Falling Behind: Do we treat boys like malfunctioning girls?

This is part one of our series "Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America's Boys."

Boys fall behind girls in education in the U.S. starting as young as eight years old. Understanding how boys learn is key to knowing why that’s happening.

Today, On Point: Part one of On Point’s weeklong series “Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America’s Boys.”

Richard Reeves, president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Author of the book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It.”

Richard Hawley, former headmaster of the University School in Cleveland, where he worked for 37 years. Founding president of the International Boys’ School Coalition. Author and co-author of many books, including “Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies That Work — And Why” and “I Can Learn from You: Boys as Relational Learners.”

Heather, mom of fourth grader Ben in the Salt Lake City area.

Lindsey, mom of second grader Toby in Houston, Texas.

Dion, dad of Maceo, a first grader in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Deon, mom to five boys in Vancouver, Washington and former volunteer in a kindergarten classroom.

Sean Reardon, professor of education at Stanford University.

Luis Lancho, fifth grade teacher and third through fifth grade reading coach at Highland Elementary in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Part I

HEATHER (Tape): How was your day?

BEN: Good.

HEATHER: Good? Wow, that’s good! Anything happen today? Anything good happen today?

BEN: So at school we did play Four Corners ‘cause we had extra time. But then also, we also played Heads Up Seven Up again. And I also got to play with Sam and Aiden at recess. 

HEATHER: So all the good stuff happened at recess today?

BEN: Yeah. Some pretty good stuff.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Oh, Heather. As a mom of a fourth grade boy myself, this conversation is so, so familiar to me. “How was school today?” “Good.” “What was the best part?” “Lunch” or “recess.”

HEATHER: Anything good happen in your classroom today? 

BEN: Um, we rotated WIN time groups, and I got my class. 

HEATHER: Oh, okay.

CHAKRABARTI: Heather and her son Ben live in the Salt Lake City area. Ben's 9.

HEATHER: That sounds good. Because a lot of times you come home and you're not super happy, like you have a hard day at school.  

BEN: Yeah. But some fun things happened at school. But usually it doesn't happen.

HEATHER: Yeah, usually it doesn't happen?

BEN: Well, yeah, but rarely, some fun stuff happens kind of like that. 

HEATHER: Oh, but rarely?

BEN: Basically, yeah.

LINDSEY: When I ask him about the best parts of his day, he says lunch and recess. So… (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: Lindsey is a mom in Houston, Texas. Her son Toby is in the second grade.

LINDSEY: He wants to sit with his friends, he wants to play. That's his motivating factor to get to school.

DION: So (LAUGHS), he is a fan of lunch and recess.

CHAKRABARTI: Dion and his son live in Raleigh, North Carolina. And by the way, we’re only using first names to protect their kids’ privacy. Maceo is a first grader.

DION: So he is happy on days that he gets out of school and, you know, it can sometimes be challenging for him to get up in the morning to go to school. Whereas in kindergarten it was a little different where it was – they were learning, but there was a lot more play.

CHAKRABARTI: And by now, with young Ben, Toby, and Maceo, you are indeed detecting a pattern.

(MONTAGE)

HEATHER: He’s very physical and he wants to be outside playing or moving.

DION: The activities that he likes are, you know, P.E. and music and drama. They call them “specials.” He thoroughly enjoys those. But, you know, the other things that are part of the curriculum aspect of it, he’s just like “eh.”

LINDSEY: He really likes math. He likes all things math.

DION: I was dropping him off at school one day and his teacher said, “Do you know that Maceo knows how to do integers?” I said, “Ma'am, I don't even remember what integers are. But it doesn't surprise me.” (LAUGHS) Like, it does not surprise me. 

LINDSEY: Where he struggles is with writing and spelling. He notoriously won't capitalize. He won't write complete sentences and he won't put a punctuation in.  He just says, “I forget,” or “I don't remember.” Or he knows that if he gets it done, he'll have free time. He'll get to play Legos or reading time if he can complete his work early.

HEATHER: I feel like public schools are set up like a factory. Like, a bell rings, you sit down, you know, you do your work. A bell rings, you stand up, you go someplace else. And that's not how kids are built. He's bored. He often tells me it's boring.

DION: About a week or two ago, he told the teacher, “This is boring.” (LAUGHS) And he said he wanted to go home, because he said home was more fun.

HEATHER: Ben calls it “six cruel hours of our lives,” you know, an acronym for “school.” (LAUGHS) He doesn't like it. He would say, “Oh, that was the worst day of my life! It was awful!” (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: Heather, Dion, and Lindsey all give a little laugh when talking about their boys. But it sounds like a worried laugh.

