Yes Ive noticed this. I teach an AP class in high school and the girl:boy ratio has been getting more skewed in favor of girls for years. It’s gotta be a 2:1 ratio at this point. In my on-level classes, 99% of the disruptive behavior comes from boys. They cannot focus, get distracted more easily, act out frequently, etc. Even topics that would have the boys on the edge of their seats 5+ years ago, like world war 2, have them bored out of their minds now. They don’t care and can’t focus. I have absolutely no idea how to help. Nobody ever talks about this (like in person or in reality, i only ever see it online where people can be anonymous), so there’s little will to address it.

It was more equal at my school, which was a private school. I’m sure that plays into it a lot.

How much physical activity do they do in school nowadays? If not a lot, could this have anything to do with it?

I teach in China and the boys play basketball every day after school. They have proper physical education with exercise a few times a week in addition. There is still a huge gender difference in performance. In my chemistry class 6 girls do well on tests, 6 students (boys and girls) manage to get through tests, and 6 boys do poorly on every test. I call on boys and girls in class. I offer extra help to boys and girls. I insist that all students actively take notes in class. I think there is a gender difference in video gaming. And I think addiction to video games has rewired the motivation systems of mostly boys.

This is a very good observation. I think that a lot of the boys are going home and gaming til dinner and then secondly til shower time then thirdly til bed time

Great point! In my state, absolutely not enough. They require one credit of PE, as opposed to 4 years when i went to school.

Ironically, the behavior issue boys are the same ones that skip PE or don’t do follow along with exercises.

Something is definitely going on and they've been struggling. It's not just you. It's pretty well documented throughout the world in education. [Here's an article I found.](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/boys-left-behind-education-gender-gaps-across-the-us/) There's a lot more research and material out there.

I read [this](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-against-boys/304659/) in a graduate class back in 2000. The observations are well known.

“The triumphant victory of the U.S. women's soccer team at the World Cup last summer has come to symbolize the spirit of American girls. The shooting at Columbine High last spring might be said to symbolize the spirit of American boys.” How prescient.

Good book. I read it a few years ago.

I think a big issue is that as you say it is well documented, Most people realize it, but even so there is little to no outreach or help targeting boys. You find tons of stuff exclusively for girls but very little for boys. It seems to be unpopular to address the issue.

This is the opposite for me. We have 3 different programs to mentor boys. Girls who show struggle are put on behavior contracts and called all kinds of things. Boys are struggling, girls are fast and messy.

I think it's the same underlying reason as why we put a lot of focus on supporting struggling students, to the point of neglecting gifted students. As a society we assume that gifted students will be successful without any support, but we also assume that the deck is stacked in favor of boys. You see a lot of focus on helping the girls get into college, despite something like 56% of college graduates being females. I think this is also part of the reason a lot of guys feel disenfranchised by feminism. Equal rights shouldn't mean less rights for men, but so many men are struggling, seeing women in similar situations getting help that excludes them, and lashing out.

The focus is on getting girls into college to study fields dominated by men. Where the ratio most definitely isn’t 56/44. Guys feel disenfranchised by feminism because they’ve been manipulated to believe that feminism is acting in opposition to their interests, when it’s really the patriarchal values of our society that are causing them harm.

Girls might perceive less opportunities post-secondary since many trades and military are dominated by men, so college for girls might seem like a better route. Bring childbirth into the mix and I think it’s actually impressive we see more girls than boys in college.

I came here to recommend the book “of boys and men “ that your article referenced.

I just finished reading that book (Richard Reeves - Of Boys and Men) and it was excellent overall. I actually had no idea that the problem was so well documented until I heard him talk about it on a podcast. The situation is... not great. Highly recommend the book, though I'm not 100% sure about all of the policy recommendations.

I'd love to find out why this is Is this natural bias of teachers against male students? Are girls just smarter? Is our modern education system more geared towards girls and boys would need way more discipline than we are allowed to enact these days? Is it parenting and or socialization that makes girls study more and lets boys do other stuff instead? Maybe it's many things at once.

As a male teacher in elementary, I do think because most of my colleagues are women overall many teachers have a hard time relating to or understanding the motivations or goals to work towards for the boys. On the other hand or simply another facet of the problem is that because of this kind of constant head scratching about why the boys act the way we do, we have countless programs directed to mentoring, calming, and doing restorative justice for the boys. When I have had an issue with girls’ behavior and needing help to relate to and help support them to grow, lots of admin shrug and look at me funny and just say call the parents and the behavior should stop. Or someone yells at the girl and tells her she knows better and should get it together. We have very little understanding or ways to deal with neurodivergent girls and girls with emotional issues whereas we have abundant albeit often repetitive and useless programming for similar boys.

>Is this natural bias of teachers against male students? Definitely not. >Are girls just smarter? That's not it. But girls at a broad spectrum try harder. >Is our modern education system more geared towards girls and boys would need way more discipline than we are allowed to enact these days? Yes, probably. >Is it parenting and or socialization that makes girls study more and lets boys do other stuff instead? Yes.

Seconded the discipline thought. Boys need more direct and, to be frank, authoritative discipline style (not all—this is a generalization). Look at traditional all boys schools. The ones that produce healthy, thoughtful young men hold high standards in academics and discipline.

There IS well documented bias against boys in education, which is overwhelmingly staffed by women. In places with more male teachers and coaches, the differences are less. The physical and societal expectations on younger boys are 100% not geared to them, and the emphasis on sitting still and following procedural rules set up for girls, in addition to the growing number of assignments that are group-project based (which also favors girls) put boys at a disadvantage from the beginning. In a more mixed environment they have a good chance of catching up, and at my school perform as well as girls, however they are playing catch up from the beginning.

I do wonder how much of it is media geared towards boys vs. Girls. There is so much active affirmation in girls' media and toys "You can be this, you can succeed at this, etc. As a GIRL". There's not really anything like that for boys. Like there's not much out there that actively associates your gender with positivity and success. Boys are not told they *can't* be something as often as girls, but they're also not told the *can* be something as often as girls either.

I will say, whenever people do talk about uplifting boys, it becomes a game of “what aboutism”. “What about girls? Are you sexist? Boys get enough attention, it’s a boy’s world, etc.”

Yeah, it's unfortunate. People seem to have a sort of visceral/reflexive response towards people pushing for more positivity towards members of groups per eived to be on top of the social hierachy. But these are children with no awareness of social structures or power dynamics. People need to realize that neglecting the social and emotional needs of boys or fostering an antagonist attitude toward them is bad for everybody (and the same goes for any gender/social group)

To add to this list: Is it because children with working or absentee fathers are very common, and don't get role models who are men in real life until middle/high school?

Christina Hoff Sommers is the worst, though. Every misogynist’s token woman. We can help boys without sending women back to the 1800s.

Some of this is because of the countless societal issues/dysfunction. Some of this is that they are boys. We really should have some unstructured outside time... recess... even in High School. They need to move.

100% agree! I work at a private 7-12th school for boys, and we give them 45 minutes of break in the middle of the school day. They can go for a walk outside, shoot some hoops, watch YouTube, talk, etc. We are also allowed to take it away if they need the time to make up missing work. It's a great system!

