As nearly everyone who is not president of Harvard can acknowledge, boys are the intellectual equals and sometimes superiors of girls. Despite their diminished numbers in higher education, boys continue to perform narrowly better on verbal standardized tests than girls, and significantly better than girls in math. IQ experts agree that boys are more represented at both ends of the bell curve than girls. James Q. Wilson summed it up: "There are more male geniuses and more male idiots." But girls are racking up the A's in primary, middle, and high school. They are excelling at extracurricular activities. They are assuming leadership posts, multitasking, and polishing the kinds of resumes admissions officers admire.
Christina Hoff Sommers argued nearly a decade ago in "The War Against Boys" that in our zeal to remedy past discrimination against girls, we had managed to pathologize normal male behavior. The schools in particular, she wrote, discouraged male strengths like competition and drive in favor of female strengths like cooperation and detail work.
Let's concede that the campaign to boost girls' performance succeeded very well. But with more than two decades of data showing diminishing achievement by boys, it is past time to focus on reviving their fortunes. Is it the schools' bias against competition? It's worth examining -- particularly when we know that all of our kids, boys and girls alike, will be competing against highly disciplined students from India, China, and elsewhere who work twice as hard.
Or could it be another aspect of male brain development? The New York Times profiled a fast-growing service catering to upper-middle-class parents in New York -- organizational tutors. They help kids (overwhelmingly boys) who are capable students but who cannot seem to hand in assignments on time, keep their backpacks orderly, or their notes current. "The guys just don't seem to develop the skills that involve organization as early," explained psychologist Judith Kleinfeld.
The boy crisis may be an artifact of our weakened families, or our feminized school environments, or Take Your Daughter to Work Day, or all of the above. But as the mother of three sons, that messy backpack with crumpled math homework due last week really resonated. The Civil Rights Commission can do us all a favor by going away. Bring on the organization gurus!