Something is going on with America's boys. In every single U.S. state, men are less likely than women to earn a bachelor's degree. But that educational achievement gap begins much, much earlier. By the time they’re just 8 years old, boys are nearly half a grade behind girls.

And as that gap grows, it's correlated with higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and suicide for American men. Which is why a growing chorus of experts are saying with urgency, when it comes to boys and school, for the good of the boys and the good of the nation, something needs to be done — now.

I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. This is an On Point special series, “Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America’s Boys.” Episode One: Do we treat boys like malfunctioning girls?

RICHARD REEVES: My name is Richard Reeves and I'm president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

CHAKRABARTI: How many parents have come to you with stories similar to what we just heard?

REEVES: I guess we're into the thousands now. Because I'm out and about speaking quite a lot at schools and in communities. You know, I'm bringing national statistics to bear. I'm looking at the research and then what people are saying is, “Yeah. Mm-hmm.”

CHAKRABARTI: And are you hearing from parents across racial groups, across socioeconomic groups, or are the concerns more narrowly defined?

REEVES: There’s a general sense among a lot of parents that their son is like a square peg and that school is like a round hole if you like, and that does seem to cross class and racial lines. But the implications of it are much greater for boys of color and those from lower income backgrounds. And so whilst you can see the gender gap everywhere and in all races and all classes, the gaps get really big and really troubling as you get into the areas that have the least economic advantage.

And so a lot of parents are worried, I would say the ones who have the deepest worries are in fact the ones who are in the least advantaged circumstances. And so that's where policy needs to start.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Richard, I do wanna establish an evidence base here, right? Because, like, anecdotes, no matter how widespread, are not the same thing as what the data show. And the data are quite striking these days when it comes to boys’ experiences in school versus that of girls. So let's just take a moment to listen to Sean Reardon. He's a professor of education at Stanford University and his team has been collecting test scores from students across the country.

SEAN REARDON: We gather the test score data from every single public school in the United States. Every student in third through eighth grade takes a math and a reading test every year. So we've been collecting that data since 2009. So we have about 15 years of data. It means we have something like half a billion test scores. 

CHAKRABARTI: And those half a billion test scores represent something like 80 million American students.

REARDON: We see very clearly that girls are outperforming boys in reading pretty much everywhere. There's almost no school district in the country where boys are doing as well on average as girls in reading. But in math, on average, boys and girls are doing about the same. But that hides a little bit of variation. In rich communities, boys actually are doing better than girls in math and in lower income communities, girls are actually doing better than boys in math. 

CHAKRABARTI: So Richard, that’s some data there. But you have even more national statistics. What are some of them?

REEVES: We see, you know, huge gaps all the way from pre-K, actually, of course, through to postgraduate. But at the K-12 level, at the end of high school, a pretty good measure of success is what was your GPA? And if we look at that distribution, among the top 10% of students ranked by GPA, two-thirds of them are girls. There are twice as many girls as boys in that top 10% of high school students. And in the bottom 10%, it's reversed. So we see twice as many boys as girls in that bottom 10%.

We see just in some of those basic measures that the gender gap Sean Reardon just talked about in terms of test scores not only continues through high school, but also then gets amplified in terms of things like grade point average. And so by the end of high school, on basically every measure that you can assemble, there's a gender gap and it's a gender gap that is leaving the boys behind.

CHAKRABARTI: And that gap then gets further propelled when it comes to college and postgraduate academic achievement, right?

REEVES: That's right. The gender gap that you would've experienced if you'd walked onto a college campus in the mid 1970s would've been one where it was kind of 60-40 male-female in terms of college degrees, but now it's the other way around. It's 60-40 female-male. And I think in both cases, that's a reason to worry about what's happening. And it is the case that for the boys, you can really identify a lot of it through K-12. And so what I see is that a gender gap that's emerging, growing, hardening through those K-12 years then gets shown up, if you like, on college campuses.

And so I think that the visibility of the gender gap on college campuses, because the men are literally not there actually is a reflection of what's happened much earlier in the system, when if the boys are there – and of course, they are more likely to be suspended or expelled or truant, of course – but the boys are largely still in the classrooms in K-12. They're physically present. But as the stories we've just heard demonstrate well – and the research – is that even if the boys are physically present, that doesn't mean that they're really present. They're not engaged.

CHAKRABARTI: You're one of the folks who's calling with increased urgency, as I said earlier, for something to be done now with boys – even at the youngest ages in school. Why do you think this matters so much?

REEVES: Well, it's just as important for boys and men to do well in the education system as it is for women and girls. And that almost sounds weird to say, doesn't it? It's like we're so used to a message of encouraging girls and women into education, we've sort of forgotten that that's just as important for boys and men, too.