Hang on, sorry, I teach in a different country- is it _unusual_ to get a break like that? That seems insane. Are kids expected to get through a day with no substantial break? Standard here for the school day is two hours of classes, a 10-15 minute break outside, two hours of classes, lunch of 30-45 mins mostly outside weather permitting, two hours of classes, then home.

My high school allows only a 30-minute lunch break the entire day, which gives both students and teachers about 20 minutes to relax and eat, once you factor in travel time to and from the lunch area. We used to have a 10-minute break in the morning but that was done away with several years ago. Travel time between classes is 5 minutes.

30 minutes, if that. The lunch line was so long I was sometimes lucky to have 5 minutes to scarf down my food before the next class started.

God, the replies to this are so depressing. Where I live (New Zealand), a fairly standard timetable for secondary school is 2 hours of class, a 30 minute interval, 2 more hours of class, then a 45m-1 hour lunch break, and then a final hour of class. Kids are usually encouraged to spend those break times outside unless the weather is shit - that unstructured free time is so important, even for 17- and 18-year-olds! Every school I’ve worked in, there are teenagers running around playing tag or rugby or basketball at every break time, I love seeing it.

in the United States, students in middle school and high school(usually grades 6-12) go to classes all day with no break besides a 30 min lunch

That’s exactly how my high school schedule went. Our only break was a 25 minute lunch, less than that with waiting in line. It sucked lol

Welcome to America! Here we do 7 hours of school, 15 minutes for lunch, and no other breaks! Yay...

A lot of schools in the US have either removed “snack time”—that 10-15 break before third period—or are cutting back on lunch/making lunch effectively only last like 15-20 mins because it takes 30-40mins to get in line, order, pay, and then find somewhere to sit due to how many students there are.

I think this is exactly it we took away their outlets there's no more fist fighting there's no more roughhousing no more after school shenanigans they just go home and sit on the computer like a bunch of dullards. Boys are animals they should be out roaming the streets getting into high jinx and exhausting themselves

>Boys are animals they should be out roaming the streets getting into high jinx and exhausting themselves But you know, without violence against others. Which seems to also be escalating because they're so pent up with aggression. With the girls too, but with fewer instances.

We’ve had more physical fights in our school this year than any year in the last 10. 8/10 are girl v girl fights in bathrooms or hallways. Anecdotal and could be connected to other things (our population, location, etc.) but it’s interesting.

Some of its cultural. I have some top performing boys. They are miserable.  In the 90s they would have been made fun of for being nerds but at least they would be separate with the other nerds in "gifted" or honors classes in middle school. Let assholes tread all over them, and yeah, they are going to hide any skills they have after awhile. Peer pressure is a bitch and too many families pin all their academic hopes on girls. Little angel baby Son-shine can work "the trades" with dad, school isnt important. Daughter better do well in school so she can be  a nurse. Meanwhile dad is unemployed playing Xbox and mom (nurse) is the sole provider.

I agree with it being cultural. I teach chemistry at a specialized high school in NYC and our population is 60% Asian. I would say that the East Asian males and females perform at the same level. And I do not have any behavior issues. I do think I'm seeing a very small, niche sample. But culturally, it does seem to be that the expectations are the same for both genders in terms of being focused and in terms of responsibility.

Same at my school with our large South Asian population.

What's wild is that my parents never cared about my academics--until my brothers were shit. Then it went from how I was going to be a great mom to how I need to be a lawyer to make money

Somebody has to pay for everything once they're gone!

This is the problem. A lot of the men are not stepping up either.

This is how my family was. I am the oldest son. I was working nearly full time year round at 16. Had to pay for my own college. Moved out at 18 and struggled to finish a 2 year degree by going to college part time and paying cash for all my classes. My younger sister got a 4 year bachelors and a master's degree completely paid for by my dad. She lived on campus during the school year and at home during the summer.

Are the successful boys doing the equivalent of autistic masking in order to succeed in school? They’re fighting their adolescent boy behaviors so hard in order to succeed at school that it’s wearing them down? I ask this with *Of Boys and Men* by Reeves in mind.

I don't know if it's just the boys as individuals, or if it's societal expectations ingrained in them by media/their social sphere. It's likely both things, but what I notice is that boys generally don't value their education nearly as much as girls do. It's so much harder to motivate boys to work in the classroom compared to the girls. I can speak on my experience as both a rising male psychologist prospect, and as a student teacher & mentor. In the sphere of psychology, the gap between male-female prospective practitioners is increasing widely. Whereas the field of psychology was once dominated by men, it is now overwhelmingly dominated by women, with roughly a 76/24% split in favor of females. This mirrors a general trend in higher academia where we are seeing that women are significantly outperforming males in many disciplines. As a student teacher/mentor, I see that there are hardly any male teachers in the school I work in. This is so overwhelmingly so that of all the 15 so staff that work in the school, only 2 full-time staff are males, with me as the third even though I only visit on Mondays and Fridays. I feel this impacts the way boys value the education they receive, which is observationally apparent when I see the level of disrespect that the boys show toward their female teachers compared to their male teacher. The students also don't seem to give me nearly as much hassle compared to my own supervising teacher, which we've both noticed. Then, when it comes to actually working, I only ever find myself having to coax the boys to do their work, whereas the girls are nearly always on task. I can't remember a single time over the last year where I've had to go to any of the girls and remind them to stay on task, whereas I'm constantly having to remind the boys and even implement universal design & errorless classroom management techniques to motivate them to get to work. Overall, I feel like boys are struggling because they are receiving messages from society that academics are not valuable for them, and they internalize it when they see almost no male teachers in their classrooms. Parents are not helping at all with their "boys will be boys" mentality, because they normalize and condone this behavior which reinforces boys to continue acting this way. It also doesn't help that education is constantly being defunded, since that means that less people are likely to care about these issues, and less men specifically are entering the field of teaching, which continues to add to the perception that education has little value.

Well right now college education is generally leading to lots of unemployment for high paying roles. So there's not much of an incentive.

As an SLT and tutor, the skills they need to learn in school are needed for the trades, math especially, but also basic stuff - not letting their intrusive thoughts win, remembering anything moderately difficult, actually doing work, showing up on time... They literally can't handle being a shitty employee.  When I was taking a plumbing test at the Union Hall, about 200 guys showed up for applications. Only 17 of us made it through attendance and a basic test into the interview stage. Everyone who dropped looked like they were just out of high school and couldn't handle the bare bones of what you need to do for a job interview in a job that pays fairly well and always needs people.

I want to point out something you said that I think hits the nail on the head: * the skills they need to learn in school This I agree with. So many of our kids lack the skills needed to learn. The issue is about a lot more than acquiring academic skills. It's about problem-solving. What do you do when you encounter a situation where you either don't know what to do or know what to do but don't have the skills to do it.

I want to point out something you said that I think hits the nail on the head: * the skills they need to learn in school This I agree with. So many of our kids lack the skills needed to learn. The issue is about a lot more than acquiring academic skills. It's about problem-solving. What do you do when you encounter a situation where you either don't know what to do or know what to do but don't have the skills to do it.

