Education Commissioner Susan Gendron is unusually tenacious – half of Maine can be against her (see school-district reform) and she just keeps pushing. But it turns out even she has a limit, and a group that was supposed to examine school challenges for boys recently found it.

In 2005, Gendron created a task force on gender equity in education as statistics were piling up that showed boys doing worse than girls by most academic and social measures. Boys’ grades are lower, most of their test scores are worse, they are more likely to be suspended or expelled from school and are far more likely to kill themselves. Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with learning or emotional disabilities.

As urgent as all this sounds, the task force – 14 women and seven men – skittered away from the causes of boys’ underachievement. It first doubted the media’s description of this phenomenon and pointed to poverty as a likely source of the achievement gap. It seemed most comfortable exploring ideas about gender, an interesting topic but sufficiently off the mark that Gendron returned numerous versions of the plan for rewrite.

The last time the group turned in its work, “I said ‘Thank you, we’ll take the report and rely on outside experts,'” Gendron said. Eighteen months after it was due, the department on Thursday posted an unadorned and unannounced version of the report to its Web site, the modern equivalent of the dust-gathering shelf.

Education differences between girls and boys are most noticeable when they are young women and men, of college age. For every 100 women in college nationally, only 77 men are, a ratio that holds for the percentage of bachelor’s degrees conferred and tilts more heavily toward women for master’s degrees. Even at the doctoral level, U.S. women caught up to men a few years ago and now earn slightly more of the Ph.Ds and Ed.Ds.

These trends are quite recent. Twenty years ago, about the same number of women and men attended schools within the University of Maine System; as of last year, the head count was 13,000 men and 21,000 women.

The good news about this, following the American Association of University Women’s 1992 report, “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” is that new respect for the ability of girls and women has let them achieve at much higher levels. It suggests that diffuse problems like gender discrimination can be overcome in important ways.

But before that occurs, the problem must be stated plainly, which the AAUW did in ’92: “The invisibility of girls in the current education debate suggests that girls and boys have identical educational experiences in school. Nothing could be further from the truth,” its report began. “Whether one looks at achievement scores, curriculum design, or teacher-student interaction, it is clear that sex and gender make a difference in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools.

“The educational system is not meeting girls’ needs.”

In contrast, the Maine task force report admits, blandly, “a gender gap exists,” and then declares it “reached a more in-depth understanding of the concept of gender gap and an appreciation of the complexity of gender issues in Maine education.” It says its report “identifies and describes a much more complex intersection of factors that are at work in Maine education and directly impact our understanding of the gender gap such as socioeconomic status.”

The former is a call to arms; the latter, a breakout session at the Annual Conference of Academic Murmuration. Of course the issue is complicated, that not all boys do poorly and all girls do well. Certainly other factors influence student performance. That’s where this discussion begins. It can’t be its conclusion.

A telling concern for the task force was its belief that “some may be tempted to conclude that attention paid to girls’ academic issues in the 1990s is the cause of boys’ academic decline in the new millennium. … But this conclusion is only reached when one frames gender equity as a ‘zero-sum’ game.” Indeed. Gendron zeroed in on the conclusion that the group “showed a tendency or bias toward girls’ issues rather than boys.'”

No one wants to go back to shortchanging girls, but teachers have a limited number of minutes of classroom time and a limited number of ways they can connect with students; schools have limited budgets for hiring staff. Given the serious deficit in boys’ progress, the task force members must know if they had emphasized the challenge of helping boys catch up, some of those resources would have been redirected.

In that sense, their conclusion was clear: The boys can wait.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News. Readers may contact him at tbenoit@bangordailynews.net.