It really does have a huge implication, we can see this in the data now, for how men do in the labor market, in terms of work, whether they're likely to get married, you know, whether they have kids, their life expectancy, their health. And so there are really long run consequences here. It's taken policy makers too long to wake up to the need to act with real urgency on this issue of boys in school. Because for every year we lose, that's another year of opportunity to help put those boys and men on a better economic and social track.

Part II

GABRIELA (Tape): The teacher gathered all of the children sitting cross-legged to tell a story, and after a while he just got up and walked away. They're not supposed to do that. So the teacher asked him why, and he said he was bored. So he was just bored by what he was learning and how he was learning. Are boys wired differently than girls? Being around my nephew and nieces growing up, he just had a lot more kinetic energy and wasn't able to sit still and be still.

DEON BIRD: I saw the teachers and how they're trying to control the classroom, but I also saw from the kids' perspective of “hands in your lap like spaghetti. Your mouths need to be closed with marshmallows inside. You need to walk down the hall with your arms around yourself.” It's just so much control of your body that that's hard to do at 5 years old. 

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Deon Bird. She volunteered in a kindergarten classroom in Vancouver, Washington. She’s also mom to five boys. And then earlier, you also heard from Gabriela. So Richard Reeves, what do you hear in those two stories?

REEVES: Yeah. I worry a lot that just inadvertently you end up with a default student in mind and that that is a girl. What that means is that boys too often end up being treated like malfunctioning girls. In other words, the extent to which they deviate from that assumed norm of behavior, et cetera, is just a problem.

And of course these are all averages. I think people are quite rightly afraid that we're saying “all boys are like this,” or “all girls are like that.” But I think this assumed default about how one should behave in school does end up disproportionately hurting boys. I think it hurts everybody, but I think girls are better at doing it even when it sucks than boys are. 

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm.

REEVES: And so what that means is that you have an education system that’s just not working very well, period. The girls survive it better. They're just a little bit better at doing it even when it's not great.

But the good news about that, it means that just making these schools work better for boys would also make them work better for girls. It's just that it would disproportionately help the boys. The boys seem, they just — I mean, I struggled.

I remember sitting on a hard plastic chair for hours on end and falling behind in English and so on. And the girls just seem a little bit better at doing the work even when it seems pointless and boring. And so making the work less pointless and boring would really help the boys. But guess what? It would also be good for the girls.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. As a one-time girl myself, I can vouch for this! (LAUGHS) 

REEVES: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: Because I just loved being in school. I would do whatever my teachers asked me to. Because I, I don’t know, I just felt some kind of profound fulfillment in well, perhaps pleasing the teacher and pleasing my parents, but also just existing in that space. So, you know, that’s my –

REEVES: God, we're all just listening to that wishing we had daughters!

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

REEVES: Well, I had three sons. And I like to say that people will say, “I wish you were more like your sister.” And if they're a good parent, they only think that, they don't say it. But my confession is I had three sons and I still found myself thinking, “Why aren't you more like your sister?”

I literally had an imaginary sister that I would compare my sons to and she would pack her book bag and remember to put both her shoes on, turn in her homework. I wouldn't have to be going to school to talk to teachers all the time, so I actually made up a sister to compare them to, and I feel pretty ashamed of that now, but I guess I'm not alone.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Richard Hawley joins us now. He’s founding president of the International Boys’ School Coalition and author and co-author of many books including Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies That Work – And Why.

Richard Hawley, welcome. And let me just start by asking you: Are there developmental differences between boys and girls in the early school years? Like say, fine and gross motor skills?

HAWLEY: Yes there are and they're measurable, but it's kind of a bell curve. Some boys will present like girls in terms of their fine motor skills and so forth. And some girls will present like boys in terms of their gross motor skills.

And all one has to do is have children or observe a preschool or kindergarten to see what things boys and girls play with when they're given a choice. You know, who goes to the big wheel bikes and who goes to the smaller things to manipulate and so forth. So yes, you see obvious differences, but they're not universal.

REEVES: Yeah. I think there's a general point here which people really struggle with, which is how do we talk about differences between boys and girls without falling into the trap of determinism? Without saying, “All boys are like this, all girls are like that.” Or ending up in an equally absurd position of suggesting there are no differences. And actually what's happening is that the distributions are overlapping.

And so, by way of analogy, you might say, when we say, “men are taller than women,” we know what we mean by that. Nobody thinks that if I say, “men are taller than women,” that I mean, “every man is taller than every woman.” Right? In fact, about a third of women, I think, are taller than the average man or whatever. What we mean is just on average. And that the distributions overlap, but they're different.