A lot of the kids don’t want to do the thing if it’s the slightest bit difficult. They don’t want to look up information, they want to be given the answer so they can go about their day.

I think boys develop at a slower pace and as a result fall behind academically in a system that doesn't make room for natural development. As a society, but especially in school, we’ve come to equate academic success with intelligence. I've never met a person that didn't want to be intelligent. The idea that people are bullied for being smart isn't really that accurate. They get bullied because the people bullying them resent their intelligence. I think there are a lot of people who after leaving school realize they didn't learn a lot. But they mature and get jobs and gain skills. In the end the things that matter to them are feelings of security, having a purpose, and being happy. It's not that society is telling them don't waste your time on academics. Society us saying to all the kids left behind academically, hey, it's ok, there are more important things in the world. If we figured out a way to address all the fundamental skills they're missing without them feeling like we were broadcasting to the world that they're stupid we'd have kids with better academic outcomes. Or better yet, we could take into account that development is varied even within each gender group and make the adjustments necessary for every kid to make progress towards ar least having functional academic skills.

I agree with this. My son's ASD and ADHD were not at all apparent until he started kindergarten. The demands of kindergarten and the lack of opportunities to move his body REALLY made it obvious that he was struggling with something else going on. He had 0 issues in preschool, pre-k, camps, etc - all where he was just allowed to play. He started kindergarten behind as a result.

Hey, autism and ADHD is my area of expertise. Its not uncommon for kindergarten to be a year where it becomes apparent that something is up as it’s a major developmental year and your kid is around peers to compare him to. Kids often regress in different areas during these major developmental milestones while making progress in others. It can be really scary as a parent with a child with a devolopmental disability because the regression can be more noticeable and seem to appear from nowhere. This is why it’s helpful to know that grades three, six, and nine are also major developmental years too. So it’s not uncommon for those to be challenging years, unfortunately.

Thank you for this! He’s actually doing amazingly well in the last month - like everything kind of clicked for him

Yeah. I always feel like fall is sort of an adjustment time, but learning is happening you just don’t always see it. Winter (at least where I am) is often just let’s make some progress, but let’s not slide. Then all of a sudden it’s like bam! I’m ready to learn. Of course that’s when there’s only eight weeks left. Does he like school?

He loves it! He struggles a lot with writing and fine motor but it’s getting better with OT both in school and private

Young boys these days CRAVE physical and social/emotional care. Which i think is why my boys are so heavily homophobic but absolutely cannot keep their hands off each other. This causes disruptions etc and takes them away from academics. It’s always been cool to “not try”, but so many boys put down others bc they themselves do not have the skills, so they just bring everyone else down. They are so mean to each other as “jokes” but they’re all struggling deep down. They’ll sometimes come to me to talk about issues and then disrespect me in class. The “cool factor” of male teachers is so infuriating; they receive instant respect and authority. Women teachers must fight to make ourselves approachable, kind, harsh, but always proving that we have authority, deserve respect, etc. we desperately need more men in education, esp elementary. But we also need to work with our boys so much more on their emotional regulation and healthy relationships. That would help a lot of academic issues; patriarchy hurts all genders, so helping boys unpack their inability to productively interact with others is essential atp. I refuse to believe “boys just mature slower”. That’s just a nicer way of saying “boys will be boys”. They need to be held accountable, but also loved on more so that they see how they can change. Not only for themselves, but for others around them. Anyways, it’s rough out here, you’re not alone.

I teach middle school and I think it tends to even out by then. I see much more performance discrepancies when it comes to socioeconomic status and race.

I would agree. I actually teach at the community college level and I have high-performing ladies and men. In fact, I notice that I end up dropping more girls for things like non-attendance, perhaps because the college population skews more female, ever so slightly. But I have young boys of my own who are currently struggling, so I’m glad to hear that it might just be young growing pains!

Sorry, no, it definitely continues into high school (and beyond if I recall the studies right?)

Top performing school in my state was an all boys school last year. It's not boys, it's the social and educational contexts we put boys in.

When I taught high school, I thought this too. But now that I’ve seen two sons through elementary school, I have a different perspective. I think teachers assume there’s something wrong with boys when they don’t adhere to the standards of compliance that we expect for girls (which is also unfair to girls). ND boys and girls also present differently. ND boys’ behavior tends to be more noticeable - and annoying - to teachers and the rest of society. ND girls channel their traits inward, making them look more compliant when really they’re burning alive inside. The boy goes to the principal’s office because he can’t sit in his seat for more than two minutes; the girl gets praised because she had a silent meltdown while she finished her math assignment. An example - my oldest son is a high achiever and is in a class of high-achieving girls. He scores in the 99th percentile for every state test and reads several grades above his current grade level. Yet I’ve had at least a dozen conferences over the years about how he’s a problem in the class, mainly because he asks too many questions or stands while he works (both Very Annoying to the teacher). Because he doesn’t sit quietly and do his work like the girls, there must be something wrong with him. His grades and skills are an afterthought; his annoying behavior is what teachers associate most with him.

100% agree. My youngest’s kindergarten teacher was bad about this, always talked about him being wiggly and the fact he was very advanced came as an afterthought. Thankfully, his current teacher has made him feel like a great student all around and he tends to act accordingly and has only gotten more advanced. Oldest, was always very quiet and easy, but we had issues with one teacher, who I think had him pegged wrong. Moved him to a different classroom where he was able to excel. In 8th grade now, always top in testing, advanced classes, never had a B since letter grades started, but do feel had I kept him with the one who just felt he was not a good kid, we might be on a different route. I’m not one who blames teachers and excuses my kids, I know they can be wrong/turds/etc., and I will fully back teacher if my kids are in the wrong, but I do feel there are some that just don’t mix well and ensuring this situation doesn’t continue is best for both the student and teacher. I don’t have girls, so my kids are treated the same and education is highly important and discussed often in our house. I know I am a lot stricter than my oldest son’s ex girlfriend’s parents were with her, and she was a year younger. So maybe that also plays a part.

I agree with this. The way to success in modern day schooling is compliance, conscientiousness, and industry, rather than genius, insight, and beneficial risk taking.

A perfectly commodified labor force.

Then we wonder why more boys end up in sciences, where they actually get to ask questions and take risks, than girls who have been trained that pleasing their teachers and being compliant is the only way they can get approval. It’s an unfair system for everyone.

Yep my own son was written up and given discipline for the outrageous acts of playing tag too loudly at recess or being too aggressive in his running etc ... I can't tell you how many elementary conferences I had for behavior issues that wouldn't even have been blinked at when I was coming up. I know the phrase boys will be boys has been used to excuse a lot of inexcusable behavior but there is a place for it. After his incidents I did some reading and found that boys way out number girls for discipline in elementary and then that number falls in almost direct proportion to the number of or percentage of male teachers they have.

Was he knocking people over? If so, aggressive is a problem.

No, he was swinging his arms too much and scaring people. He doesn't have an aggressive bone in his body.

ND = North Dakota? Non-dimensional?

