Boys vs. girls.

As a long-time fan of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, I was disappointed by the errors in "The Boy Problem" (May 5). Whitehead asserts that the gender gap has developed not because "the boys of today are lagging behind the boys of yesterday [but because] the girls of today have surpassed the girls of yesterday--and outdistanced the boys of today as well." This is not true. Scholars tell us that the growing gender gap in academic achievement is not primarily a function of girls doing better, but of boys doing worse. Last year Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky at the National Endowment for the Arts published a study of the leisure-time activities of teenagers between 1980 and 2004. In the early 1980s, boys used to read for fun. Not any more. Girls still read for fun, though girls today read less than girls did twenty years ago. The authors suggest that one reason for boys' lack of interest in reading might be the reading curriculum that was put in place in order to promote girls' interest in reading. Twenty-five years ago, U.S. students were often assigned Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Today, students in U.S. schools are much more likely to be assigned Toni Morrison's Beloved. Which book is more likely to engage boys, and which girls?

Whitehead also errs when she implies that girls today are more likely to take courses such as AP calculus. In fact, both proportionately and in absolute numbers, fewer girls are studying AP calculus today than twenty years ago (the National Coalition for Research on Women, www.ncrw.org, has documented this point thoroughly). When teachers have no training in, or understanding of, gender-specific teaching strategies, the end result is fewer girls in subjects such as calculus, physics, and computer science, and fewer boys who care about school at all. And that's what is really disturbing: the growing evidence that most boys no longer care about the schools they attend. In 1963, the Beach Boys had a Top Forty hit with "Be True to Your School." In that era, high-school boys would often wear jackets emblazoned with the name of their school. Today, such a song--or the wearing of such a jacket--would be considered a joke at most schools. The only schools where I see boys wearing school jackets nowadays are all-boys schools, where caring about school is not yet considered a wretched emblem of geekiness.

LEONARD SAX

Poolesville, Md.

The writer is executive director of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education.

THE AUTHOR REPLIES:

In opening my column with a reference to the college gender gap, I had in mind a single measure of educational achievement: the college graduation rate. I should have made it clear that I was using this measure rather than others. But my characterization of what this measure shows is accurate. Thirty-five years ago, the college graduation rate for young men exceeded the rate for young women. Today, the reverse is true. This isn't because the rate for men has dropped but because there has been such a large increase in the rate for women.

I'm puzzled by Leonard Sax's reference to AP calculus. I simply noted that the progressive model "urged girls into AP math courses and summer science programs." I don't think this implies what Sax says it implies. In any case, I agree with him that we need to take the boy problem seriously and that so far we have failed to do so.

BARBARA DAFOE WHITEHEAD