And I think if we can get to that position where we can say, look, how big are these differences? Who are they affecting? Without then forcing people into that trap of saying, “You're a boy, so you must be like this.” But allowing us to recognize that there can still be some pretty big differences on average, even if there are always exceptions to that rule. We can have exceptions to a rule without having to abolish the rule.

CHAKRABARTI: And Richard Hawley, let me turn back to you again for a second because I still wanna understand some more of the brain differences on average. Is there a difference in the capacity to focus or the duration of focus for between, you know, kids in, I don't know, second, third, fourth grade?

HAWLEY: There are studies that show that boys, they're more distractible from preschool through early school years. They're more distractible. And once they're distracted, it takes them a longer time to come back into focus than girls do. That seems to be a measurable quality.

But I think then drawing conclusions from that, the “how do I teach differently?” and so forth is harder, less productive than if we would say “when boys do attend, in what circumstances does that happen? In what kinds of teaching does that happen?”

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this then brings us to, I think, some problem solving then. There are some differences on average between boys and girls, but Richard Hawley, one of the things that boys seem to respond to the best is relational learning…? I mean, how would you describe what that means?

HAWLEY: Start with the relationship. The teacher initiates the relationship, monitors the relationship, and if it goes bad, repairs the relationship. We found that the teachers who extended these gestures succeeded even with kids that were written off by other teachers.

They reached out, they got to know 'em in a bigger context than just as a student in that class and that subject, and found out what the external situation was in the person's life. Relational gestures are not something that especially empathic teachers have and only have and others don't. We found that was not true.

CHAKRABARTI: Richard, what you're saying is that the biggest variable isn't necessarily curriculum, right? Or various programs that are being done in school. It's something much more elemental – that boys really care about “who am I doing this for? Even the things that I'm not good at, or I'm afraid to learn?” That if I'm doing it for someone who I believe in, that that's the biggest difference?

HAWLEY: So for the boys, the question is never “What subject? What curriculum? What book?” It's, “For whom?” “For whom will I make this extra effort? For whom will I take that risk?”

My research colleague and I came to that conclusion because our first study, which is basically asking boys and teachers the world around, “When something succeeds, when a lesson succeeds, what is it about it?” We asked the boys and the teachers in that study, “Please talk about the lessons. Try not to use value words like ‘I liked it, it was terrific,’ but say what happened objectively. Please don't mention any names. If you do, we'll take them out of our published findings.” The boys did it fairly well, but not perfectly. Because they couldn't talk about what they learned without talking about the teacher who did it and how he or she did it.

So we designed a much bigger study in which we asked boys and teachers, “When a teaching relationship worked, could you describe that process and if you had a failed relationship with a teacher, could you describe that?”

Again, we found out that from the boys' standpoint, when they were having trouble with something or they had reached the level that they said, “I hate math. I hate art,” the teachers, attentive, relationally gifted teachers, were able to get them to overcome that resistance and actually have transformative outcomes. I mean, very poor and marginal failing students becoming good students. It was very exciting. So whatever the academic or educational resistance is, address the relationship first and then the academic issue.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Richard Reeves, what do you think about this?

REEVES: What I get from this research is that good teachers are good for students, but particularly good for boys. Or to put it more negatively, it's like if you have a teacher that's really struggling, just not suited for the role, that disproportionately affects boys.

And what I like about this is it gets us away from the worry that somehow making these changes, having a more attentionally gifted teacher is not gonna be bad for girls. It's just going to be especially good for boys.

HAWLEY: But in terms of relationally gifted as opposed to, I mean, the boys thought that their teacher's mastery of their subject was the thing they most admired and they most liked. But the second most was that they reached out to them and they knew them. And they knew them in circumstances beyond their status as a 10th grader in geometry or seventh grader in English, actually reached out to them and knew them.

CHAKRABARTI: In the absence of deep relationships like the ones that you're both talking about that boys seem to really respond positively to, I'm also wondering if there are other cultural forces that lead to boys eventually thinking that school isn't the place for them.

And we've had parents call us and say — you know, parents of girls and boys in the same family — who say, you know, my girls, whenever they went to school, they were surrounded by messages of “girl power.” There were special groups for girls. They were getting a lot of praise, et cetera. But there was not the same celebration of boyhood. There was no “boy power” message.

REEVES: Yeah. I had this personal experience. So I was going in, one of my sons was struggling at school and we walked down this hallway and on one side of the hallway was all these notice boards with Girls on the Run, a scholarship night for girls, Girls Who Code, Black Girl Magic, et cetera. Just really wonderful. I really, I love all that. And it just so happened that the wall on the other side was completely blank.