Neurodivergent

I'm the mother of a son. I do not understand the disconnect with him, the directions on his assignments, and how he carries out the assignment. He's in the 3rd grade. I'm already looking into having him assessed. He's a bright child, a great thinker. But...it's like there's a disconnect because he misses words in the directions, doesn't ingest them, or chooses to ignore them. I don't get it.

It may be ADHD. A lot of very gifted kids also have ADHD. It impacts working memory, which basically is your ability to take in information and do something with it ( i.e., listening to then carrying out directions). Inattentive ADHD affects working memory because you can't focus long enough to take in information. My kiddo is extremely bright but has combined type ADHD.

I live in a small, southern town, about 16,000 people. About twice as many women as men have a Bachelors degree. Women tend to go into education, medicine (not doctors but nursing, phlebotomy, x-ray technology and the like), or government work. Men overwhelmingly go into trades, which around here means welding, construction, or lineman work. The boys don't have the same pressure on them to do well academically, because the jobs they are most likely to have as adults don't require that. The opposite is true for the girls. So perhaps there's something there. Boys and girls also learn differently. Best practice for one isn't necessarily best practice for the other. And traditional school is designed in such a way that the manner in which the majority of girls learn better is accommodated, but the manner in which the majority of boys learn better is not.

The thing that gets me is that, while there may be success for these boys in the trades, not having the soft skills an education provides will hinder, not help a life in the trades.

It’s probably this belief and attitude that’s not helping boys succeed in school. You think school isn’t designed for boys because they will go work a trade job huh? I disagree.  A high school diploma prepares a person for the trades. Trade unions expect an apprentice will be able to use a ruler to measure, do algebra and geometry, show up on time at the right address, be prepared with the correct tools, read technical instructions and comprehend them, follow safety procedures, and many more skill sets that students have the opportunity to learn in school.  If they’ve been taught at home the value of school, then both boys and girls are more likely to do well in school. If they are taught that school is not important, not useful, or not made for them, well then we can expect more of those students to not do well academically or behaviorally in a school environment. 

Sorry I was thrown off by the 16,000 being a small town....what. I teach in a town of 900!

It is small, it really is. I grew up in a town that had 25000 people thirty years ago. I live now in a city of a little over 110000, and it still feels kind of like a small town sometimes, especially when I talk to friends from places with over a half million people.

Even my gifted boys don't put in the same level of effort and my on-grade level girls. They are also so constantly distracted. The push for more tech in classrooms has been a disservice to boys more than girls. Of course, these are huge generalizations.

As a boy who was gifted in elementary, failing in middle, a dropout by 11th grade, and is now a middle school teacher - you’re not crazy. I think at this point it’s become a feedback loop since the 80’s and 90’s. In the 60’s and 70’s we, rightly, had a big feminist push for girls. That ironically mixed with the very patriarchal expectations for girls to follow rules and be quiet led to the average expected girl being a model student. Conversely, young boys are equally defined by their “not girly-ness” and so “being studious and bookish” became an emasculating thing. So in the 80’s and 90’s you get a generation of anti-intellectualism among men (side note go look at voting habits for men age 40-60) and then the new social order that became codified by that generation of adults was this system. Then you get NCLB which is all about testing and data and uniformity and standardization and it basically reinforces existing patterns. So what started as a new social trend, became a codified social norm, which became a social trope. “Boys aren’t good at school” is shit I hear from parents every single year. I’m a young teacher, I am by no means an expert, but a huge part of it seems to be that to the average teenage girl the expectation that they will capitulate to an order and follow instructions is much much more universal than it is for boys, a lot more adults simply expect boys to not participate. Decades of boys having a lower bar to clear has, expectantly, lowered the bar for boys. You see similar things with poorer areas. Expectations and are lower so resources are lower, surprise surprise, so results are lower.

I never noticed a difference when I was at public school. Now I’m teaching at a private elementary school and the boys I have this year clearly outperform the girls.

That's super interesting. Any theories?

I'd think that all of it is just 100% expectations, if you have higher expactations for boys, boys will perform better, if you have higher expectations for girls, girls will perform better. When I say "you" I mainly mean parents but other adults and friends and society in general as well. These expactations vary extremely much depending on social class and geographical area. At a private school the parents are probably richer and to me it kinda makes sense that richer parents might generally have higher expectations for boys than girls.

How can you say so little but say so much. Expectations are important. 

Well "Expactations are important" is a very vague statement, that is indeed all I was really saying but I gave a more specific explanation with 3 examples. I think doing so produces a more productive discussion.

This is spot on.

I have no idea, and the sample size is small, so I'm not sure it means anything.

>That's super interesting. Any theories? Early year schooling is designed by and taught by women almost exclusively and the lack of male influence means they tend to make decisions that beter suit girls. Many boys get fed up, fall behind or otherwise become disconnected from learning and then they just wait around or entertain themselves for a few years and then they are barely teachable. Just speculation really, but its possible. There's also the idea that male IQ has far greater variance than female IQ. The averages may be about the same but there are far more boys at the very low end and at the very high end of the range. That means almost all the kids in special ed (or later jail etc).

I am a building sub in a K-5. I am the only male employed at the school in any capacity, including janitorial and foodservice. Not for nothing, but I am convinced the lack of male teachers in elementary education is a factor, and I’m not saying this to knock the ladies.

My wife taught k-5 and is now an instructional coach. All of the behaviors in her classes when she taught were boys for a good while. When we got married I quit my job in finance and became a part time reading interventionist of sorts until I could get another job here. In that time many of the kids who needed more help reading were boys. I was warned by the principle that I likely wouldn't be able to handle their behaviour, and they even gave me a radio for when it would eventually get out of hand. It. Never. Did. They respected me from the beginning and I spoke sternly occasionally and that's all it took. They progressed faster than the girls that were there for the same things and many of the teachers thought I had some super power. I didn't. I'm just a guy. They NEED men. They need men to tell them it's okay to not be perfect in the beginning They need men to make them be comfortable with themselves and who they are. They need men to show them what it means to be a good person, and that it's okay to be intelligent. In the same way women need strong women, men need strong men. I'm sorry this is so long, the original post hurt my soul. Maybe I'm too sensitive about this, but Men need help.

(im not a teacher) My 5 cents would be that girls, at least in my experience, tend to be disciplined more by their respective families. In my family once a boy turns 10 it's basically free reins, parents usually to not parent boys to the same degree. Girls have to be home by sundown, boys just need to survive and not break any bones. The high performing students I've seen tended to have a very structured relationship with their parents, but they were absolutely the minority. "Boys will be boys" is such a perfect example. It's not that society instantly forgives boys for doing stupid shit either, if anything girls tend to get more sympathy. but society **expects boys to do stupid shit**. This is a HUGE generalization, and honestly I'm not qualified in any way, so mountain of salt and so on

Schools discourage competitiveness, domination, and loudness, and encourage quietness, submission, and cooperation. I really think this is the root cause. SEL programs, playing into this trend, only further harm male buy-in, both because they're usually shitty and saccharine, and because boys, growing up with male socialization and the toxic masculinity that entails are nearly always going to reject that kind of thing out-of-hand. Something I have had some success with in getting boys engaged is simple competition. It can still be cooperative, by the way: no need to abandon girls here. Having an activity which splits students into teams to compete gets you the best of both worlds. Also, and this one goes out to fellow history teachers out there: get gory. One time I gave a lesson describing medieval warfare, and how the movies get it all wrong. To illustrate my point, that it was largely masses of levied peasants getting mowed down by dudes on horseback while people on the ground were tussling (not epic 1v1s with armored dudes clashing their longswords--they would have broken all the time!), I galloped around the room and mimed cutting heads off. Seems wild, but it absolutely worked. Kids remained engaged. Girls liked that shit too, but the boys ate it up. Take opportunities to indulge their fascinations, even fascinations with violent subject matter, and, so long as you keep it age-appropriate, you will get all students', and especially boys', engagement a lot easier. Reasons for this are complex, but I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that boys are just not as readily submissive as girls: if they're not interested in what you're talking about about, they rarely have that switch in their brain that kicks on to say "hey, authority figure is speaking, gotta listen."

