NEWSWEEK COVER: 'The Boy Crisis'

Boys in Every Demographic Are Falling Behind According to Almost Every
Key Societal and Academic Metric; Problem May Lie in 'Biologically
Disrespectful'

Education System

New Research Suggests Classic 'Boy' Behaviors Are Triggered in Part By Male

Brain Chemistry, Not Socialization

NEW YORK, Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Danny Frankhuizen, 16, is
thoughtful, articulate, bright, has a good relationship with his mom,
goes to church every Sunday, loves the rock band Phish and spends
hours each day practicing his guitar. But once he's inside his large
public Salt Lake City high school, everything seems to go wrong. He
can't stay organized. He finishes his homework and then can't find it
in his backpack. He loses focus in class, and his teachers, with 40
kids to wrangle, aren't much help. "If I miss a concept, they tell me,
'Figure it out yourself,'" Danny tells Newsweek's General Editor Peg
Tyre. Last year Danny's grades dropped from B's to D's and F's. The
sophomore, who once dreamed of Stanford, is pulling his grades up but
worries that "I wouldn't even get accepted at community college."

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060122/NYSU002 )

Danny is a symptom of a larger problem. By almost every benchmark,
boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling
behind, reports Tyre in the January 30 Newsweek cover story "The Boy
Crisis" (on newsstands Monday, January 23). With boys' standardized
test scores and college enrollment rates dropping, and diagnoses of
learning disabilities rising, educators are searching for new tools to
help tackle the problem. In the last two decades, the education system
has become obsessed with a quantifiable and narrowly defined kind of
academic success, experts say, and that myopic view is harming boys.
Boys are biologically, developmentally and psychologically different
from girls -- and teachers need to learn how to bring out the best in
everyone. "Very well-meaning people," says Dr. Bruce Perry, a Houston
neurologist who advocates for troubled kids, "have created a
biologically disrespectful model of education."

Thirty years ago feminists argued that classic "boy" behaviors were a
result of socialization, but these days, scientists believe they are
an expression of male brain chemistry. Sometime in the first
trimester, a boy fetus begins producing male sex hormones that bathe
his brain in testosterone for the rest of his gestation. "That
exposure wires the male brain differently," says Arthur Arnold,
professor of physiological sciences at UCLA. New studies show that
prenatal exposure to male sex hormones directly affects the way
children play. Girls whose mothers have high levels of testosterone
during pregnancy are more likely to prefer playing with trucks to
playing with dolls. There are also clues that hormones influence the
way we learn all through life. In a Dutch study in 1994, doctors found
that when males were given female hormones, their spatial skills
dropped but their verbal skills improved.

Another challenge may be that boys, due to the same evolutionary
imperative that drives juvenile male chimps to face off against each
other rather than appear weak, often fail to accept the help they
need. The transition to middle school is rarely easy, but like the
juvenile primates they are, middle-school boys will do almost anything
to avoid admitting they're overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything they
do or say by a single yardstick: does this make me look weak?" says
Michael Thompson, coauthor of "Raising Cain." "And if it does, he's
not going to do it." That's part of the reason that videogames have
such a powerful hold on boys: the action is constant, they can
calibrate just how hard the challenges will be and, when they lose,
the defeat is private.

One of the most reliable predicators of whether a boy will succeed or
fail in high school rests on a single question: does he have a man in
his life to look up to? Too often, the answer is no. High rates of
divorce and single motherhood have created a generation of fatherless
boys. In every kind of neighborhood, rich or poor, an increasing
number of boys -- now a startling 40 percent -- are being raised
without their biological dads. Older males, says family therapist
Michael Gurian, model self-restraint and solid work habits for younger
ones. And whether they're breathing down their necks about grades or
admonishing them to show up for school on time, "an older man reminds
a boy in a million different ways that school is crucial to their
mission in life."

In neighborhoods where fathers are most scarce, the high-school
dropout rates are shocking: more than half of African-American boys
who start high school don't finish. David Banks, principal of the
Eagle Academy for Young Men, one of four all-boy public high schools
in the New York City system, wants each of his 180 students not only
to graduate from high school but enroll in college. And he's leaving
nothing to chance. Almost every Eagle Academy boy has a male mentor --
a lawyer, a police officer or an entrepreneur from the school's South
Bronx neighborhood. The impact of the mentoring program, says Banks,
has been "beyond profound." Tenth-grader Rafael Mendez is unequivocal:
his mentor "is the best thing that ever happened to me." Before Rafael
came to Eagle Academy, he dreamed about playing pro baseball, but his
mentor, Bronx Assistant District Attorney Rafael Curbelo, has shown
him another way to succeed: Mendez is thinking about attending college
in order to study forensic science.

Also in the cover package, feminist scholar and NYU professor Carol
Gilligan looks at what the study of girls can teach us about boys.
"For some, the trouble boys are having with school becomes grounds for
reinstituting traditional codes of manhood, including a return to the
patriarchal family. For others, it provokes the reflection that
despite the lag in school achievement, despite the fact that girls
have always gotten better grades and more boys go to prison, men still
outnumber women at the highest levels of academia, as well as in
business and government," writes Gilligan. "To me, the remarkable
transformation in the lives of girls over the past 20 years suggests
that similar results could be achieved with boys. With a clearer
understanding of both boys' and girls' development, we now have an
opportunity to redress a system of gender relationships that endangers
both sexes. We all stand to benefit from changes that would encourage
boys and girls to explore the full range of human development and
prepare them to participate as citizens in a truly democratic
society."

(Read entire cover package at www.Newsweek.com. Click "Pressroom" for news

releases.) SOURCE Newsweek