And I thought, going along with this sort of trudging teenager who's really struggling at school, I just tried to see it through his eyes and talked a little bit to him about that. And I think what we've done is just inadvertently ended up coding the idea of educational excellence and educational aspiration and striving as a bit female.

And it's no one's fault and it's not for a bad reason. It's not intentional. But the unintentional result is that just if you're a boy going into a school and listening to messages, then you could be forgiven, I think, for thinking that this is a thing for girls more than for boys, right? There's something almost stereotypical about the idea, well, “Boys don't need it. Boys don't need any help,” you know. And they do, as much as the girls do. And so there is a very hard to measure cultural element to this, too, I'm sure.

HAWLEY: There's something else going on, I think, culturally, and I don't think it's badly intended, it may be even accidental, but it's a factor in boys' responses in school. This notion of badly developed males or toxic masculinity — and there's all kinds of examples of toxic masculinity — I think gets, in some cases, unconsciously imposed, this sense that boys ought to be less stereotypically masculine. In other words, we get rid of stories of martial heroes because it might seem hypermasculine and so forth, and we’ll replace certain books with more friendly, gender neutral books.

And if that’s done, and I’ve seen it done in some whole school systems, to a certain extent, a boy, he'll learn to — a lot of boys will learn to obey. They won't say the wrong thing. They won't say the misogynistic thing, but they won't be able to find themselves as they're feeling in school. I don't think there's toxic babyhood or toxic boyhood. There may well be toxic masculinity, but that got caused somehow.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Well, returning to things that work for boys in the classroom. What are they?

BEN: So I think it was a couple of weeks ago, we had this cool little project where we could go to the computer lab and make abstract art. 

HEATHER: Oh, that’s right, your abstract art. 

LINDSEY: They had a lesson, like a chemistry lesson, on how to make root beer floats. 

DION:  There's a book called The Day the Crayons Quit. So his drama class turned that book into a play. Each kid had a part. He was yellow – he was the yellow crayon. No, no, no, no, no! Maceo was beige. I think he was beige. He was beige crayon.

CHAKRABARTI: This is fourth grader Ben and his mom Heather. Also parents Lindsey and Dion. You heard from all of them earlier in the episode. And evidently, the boys don’t always like just lunch and recess.

BEN: When you’re doing the abstract art, we doodle on the computers. Like, you know, you get to be creative. So like, because I got some cool little squares to make the American flag. And I made another flag. And I made some checkerboard patterns. And I made some other stuff. 

HEATHER: Is it supposed to be like Mondrian stuff?

BEN: Yeah, yeah! Mondrian!

LINDSEY: You have a hypothesis. They talk about the materials they need and the methods that they're gonna use. Then they do the experiment to see what happens and come up with conclusions as, like, a team. I think it was a team of three. From there, they presented it to the class. They got to eat ice cream, they were learning, but still doing something fun.

DION: He was really excited about, like, learning his lines. And he was a little, you know, had a little bit of stage fright— a lot of stage fright. (LAUGHS) But he was really, really excited about that. He, for a period of time, gave everyone a name based on the crayons. I think I might’ve been like, red crayon. Mom might’ve been yellow crayon.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I also put this question to my own fourth grader one day recently after school.

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: This is good, right? Yes!

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want me to hold the mic or do you wanna hold it?

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: I’ll hold it. 

CHAKRABARTI:  That’s cooler, right? So we wanna protect your privacy. 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: So you wanna just pick a nickname or what they call a pseudonym?

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Like what?

CHAKRABARTI: I don’t know, you pick a name!

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Poopoohead!

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) You want the world to know you as Poopoohead?

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: No! (LAUGHS) 

CHAKRABARTI: No, no. (LAUGHS) Pick something else.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, this went on for a few minutes. But we finally refocused.

CHAKRABARTI: When you do things in school that you really like, you know, on the days that you come home and you say, “Oh, Mama, I did this. Mama, I did that.” Can you think of an example of something recently that you were really excited by? 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Uh, yesterday. Art.

CHAKRABARTI: In art? 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: What did you do?

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: We’re making inventions that no one has ever made before to help solve a problem. I'm building like a flexing crane that can also have wheels. 

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, wow. What problem is that solving? 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Uh, that cranes have to like, have so much wire and like go down so much and then pick it up. But this can just have no like thing at all, just a hook.

CHAKRABARTI: So you're designing a crane and how are you building your design? 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Uh, right now, um, there's this thing in the art room. It's called a ChompSaw. 

CHAKRABARTI: It's called a what? 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: ChompSaw. 

CHAKRABARTI: ChompSaw. 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: It's really good at cutting cardboard. 