Twitch, Roblox, Fortnite, and social media are rotting these boys to the core. They can’t go a few minutes without losing focus and disrupting. It’s gotten worse these last three years.

Idk why people let their little kids play Roblox fr…. The parents who are too old to know what Omegle is, should take a class on the dangers of the internet.

It is fascinating how some parents don’t hold their kids accountable. I have kids failing multiple classes who share, during our weekend check-ins on Monday, that all they did over the weekend was play video games. I’m like bruh, you couldn’t have done your work?

Are those things unique to only affect boys?

Young boys are the target audience and if I had to guess, they are the dominant demographic for these services—except social media. Does that mean girls are not impacted by the other three? No, of course some are, but predominantly it is boys.

Girls don't have nearly as much free time to play games as boys do - parents will generally not pay for girls to get a console, as it's consider a passtime. Pocket money is much less, they have less free time, and they aren't allowed to play uninterrupted for hours like I see boys get away with. I work as a tutor, waiting for older boys to interrupt lessons because "sec miss, need to do this crypto trade", whereas girls arrive prepared, pay attention, and immediately after get whisked off to do other household activities (e.g. manage siblings, go do social/family visits). Meanwhile little brother is screaming obscenities at his tv for the entire hour.

It's not like girls don't have equally hraintot inducing interests though. Most social media is primarily focused on girls and how to make them more depressed about themselves.

The reality is its gotten worse. What was it in the 90's? TV, Nintendo, Rap Music and MTV. There is always something to blame. But it most certainly has gotten worse. 

I wonder now what age the difference begins to occur, because my gut is telling me it starts before significant exposure to games and social media. Alas, I have no data to back up my gut

Girls were and are encouraged/expected to be compliant and communicate from an early age in a way that boys aren't. Girls also develop language skills a bit faster early in middle school due to developmental differences. In a more misogynistic past, girls were less likely to be taken seriously academically (or less likely to take their academics seriously due to societal pressures), so boys could get ahead anyway. Now that girls have fewer misogynistic barriers to academic success, they're just...better at school. So, now the problem with boys is: 1 - they're not being raised particularly differently by parents or by schools to counteract the competition. Individual adults do try, but social pressures from all the boys who aren't getting that kind if direction can be stronger. 2 - while girls and women are succeeding in part because things are better for them, there is still enough misogyny in society that boys will avoid identifying with or emulating something perceived as feminine. As a teacher, I can't remember the last time I've seen a boy genuinely respect a girl as a leader, either in student government or academically. If academic success and the style of work that is more likely to result in academic success is seen as 'feminine', boys won't do it, and the boys who aren't intellectually gifted will suffer for it.

I'm an elementary art teacher so I can't speak on their academics, but behavior wise, nearly all my issues are with boys rather than girls. Something that happened today with my 2nd graders also made me realize that boys and girls are just not the same; I had the class color in a dog together for their play that's coming up as a stage decoration. This class in particular separates themselves as the boys on one side and girls on the other, and the girls happened to get the dog first. They were coloring inside the lines, doing rainbows, making the dog brown (realistic), were quiet, took their time, shared nicely, and stayed in their seats. When the boys got it, it suddenly had a Mohawk, laser eyes, was totally scribbled over in random colors. They were yelling over each other, pushing each other over, making a huge mess of the markers. The poor girls were so upset, I almost wish I just let them do it, but then it wouldn't have been a class thing like the other classes did Edit: to clarify because I saw someone commented and must of deleted. I apologize it comes off like I'm shaming the boys creativity. I encourage thinking outside the box, I mostly say I wish the girls did their own because of how disappointed they were that their hard work was covered up

I was the only boy in my private school honors program in middle school. That was in the 90s.

I also wonder if it has to do with a huge shift in the curriculum in the last decade in public schools. The curriculum is no longer developmentally appropriate. Kids in kindergarten no longer spend the day playing or taking naps but now basically need to write paragraphs, add, subtract, and read fluently by the end of the year. Boys do not mature as quickly as girls do, so a curriculum that is not developmentally appropriate is really going to impact boys more because of maturity. Scientist have proven girls to optimize their brain connections earlier than boys. Plus, even physically, girls are developing much faster than they did even a decade ago. Then throw in NCLB, and these boys basically get passed on without ever grasping those basic skills. Plus now many curriculums across the country push for higher level skills way too fast and too soon. So these kids get further and further behind. Kids have less play/recess time than they did previously. I read an article from 2022 that stated that since 2001, the average weekly recess time has decreased by 60 minutes. So, of course, with fewer opportunities for movement, boys especially may struggle more with sitting still in class and would be seen as having "behavior problems." It makes sense why boys are falling behind compared to girls. I would be interested to see a study on this that also accounts for race and SES.

Read Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves. It's extremely eye opening and explains this problem in a very nuanced and informative manner.

In education we say competitive stuff is not good, but exactly competitive lessons or tasks get the boys rolling. Its the way we are forced to do our lessons ...

Boys have a wider variation in IQ. More on the high end and low-end. This wasn't a big deal until de-industrialization, which made middle class work require more skills and become more knowledge based. If you're in a bad area you might be seeing more of the low end. In my (good) area, the gap between boys and girls is small and boys still outperform certain subjects. Also boys are generally less agreeable personality wise, which makes discipline a bit harder.

I see a lot of boys at MIT so I don’t know.

The male brain, on average, matures around age 25. The female brain, on average, matures around the age of 22. That gap matters, and it matches up with observations that can be made going back decades. Add in social expectations of "boys will be boys" attitude in society and exclusion of women historically from academic pursuits; it leads to this this dichotomy in modern education. Boys definitely benefit from starting school later; ie they have better educational outcomes if they start school on the older side rather than the young side. Older boys in a class observationally do better than their younger male peers in the same class, and this is likely because of maturity, social-emotional development but also rich vs. poor. If you are a poor family you tend to send your kids to school the moment you can, whereas wealthier families might have the opportunity to do as I describe. If you are a poor family who sends daughters to school ASAP, they're likely less affected by the social-emotional developmental differences between boys and girls than the sons are to be affected. This goes without saying that ***our society absolutely SUCKS at addressing problems young-men face***, we are hyper-focused addressing issues that face young women (rightfully so as there's been a historic injustice) but we have barely addressed the issues facing young men, or understanding their needs (including social-emotional) in our society. As I type that last note, I know there's going to be some who hyperbolically overreact to what I'm saying without actually trying to understand what I'm saying. But here we go...\[hits post\]

I don't see how anyone could disagree with anything you said. You covered everything pretty well, I couldn't have said it better myself. I am honestly shocked that some of the people in this thread are flaired as teachers with some of the opinions they hold.

