says, it’s worse for low-income boys; there’s also a race gap. And, as you might imagine, that’s causing problems for those boys as they grow up.

Reeves is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of the 2022 book "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters and What to Do About It." The Show spoke with him earlier about the problems boys are facing in the classroom and we started with in which ways boys are not succeeding in school right now.

Full conversation

RICHARD REEVES: Yeah, well, actually, the difficulty is answering that question, simply because it's on basically every measure in the education system, there's a gender gap just disfavouring boys. But just maybe, to put a couple of data points down, in higher education now there's a very significant gender gap with men, a long way behind women.

So on college campuses today, it's about 60/40 female male terms of the share, which is a bigger gender gap than we had in the 1970s actually. It's just the other way around, and that reflects a lot of what's happening in high schools and earlier of course. I'm not blaming colleges here, although colleges can definitely do better.

If you look at high school GPA, the top 10% of students are two-thirds girls, only one-third boys. Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a developmental disability, and they're much less likely to be school ready when they actually kind of come in kindergarten.

And so we see kind of significant gaps that lead to, you know, by eighth grade, boys are about a grade level behind in English in the average school district. And it's worth saying that these gaps are just much bigger in poorer school districts as well.

MARK BRODIE: I assume this is the kind of thing where there's not, like, one or two reasons for this, but I'm wondering if, in your mind, there are a few main reasons why this is happening?

REEVES: Yeah, there are a few. I think one factor is that boys do develop a little bit later than girls. You see it in the in the young years, where boys just develop language skills, especially it's a little bit later and but then in adolescence too, you'll see that like the boys just develop quite a bit later than girls, and where that particularly plays out is actually less in what social scientists call cognitive skills, which is more just about processing what you might think of as traditional intelligence, and it's more around organization, study habits, persistence, attention and so on.

And I'd say two other things pretty briefly. One is that I think the lack of male teachers is a problem. And the last thing is the lack of investment in more hands-on learning styles. So don't mean shop class, but I just mean more applied learning styles, more and more vocationally oriented learning styles, which definitely seem to favor boys.

BRODIE: Is there a time where you can pinpoint sort of where this started happening, where boys started struggling as much as they are, and girls really sort of overtook their academic achievements.

REEVES: Well, I think it's much more of an overtaking than it is a sort of new problem of boys struggling. That for sure, there are various ways in which boys are actually falling back in some places, like even in absolute terms, but this is mostly a story of, if you like, a race that girls are just now winning in, you know, much more easily they have out striding and overtaken the boys.

And the way I think about this is probably, I think we can see this happening, really, from the '80s onwards, late-70s, early-80s onwards. And my sense of this is that we should see this rather as revealing something, rather than causing or being caused by something. And what I mean by that is that I think that some of these natural advantages that the girls have were always there, and the reason that they didn't show up before is because we didn't encourage girls to advance in education or go to college.

We were artificially suppressing girls and women in a way that we weren't boys and men. And as soon as we took those artificial constraints away it was, I think it was really like taking the brakes off a race car, to be honest.

BRODIE: What are some of the ways out of this? I mean, I understand, I imagine you would say, you know, let's have some more male teachers, especially maybe in elementary and middle school or junior high. But like, what else can be done so that both boys and girls can really thrive in school, which I imagine, and it would seem reasonable, is the main goal that everybody, every student, regardless of their gender, thrives in school.

REEVES: Yeah, that's right. And then the good thing about the proposals that I've got is that there's no evidence that any of them would be bad for girls. I would certainly say, I think, we need more male teachers.

And to be clear, I think that that's not only because of what I think we'll see, and there's some evidence to suggest we would see in terms of academic outcomes, but it's also just, I think, incredibly important not to send a message to the next generation that teaching is women's work. I think it's important that education isn't coded male or female.

There are other things too. Like, I think it's certainly worth starting boys in school a bit later, if we can afford it, and it doesn't put the parents in difficult circumstances in terms of child care, just to give the boy that extra year or extra few months actually, to develop, definitely more hands on learning.

But there are other things like, even, we've seen good evidence in Chicago public schools from the impact of high dose tutoring on math scores, and it's really driven by the results among boys. And so you could imagine introducing, you know, a more wide scale kind of tutoring programs, and it could be available to all students.

Of course, you wouldn't restrict it to boys, but it would disproportionately benefit boys. And so it turns out that just kind of improving the overall education system would be good for everybody, but to be especially good for boys, and therefore, hopefully narrow those gender gaps without in any way holding back the progress of girls.

BRODIE: I want to ask about the implications of this, like, what does it mean, not just for those students, those, those male students who are struggling in school. But like, what does it mean for society, more largely, if you know, if this number of boys really seem to be struggling in school.

REEVES: Well, we know that a lot of men, especially young men, are struggling to find their footing in the labor market, in higher education, even in family life in some ways, and one thing we can do about that is to set them up as well as possible through the K-12 education system.

And so if we are concerned about the fact that wages have been flat for working class men in the U.S. for half a century now, then there's a skill answer to that. There's an education answer to that for sure. If we're worried that we're not seeing couples forming and people having children, and one of the main reasons women give is because they couldn't find someone that they wanted to have kind of kids with.

If we're worried about productivity, if we're worried about declining male labor force participation, then one of, one of the things we can do that gets upstream of those challenges facing kind of many young men and men generally, and therefore society as a whole is to do the very best we can with our education system to to equip them for the future.

And so, you know, I think there's no need to give up on the areas where we do need to continue to do more for women and girls and are many like getting more women into STEM and the share of women in tech is going down right now, and we've really made very little progress on that front for example, the share of women CEOs is still incredibly low. The share of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are still only 50.

And so I gave you lots of stats earlier about the ways in which many of our boys are struggling in school. That doesn't mean there are also many ways in which women continue to face disadvantages in our society, and the challenge for all of us is to be able to do both of those things at once, and to think two thoughts at once and actually solve more than one problem at once.

REEVES: No thank you, Mark, it was great.