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. 

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: For straight lines. 

CHAKRABARTI: What makes it more fun than other things that you learn?  

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Uh, it's not really academic. And it's more like the thing I like. I love building things and designing stuff. And engineering.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, that was my fourth grade son. You also heard from parents Dion, Heather and Lindsey, and fourth grader Ben. So Richard Hawley, those are some examples of what works better for boys. What did your research show about that?

HAWLEY: They were all very active, like making things, creating products, gaming a lesson, any kind of lesson involving motor activity, role play and performance. When students were made to be responsible for the learning of other students, putting them in that active role. Not doing closed, already known science and social science exercises, but having students examine un-yet solved problems. Teamwork and competition in combination.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. More on how to get boys excited about school in just a moment.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: So what does work better for boys? Luis Lancho teaches fifth grade at Highland Elementary in Palm Beach County, Florida. And he uses something called “the huddle.”

[IN CLASSROOM]

 LUIS LANCHO: Good morning, everybody!

STUDENTS: Good morning, Mr. Lancho!

LANCHO: Y'all ready to have a good day today?!

STUDENTS: (SHOUTING) Yes!!

LANCHO: When I'm working with boys specifically, I love to do teamwork. They're very good at working with one another and creating things. I mean, so are the girls as well. But one of the learning strategies that we do is called the huddle.

LANCHO: Are you guys ready for a huddle? 

STUDENTS: Yes!

LANCHO: All right, good. Okay, so this is the first thing that you're gonna do. I have a question up on the board. We're gonna read the question first, then you're gonna answer the question, and then we're gonna go up and get into partners in our huddle group. Deal?

STUDENTS: Yes!

LANCHO: All right, so everyone, let's go ahead and let's read the question. 1, 2, 3! 

STUDENTS: “How does Buck respond to his new life in Alaska? Cite the evidence and [unintelligible] two pieces of evidence.”

LANCHO: We ask a specific question and we would like a written response, correct?

LANCHO: Alright, so what you're gonna do right now is you're going to give me two ways that Buck responds to all the conflict that he faces in Alaska. And then every time you have a conflict in the way he responds, you're going to get a piece of the text as your evidence. Capiche?

STUDENTS: Caposh! 

LANCHO: Instead of sitting down and making this kind of response, what we do is we make everybody get up and get into teams. Teams of three or teams of two.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 1: I can move and – and go to my partner. My, my partner can help me. And he, he tells me what's the answer and he helps me. And I'll just say thank you to my partner because he helps me. He, he makes me smart.  

LANCHO: And then after the teams of two, they're all gonna go to different areas and share their answer with different students.

LANCHO: And if you guys both agree with each other, you can say this.

STUDENTS: “I learned that…blank!”

LANCHO: Thank you. All right. You guys ready? 

STUDENTS: Yes!

LANCHO: All right. Go ahead. Get up and go to your huddle spot. Go!

LANCHO: So this allows all kids, one, to be able to answer; two, to be able to share their answer with multiple people. And three, you're able to walk around the classroom, engage with different students, which is also part of that social development.

LANCHO: All right, so give me, how does Buck respond to his new life in Alaska?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 2: He responds by, um, staying alert and learning how to adapt. 

LANCHO: Okay, and how about you?  

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 3: I agree with him because on the text, he says that he sprang back, bristling and snarling. 

LANCHO: And does that show that he's alert? 

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 3: Yes.

LANCHO: Good. Good job y'all.  

LANCHO: I make it very, very competitive. So I'll have like some kind of a rubric on the board of things that I'm looking for. And the best one would maybe get a little bit more playtime when we go outside, very little. Or they would get some kind of little crown that they get to wear throughout the classroom of being, you know, the best one of the huddle. And it just makes everything ten times better for the boys. (LAUGHS) Because they really, really like competition.

LANCHO: Alright, gimme 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Alright guys, everybody did a really good job with the huddle. I'm happy with everybody's answers. Everyone actually got the answers correct. But, as you guys know, I gotta pick one winner. And that winner's going to be a group that was able to tell me specifically how the setting contributed to the plot. And that winner is gonna be … Group four!

STUDENTS: (CHEERING)

LANCHO: Alright. Good job. Good job. Alright, so as you know, uh, group four, you're gonna be able to pick something from our little store and then you're gonna take it back to your seat and put it in your book bag. Deal? Alright, everybody else go ahead and take a seat. Thank you, y'all.  

LANCHO: Teaching fifth grade, I've had a lot of kids tell me, “Hey, you're the first male teacher I've ever had.” When someone looks like you, speaks like you, loves sports like you, you tend to relate to them, right? If that's what you're into. And you get curious and you wanna learn more, you kind of want to be like that person.