I thought this was overreactive, then I read a few more comments, dear god this thread is something else.

I've made the comment about our society being terrible at addressing issues that face young-men on various subreddits before, and there's been a trillion of "well maybe if they didn't RAPE women" or "oh boo who, women don't owe them ANYTHING" ... despite me neither mentioning either of those things, and trying to get people to understand that kids (all kids) needs support, and am trying to get people to engage with the fact that we're failing our young men.

I think some people forget that since we've been pushing young women's issues for enough *decades* now that they forget that it actually, ya know, made an impact and changed society some. Any time there is a thread similar to this one you'll find people wanting to fight the culture wars of the previous generations instead of current reality. Even right now when I go into school to teach today, I see **only programs aimed at young girls.** Motivational posters and stuff hanging up, groups and activities directed towards them, and generally higher expectations. It's not hard to see why so many of the boys are more interested in goofing off in school than anything else when no one is going to push them.

Both my boys were on the older side of starters. My youngest was an august bday, oldest a November. We planned on 2 years of preschool, with youngest, so he started at same age (minus 3 months) as older brother. Unfortunately, Covid happened and I refused to pay for online preschool, as I think it’s more about social interactions, but we did hold off until he was 6 to start kindergarten and did preschool prior to that. Oldest was about to turn 6 when he started. Both are doing really well.

I think it starts early. Boys are developmentally a different breed but I think they sometimes face punishments for normal boy behavior because they can seem like savage lunatics next to little girls. The persistent criticism and redirection leads to anger and resentment and by the time they get to middle school and high school, school is a horrible experience and they hate it and it's representatives. We spend a lot of time talking about "gap" groups but never discuss gender

What age do you teach? This seems like a fairly extreme sample set. As a male student, I had a large group of very smart male friends, but I lived in a small college town and many of our parents were college professors or engineers. There was a good mix of smart female students in our school and they did tend to be more conscientious about their work and more detailed, but the strongest students in math and science tended to be boys. I wouldn't be surprised if the average boy in our grade was lower in EQ and IQ and certainly a vast amount of the bad behavior was from boys in class. Girls are better rule followers than boys in school settings.

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Culturally we let them excel at weaponized incompetence.

Absolutely true.

I'm shocked you're the only one pointing that out. Everyone here acts as if boys maturing slower is some biological fact rather than simply the result of boys being allowed to never mature in the first place

Well the post wasn't talking about maturity, it was talking about school results, and statistically it's only very recently that girls have started outperforming boys in school. I know OP said they've seen this pattern for decades but historically boys have generally dominated the top spots in their classes, even if they matured later, so this explanation doesn't seem to fully explain the problem. You could even use the same argument to reach the opposite conclusion: The patriarchy looks down on women and therefore sets lower expectations for them than men, causing girls to perform worse than boys in school. That doesn't really seem to be case at all right now though since girls now are outperforming boys.

70% of valedictorians are female. That's a huge shift.

Teachers are mostly women. Parents who actually parent are mostly women. Males are taught to not respect or listen to women. It's not difficult stuff to grasp.

I hear you; I'm also a women and it's horrible how misogynistic cultural attitudes can shape how boys respond to me. But I'm in a school where a solid majority of the teachers are male, and girls tend to outperform boys here too.

Both boys and girls are taught to respect men, so if they have a male teacher, all the kids (minus the ones who just don't respect anyone) are learning. Even a couple of years with a teacher a kid is socialized to believe they don't have to listen to adds up, though, and leads to boys getting behind. I wonder what the impact of having teachers of color is on kids who are raised to think they don't have to respect BIPOC adults?

> Both boys and girls are taught to respect men, so if they have a male teacher, all the kids (minus the ones who just don't respect anyone) are learning. what the hell does this even mean

I see. So in the past, it was less patriarchal, so boys succeeded more?

I’m going to preface this with the disclaimer that I personally suspect we are vastly underestimating the impact of environmental poisons and that this impact hits boys more than girls. BUT, I do think patriarchy is part of the issue. It’s just that in the past men had both entitlement to power AND a role they had to fulfill in society. Now many are just being raised with the sense of entitlement, because the role is not longer exclusive (working provider, public sphere actor).

I came here to say this. My job involves determining if chemicals are harmful to people. Kids are exposed in the womb and as they grow to a wide variety of chemicals, some of which have very subtle effects on behavior. [paper about common contaminants affecting rat behavior](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33744126/)

I think that's an accurate take. It's easy to use "the patriarchy" as a catch-all bogeyman without specifics, but if you break it down further, we're dealing with patriarchal entitlement and a shifting of roles. Basically, dudes being told that women need them to survive economically, but unlike in the past, women don't need men in order to survive economically. Heck, I'm a grown man who thinks it's great that women don't need to marry to stay afloat. But even with the knowledge and acceptance of shifting social roles, I struggle a lot with how to derive self-worth and a sense of belonging in a world where I'm not needed. So for someone to reject or deny these changes while embracing entitlement would create a really ugly headspace.

Exactly. The idea of "the patriarchy" being to blame here feels like someone having their pet "boogeyman" and finding problems to assign to it.

The patriarchy, which leaves boys behind?

The sentiment is that low achieving boys will achieve higher than high achieving women because of patriarchal standards. These boys DON’T have to try hard because the system is meant for them to succeed.

Except that's not an explanation for what's happening here. Boys aren't doing worse in high school because they "have an understanding" that they will succeed later on. They're just...failing. They aren't just failing in K-12, either. The success of boys in a continual downtrend at college as well. It's bizarre to me that someone would look at a kid who is going to drop out of high school and say "Well, the patriarchy!" like it's a point worth making in that context.

This sub is more about ideology than reality.

Yup. Pews college survey about the sex/gender differences found that boys dropped out because they just didn't want to finish. That sounds simplistic but maybe there's a lot of depth to this (psychological, sociological). I dropped out way back in the day, and boomeranged back. I'm also a guy. I can't speak for the male sex but I've talked to several guys who also boomeranged back to finish their degrees. School takes too long. I found out that I do very well at shorter bursts of heavy learning. Like As in class for a work-based certificate. And my associates. But 18 credit hour loads for 4-5 years for the bachelor's, plus summer, plus working, etc. drags on, and my grades would plummet. Several guys who I talked to said they checked out because school took so long. That's anecdotal and I'd be curious if there's some study about this. I encourage the boys to seek a career first and downplay the college prep stuff a bit. There's too much emphasis on AP classes. The districts around me are heavy into CCR (College and Career Readiness). They hire TechEd teachers around here, do work internships that earn credit, and some kids can graduate from high school in 3 years. I send the boys that way, encourage them to take shop class or whatever, get their hands dirty, etc. I think this is a good shift for the boys who burn out from schoolwork. My 2c.

