Where the boys aren’t

If you were a University of Maine student 20 years ago and had doubtful taste in music, you could put on a Donovan record, hear the lyrics “For every boy there is a girl,” and know it to be treacly true.

The next line in “Boy For Every Girl” goes “For every dream there is a real world,” which is about where we find ourselves today. A recent university system census comparing the early ’80s with today finds where once the sexes were about equally represented on Maine campuses, the 11,953 fulltime female students now outnumber males by more than 3,000. It is a phenomenon evident nationally (133 women will graduate from U.S. colleges this year for every 100 men) and internationally, has been lamented at length and then stacked alongside global warming and the federal debt on the Big Problems to-do shelf.

This is bad news, and not just because it upsets the estrogen-to-testosterone balance at the Friday night sock hop. It’s bad in a Tom Friedman-esque way, of Maine being part of a global economy, behind its neighbors for college-going levels, experiencing low birth rates and unable to afford to squander its human resources. Yet if Friedman is right and the world, economically speaking, is flat, quite a few Maine boys have fallen off the edge.

Boys do worse in school starting when school begins. They earn lower grades throughout, even in courses where they outscore girls on ability tests. They are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disorders, are more likely to drop out and are more likely to kill themselves. In the 1990s, a small segment of academia had a ferocious fight over the extent to which girls were at a disadvantage in the classroom. Good fight; wrong sex.

Here, I should give you the cause of this profound difference in achievement, but I can’t (though maybe a girl could). Of the various theories piled on my desk, none seems to wholly explain the problem of boys, on average, failing to thrive in school. It’s an unusual problem because, unlike the production of greenhouse gases and deficit spending, no one has an interest in seeing it continue – except at the higher levels, getting into college isn’t zero-sum, so even girls (who someday might want to find mates in their same income and education brackets) should also want boys to succeed academically.

Family therapist Michael Gurian, who has published a book on the subject, recently wrote that boys have always done poorly under the sit-still-and-take-notes style of learning, but no one noticed before because until recently “we didn’t have the comparative element of girls at par in the classrooms.”

That seems reasonable, and yet given the huge amount of experience from by now a generation of teachers who truly want their students to do well but notice that a lot of boys aren’t, there must be more to it. Wouldn’t their teaching styles change to fit their students’ abilities? In a piece in The Washington Post, Gurian also mentions that more competitive learning styles and greater family involvement also helped boys in the past. Others mention absent fathers, as well as special treatment for girls, overfilled kid schedules, boys being more willing to risk failure and a culture that expects boys to be tough guys, which includes, among other things, not asking for help.

Maine Education Commissioner Sue Gendron says Maine is working on the issue in two ways. Starting three years ago it began with the Maine Community Colleges (student body, 55 percent female) a program that finds high-school juniors who are struggling in school and connects them with a community-college counselor. The counselor serves as a mentor and introduces the students to college classes, especially those with more hands-on learning.

The program is in 40 high schools currently, going to 75 in ’06-’07 and then all schools the year after. It is open to boys and girls and is drawing about equally from both, which is not bad given where boys stand in post-secondary education generally.

A broader view of the problem is due in a couple of weeks when a state education task force completes a report on gender issues in Maine classrooms. Gendron said that while a variety of issues will be covered in the report, she formed the task force because she saw the seriousness of boys falling behind from the earliest grades.

Both of these projects fall under the heading of a good start, but they could lead to a lot more. For instance, this is a perfect opportunity for the many defenders of Maine’s small schools to show their schools’ worth. Maine lacks the levels of ethnic or income diversity as other states, so could have better controls to figure out how and why boys fall behind and to test what helps them catch up with girls. A more personal classroom with teachers who know their students well seems like a great place to solve what is affecting schools everywhere.

Maine teachers, students and parents could get the chance to make a difference here and nationally.

I’ll join them as soon as I get that Donovan song out of my head.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.