You have societal pressures as well, because if you do all your work and you get good grades, guess what? When you go back in the neighborhood, you're a nerd. So they see, “Oh, look at Mr. Lancho. He's an educated man. He has a bachelor's and a master's, and he speaks to me, right, like a regular human being.” I always say it's cool to be good in school. It's cool to do good. I get to show them the benefits of being educated, right?

In fifth grade, the boys, oh, oh, whoa, because now you're starting to get testosterone. But I get to teach 'em what's appropriate and what's not appropriate to do around women. Like, for example, the past couple days, I don't know why I saw the boys jumping line at lunch. I was like, “No, you know what, the girls gonna eat first.” And I let all the girls — all like, I think fifth grade is like a hundred and something — I was like, all the girls gonna eat first. You know? It's just little things that we are able to teach 'em that will help 'em grow into men.

CHAKRABARTI:  Mr. Lancho, he's also known as Luis Lancho, a fifth grade teacher at Highland Elementary in Lake Worth, Florida. And by the way, almost all of Highland Elementary students are students of color, and 85% of its students are economically disadvantaged.

Well, Richard Hawley, do you think Mr. Lancho’s doing it right?

HAWLEY: Oh, I thought — I love that. First of all, that involved movement. So much movement, and that’s so appropriate. These are fifth graders. These are 10-year-old boys. Movement, teamwork and competition combined, that they had to get together and work together. And then the product of their, what they did together was sort of judged competitively, not in an awful way. A modest prize was given. I think they picked up their teacher's enthusiasm for that.

And also I like that that exercise involved every boy. There was nobody, like in a classroom of say, just spoken instruction where some kids might be very responsive and it might seem like to an observer, “That's a very good class.” Well, half the kids probably didn't say anything or address the issue at all if they just sat quietly.

CHAKRABARTI: But he makes them all participate. Exactly.

Richard Reeves, about this competition aspect that tends to get boys much more engaged. I completely understand that. I've seen that in my own child's life for sure. But does the current sort of educational philosophy that's in vogue, does it support that? Because everywhere that I can see in education right now, the emphasis is not competition. It's exactly the opposite. It's on collaboration.

REEVES: I think this is a great example of the need for balance and to actually think about a school culture that has both, that has collaboration and competition. And if we think that on average that boys are going to be attracted a little bit more to the competitive side of it, then fine. The key is not to have an education system that is only about competition or only about collaboration.

And so we see in the evidence that boys do much better in high stakes tests, for example, than they do in grades and actually better than their teachers think they'll do. So something about the nature of the competition just in testing actually seems to actually get boys going in a way that it doesn't quite the same for girls.

And that doesn't mean we just accept those as fixed, of course, we work on them. But it also means we don't naively ignore those differences and inadvertently create a culture or a pedagogy that just tilts a little bit more in the female direction or the male direction.

What we're seeking here is a balance. You clearly want an approach to education that doesn't just accidentally bake in a presumption that there should be a more female or more male way of learning or teaching. And instead, we should just be attentive to the fact that it's equally boy- friendly and girl-friendly. And I think that what's happened is that in the really good, well-intentioned, earnest desire to make our schools as girl-friendly as possible, we have accidentally ended up making them a little bit less boy-friendly than they should be, and that's the issue we're now dealing with.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Richard Hawley, in your research, I see that you found that the intensity, the emotional intensity that comes with competition, even the adrenaline, the adrenal responses that come with competition, produces a kind of energy that you say attaches to the actual learning. I mean, do you have an example of that? I think you told our producer about something related to Romeo and Juliet…?

HAWLEY: (LAUGHS) This was from our lessons study, which involved, it was in Great Britain. I think, Richard Reeves, you might have — you went to British schools, right?

REEVES: I did, yes. I'm from the U.K.

HAWLEY: Yeah. This was from a middle school in London. A teacher who had taught Romeo and Juliet every year, fairly demanding text for middle school boys, was not getting very good results. But then when he realized a friend of his who is a Shakespearean actor, he agreed to come to his class and do a demonstration and show the boys some aspects of stage swords fighting.

The class was a pleasure and it was lively, but the teacher also found that later when he examined the kids on and had them write about Romeo and Juliet, they not only wrote so well about those scenes in which Tybalt slays Mercutio and Romeo slays Tybalt later, but their investment in the whole play was intensified.

And I think that's an example of what we call transitive learning, where some element of the instruction might not even be about the subject at hand is transitive, that energy is transitive to retention of material or, uh, behaviors that are supposed to be learned.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I want to play one more piece of tape from an On Point listener. This is Denise in New Mexico. And her 12-year-old son tells her he hates school, even though he likes his teachers and his friends.