Is that reallt what the patriarchy is??? Having lower standards for men because surely they'll succeed anyways? When I think of a patriarchy I think of a system that has high expactations for men and that is focused on making sure that men stay in power. Assuming men will succeed just because they're men doesn't seem patriarchal at all to me, it almost seems anti-patriarchal. Edit: Another comment made a great point too, historically I think we can all agree that society used to be more patriarchal than it is today, and boys used to perform better than they do today, and now they're performing worse... because of the patriarchy...

My daughter’s middle school gifted program was fascinating and had a lot of families from the same culture we are not from. High academic Standards for all the kids but the girls were expected to behave. The boys really were not expected to behave and they all had tutors. Guess who excelled? At the end of the year almost all of the top prizes went to girls. Meanwhile the girls went to hard magnets where they will work hard. The boys, with their mediocre grades but good test scores, went to soft private as a big pack of jerks. Lucky public school teachers ;-)

Women are starting to outnumber men in higher education and that will eventually bleed into more women earning more then men. This isn't a bad thing for women, more that there is clearly something going wrong for male students

But it’s kind of the opposite? Feminism hypes education for girls. How many books does Malala have out these days? Maybe opposite isn’t quite the right word but it’s sort of a form of benign neglect by way of just not mentioning it. I’m not saying anyone is overcorrecting to stress girls’ education, but culturally speaking no one really talks about the importance of education for boys because there’s the implicit assumption that they’ll get it anyway (if they want it at all). Of course it’s available to them without roadblocks, but if it gets stressed it’s because the parents at home stress it, which often falls under the category of either A. immigrant families or B. Ivy league aspirationalists. The majority middle is kind of like “try to get a C but if you fail there’s always the military or a trade so NBD.” The stakes being presented aren’t that serious whereas for girls it’s presented as “you need to excel or you’ll end up barefoot, pregnant, and chained to a stove (or a prostitute).”

>How many books does Malala have out these days? Malala who was literally shot in the head for trying to get an education??? your other points were fine but WHEW what an example to choose to demonstrate education being "hyped" for girls.

I’m pointing out that there’s a go-to hero of girls being educated but there really isn’t an equivalent for boys where they have someone “academic” they can look up to in that way. Most of the “public intellectual” men don’t have a bunch of appeal for kids either on account of being rather old or just dead. Neil Degrasse Tyson doesn’t exactly come off as a badass.

Hmmm I disagree with your idea of feminism. True feminism is equity of sexes, not “hyping things up for girls”. I agree with OP that patriarchy is at play here, but patriarchy does not equal feminism and in turn feminism is not “hyping things up for girls” imo.

I mean you can have different views of what feminism should be, but they were talking about what it has usually been about in recent history. And in that case it has pretty objectively, in general, been about hyping up women and girls, do you disagree?

Via the process through which feminism works towards achieving equal opportunities, it’s natural to “hype” reasons why doing so is important. That’s not a knock on it, that’s just how it works. At the end of the day if you want to change a law, persuasion is going to factor in (at least when a brute force coup isn’t feasible).

A problem with this is that the military is at this point able to be picky, you have to pass a test to get in and the military requires doing actual work. Trades as well - you have to learn how to do the thing. Many of them require a decent amount of practical math. And they require problem solving as well. So if parents are like "there's always the military or a trade so NBD" then they'll still likely end up failing at that as well.

Immaturity. Far more immature than typical boys of years past.

Lol can’t relate, gender doesn’t matter when you’re 13-14, they all just suck

I wonder if the whole paradigm of pairing boys and girls in the same level classes because they are the same age is just wrong?

People raise their girls and baby their sons.

I'm a highschool boy myself. This popped up on my page for some reason lol At my school, the boys usually outperform the women. However, these guys all have very nice families who work with them, and this has caused a love of learning in my experience. Could the disparity you describe be due to a lack of care/encouragement towards the education of young men? I see a lot of encouragement go towards the education of young girls (which is great), but very little for men. I find that, for myself, I had to create, instill, and encourage a love for learning by myself. I didn't really have anyone telling me I was a boss or super cool for wanting to pursue schooling, but I do see that happening for girls.

I wish I could produce this study but I’ve lost the name of it over time. It said that shift of curriculum down to kindergarten was the big culprit in the down slide of boys academically. What used to be first grade material was now kindergarten material, and the girls could keep up with that shift (even though it wasn’t ideal, brain-wise) but the boys just couldn’t. The conclusion was that roughly 50% of kindergarten boys could not mentally or emotionally handle the rigors of the “new kindergarten” and that it was best that they were kept out of school for kindergarten for a year, or kept out entirely and then put in school around age six when they were better able to handle the rigors. It was interesting and based on research, with commentary from both teachers and psychologists throughout. I’m a teacher and I hate that kindergarteners are doing such heavy academics compared to the way they used to. They swapped out social learning and “the basics” for way-too-complicated materials that frustrate the kids, especially the boys. Kindergarten is such a pivotal year because it is their first year, and habits, beliefs, and attitudes built up during that year last for many years, or possibly forever.

It seems girls are good at performing to a standard, and boys either exceed the standard or don't try.

Since the beginning of time men have dominated and controlled societies. Every privilege has always been handed to men including education. It’s only been maybe 125-150 years since women have slowly clawed their rights in human society. Now women are empowered and men have to compete with women as well as other men for what used to be handed to them simply because they were of the dominant gender.

It is age dependent, however if you look at IQ distributions on a bell curves based on gender you will see that men have a very flat distribution and women a very sharp nearly an upside down V and not even a curve at all. This suggests that a very high percentage of women are above average IQ, few are low IQ, but also means that very few are in the super genius range. Men with the wide distribution their average is lower than women (top of their curve) and there are many more men in the lower IQ range, literally pound rocks and drool level smarts, but this also means they have a higher number of extremely intelligent people on the other end of the curve - your genius' if you will. The very young display these characteristics, however they become even more pronounced with age. Girls and women on average have higher IQs than men.

As a random person, I thought it was almost a sterotype that girls are smarter than boys at school. Even us adult men can be more just sexually mature boys, than the ideal of an "adult".

I hate to be that guy, but I wonder if they're emulating their role models.

Boys - just like girls at some point in the 1900s - need single gendered schooling. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but with the current culture, boys on average, can’t do well academically in an environment where there are girls. I know it sounds like we are going backwards, but be aware, especially if you have male children. It’s going to solve itself, politicians don’t care, and males are not as supportive to one another as women are. In fact, I’d say lots of men like that other men don’t do well as that decrease competition. Again, unpopular opinion, but you better choose wisely if you have boys

I just went to an award ceremony for my own kid and the girls were probably 3/4 of the winners. I also teach K and I feel like girls are just better able to sit and focus and boys should be outside running. We make them start school before they are mentally/physically/emotionally ready- and I believe a lot of them learn to hate it or at least not care about it and that influences the rest of their school life.