DENISE: I feel like public school is designed for girls. For kids that are behaving like a quote-unquote traditional “boy,” they are labeled as bad. They’re disciplined or they’re given like, weighted blankets and rubber bands and wobbly chairs, rather than rethinking how education is delivered for a human animal that needs to socialize and move and do things (LAUGHS) more than just sit at a desk.

CHAKRABARTI: Richard Reeves, with that in mind, I just wanna recap some of the things that we've learned across this first episode about some of the things that boys respond particularly strongly to.

I mean relational learning, both of you have really emphasized that boys tend to do much better when they understand, you know, what they're learning is for a reason. And for a particular person. “Who am I doing this for?”

Then we talked about movement. Lots of body movement, especially in the younger grades. The importance of a balance between collaboration and competition, that boys tend to really respect teachers who show a mastery of their discipline while also forming those deep bonds.

I can imagine that we're at the point in this episode where educators who are listening to this perhaps are feeling a little beleaguered, right? Because it sounds like we're blaming schools. It sounds like we're blaming the education system. It sounds like we're saying teachers aren't doing enough. And they are already having to do so much, right, Richard?

I mean, there's curriculum they have to follow. There's a schedule they need to follow. There's testing. There's some classes are extremely overcrowded. I mean, you have to have sympathy for that, Richard, right?

REEVES: You do. And I have huge sympathy for that, not least because my own son is a fifth grade teacher in Baltimore and dealing with – a very new teacher and so dealing with some of this. And the very last thing we want to do is additionally burden teachers with this sort of sense of like, “you’re somehow failing the boys.” That's not the message here.

I think the message here is that we would all benefit from teachers who have the resources, the time, to be the engaged, relational teachers that we've been talking about throughout this episode. And so this is a really profound challenge to our education system as a whole, which is this is going to take investment.

It will take investment on behalf of our girls as well. But I think for too long we’ve thought that we could somehow get a high quality, relational, high attention engaging classroom and the sorts of teachers who can do that work on the cheap. And we can't. That's something that will come with a price tag.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Richard Hawley, I think the point Richard Reeves is making is spot on. That it's going to take a lot of investment of time and money to really make sort of systemic transformation.

HAWLEY: It is going to – by the way, it is going to, by the way, I utterly agree with what Richard has said. One of the reasons I'm excited about that is we actually know a couple things about the kind of instruction that works and also the kinda relations that work, that we know them. But if there are the structural obstacles, which might be to do with finance and so forth, that make those things impossible, well then that is what we've gotta address.

I think the variable that we talk about least that would improve education the most is scale and size. Size of school. Size of classroom. I don't think the kind of relational success that we discovered in our study can happen unless teachers and individual students can have some time and space to meet individually, uh, not just in the classroom. Well, a lot of schedules right now, especially in our public schools, do not allow that.

And also the size of classes are such that that's really unlikely. So if those are the obstacles to having warm, supportive teacher-student relations to both boys and girls, if those are the obstacles, those are the ones that have to be solved.

CHAKRABARTI: I absolutely understand that systemic change is what's necessary in the long run. But when it comes to education, I keep thinking of all the parents that I've talked to over many years on lots of different educational issues who say, “well, I can't wait. My child's in school now.”

I mean, are there things that teachers and administrators and educators, Richard Hawley, that they could do right now to at least bring in a little bit more of the kinds of techniques you've been talking about?

HAWLEY: Yes. Not just monitoring the student's performance by grading it and naming it, but, but addressing the relationship. That relational reset is not expensive, and it would be a great first step, I think.

REEVES: It's honestly an attitudinal shift. It's something that, as a father, one of my biggest regrets actually is not having more understanding and empathy for the fact that the school system that my sons — one in particular — was in just wasn't working for him.

And instead of recognizing that and trying to support him, I found myself asking the question, “What's wrong with you?” And that question I think is absolutely fatal to the wellbeing of a child. If they're struggling in a system, a culture, a classroom, we shouldn't think, “What's wrong with you? Why aren't you going with the script?”

We should be honest about this. This is gonna take time. It's gonna take investment. And if we're serious about making our schools work better for all our students and not least for our boys, that is not something that's gonna happen overnight. It is not something that's gonna happen for free, and it is therefore something that we need to start now.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Richard Reeves, president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It. Richard, thank you so much.

REEVES: Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: And Richard Hawley, founding president of the International Boys School Coalition and author and co-author of many books, including Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys; and I Can Learn From You: Boys as Relational Learners. Richard Hawley, thank you so much.

HAWLEY: Well, thank you.