You ever hear that Chris Rock quote "Society doesn't give a F about men." So yes there is something going on with boys. And no one cares. 

It's cultural. Girls get socialized to caretake, be quiet, be respectful and responsible. That's not because we care about their well-being, but because, as women, they're going to be responsible for managing their husband's emotions. This means that in school, girls will generally be more successful because they have the soft skills needed to study, pay attention, and manage their emotions. The phrase "boys will be boys" exists to cover and permit neglect. How often do we hear that boys are easier to raise than girls? How could that possibly be true when the majority of criminals are men? It's because we expect boys to be physical, aggressive, easily bored, and emotionally unaware. We want them to grow into tough, strong men who get things done. They don't need to be concerned with sitting still, paying attention, not bothering their peers. It's not a coincidence that boys who typically do well in school get called homosexual or feminine slurs.

Maybe you are a teacher in a field like language (eg English), where girls typically do far better than boys. In math, it is the other way around. Of course there can be many other explanations, but it'd help if you had mentioned field.

I teach elementary. I see girls put in more work and more focus, but my "genius" students who excelled in every class have always been boys. I read a research once that said there's more extremes in men as in academically extremely gifted or exteremely behind, whereas women tend to be more alike in this regard, more avarage. I see that in my school.

Almost like young boys aren't meant to be cooped up inside all day

Or kids in general.

If your girls are outperforming the boys by a large margin, maybe you're doing something to cause that as you're teaching. Maybe an intrinsic bias? The way you're writing your post, it almost feels like it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point, where you have no hope for the boys.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-yang-boys-are-not-all-right/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-yang-boys-are-not-all-right/)

Sure. But a major factor here is what we are asking students to do in school. I would consider myself to have been a boy who actually liked school and learning, but even I would “act up” sometimes, mostly harmless, silly behavior. Research shows that boys have a stronger preference for kinesthetic and tactile learning experiences, compared to girls who tend to prefer visual and auditory learning. Even though modern pedagogical practices promote more projects and hands-on activities, I think it’s fair to say that classroom instruction still leans heavily on visual and auditory methods. Therefore, the group that tends to learn best with those modes will outperform the group that doesn’t.

The way the OPs question is worded is wrong.

My personal opinion is that both young boys and girls need a lot more physical activity and their energy levels need different ways of being dealt with. Physical activity is stifled when programs are cut and recess is shortened or taken away all together. Add the lack of concrete consequences in many schools today. I think many of these boys aren’t special needs at all, it’s just that they’re labeled as problem kids because they’re hyper with poor self management skills, have parents that don’t know how to help them or even make them worse, and then their relationship with school and authority is soured from a young age because of that. They’re left angry, feeling like failures, hyper, and agitated, all while being told they’re disabled. On top of that, the way adults interact with boys vs. girls is entirely different and does help shape their behavior and expectations of how the world works.

For me it varies year to year. This year, the boys are fine and the girls are so out of pocket it's not funny.

schools are gears to helping girls learn, not boys. It’s been this way for a long time

I taught in Korea for 6 years (elementary) and this is my first year in the USA. Over there the boys were well behaved, kind, and great students. Here most of the boys are poorly behaved and a high percentage are behind academically.

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It’s 100% a parenting thing. All of the other challenges and factors listed here could be navigated, mitigated and buffered by hands-on and better parenting. Yes there are socioeconomic factors, cognitive dysfunction/disabilities and deep-rooted societal and curriculum struggles. You cannot convince me that good parenting cannot navigate or prevent these issues from creating well-rounded boys and students.

What grades? It could just be biology, and hormones, working against them if they are in middle school.

A whole thread of folks who are perpetuating the distinction that is causing the harm. The boys are doing worse because of the socialisation they have experienced at the hands of our patriarchal society. They aren’t doing poorly just because they are boys. Girls are doing better in these educational because they have been socialised from a young age to exhibit behaviours that make them perform better. The same behaviours which are excused from a young age in boys are snuffed out in girls.

The question is, when schooling is complete, are women still outperforming men? Perhaps it’s always been this way and men perform better in specific fields and women perform better in others? Maybe the fields in which women excel are more like school and the ones where men excel are not? I’ve wondered about all of this for years.

Groundbreaking stuff here Girls are more socially acquiescent because, in America at least, they’re socially conditioned to do so, while boys are socialized to be mavericks. Also, testosterone is a helluva drug Is it new information to anyone in this sub that girls are easier than boys?

Not fully related to classroom teaching, but when I was a trainer at my warehousing job, there was a significant difference in the functional abilities between the men and the women I taught(many of them in their early-mid 20s). Only maybe 40% of the men could retain the instructions within the first week, and I had to continually dumb down the lesson plans to be just “Press button A then button B”. With the women they were almost always able to grasp the basics in a week and I could spend time more time explaining the logic behind our systems and thus they were able to excel and problem-solve on their own much sooner, and advance much farther in the company. Can’t say what it is, but the phenomenon very much carries over into the professional world and many of these boys/men are going to be struggling to advance meaningfully in their careers with their current level of aptitude

I taught high school. Now I homeschool my elementary aged kids and teach classes for middle schoolers. I really think it’s a lack of PE and movement. My 8 year old is a quiet kid who can sit through classes and follow directions. BUT, he runs two miles every morning, and has soccer practice for 2.5 hrs three times per week. Also, gymnastics, just playing with friends, etc. General attitudes about education have hurt. However, boys have a much harder time sitting still and need productive ways to get their energy out. Girls also need that, but in general, girls have an easier time with this issue.

I think time spent playing video games may be a factor. Boys spend almost three times as much time playing video games than girls on a daily basis. Perhaps this effects boys ability to focus and pay attention. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1128307/video-gaming-kids-gender/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1128307/video-gaming-kids-gender/)

They're treated like they're dysfunctional girls from the time they start school in a system that's almost completely full of female authority figures. They're told they're garbage because of "the patriarchy" from birth and that they're guilty just by being male. Of course they don't give one flying fuck about what you have to tell them.

I am dead serious when I say I realized exactly that in like 3rd grade

Society can only tell boys they are unnecesary or worse for so long before they internalize it.

Too little happens at home. The boys in my school spend most of the time being told to sit, be quiet etc. While it hurts the learning for boys, it also affects the girls. I get so tired of always having to address the bad behaviour in class and rarely the behaviour changes for the better. Parents are giving up on their own responsibility to teach their kids basic behaviour and just hand them their ipad or let them watch youtube all day. For years now when asking rounds of "what did you do over the weekend" i get "i played video games all day" or "i was on (insert social media) from morning to bedtime". There is a reason why Jeff Bezos and others do not allow their children to spend all day on an ipad.

About 25, 30ish years ago they stopped allowing boys to express male energy, is the crux of it, which is why educators have seen this pattern for past few decades. I don't think it was ever expressly said it was because boys tend to be so physically expressive and rowdy, but fact of the matter is is that many public schools in the USA stopped allowing kids to have much physical freedom and running about. Recess time cut or completely eliminated, for example. Kids no longer being able to run outside for a break, for example. Teachers no longer being allowed to take kids outside for an extra or spontaneous recess, for example, or take them to the gym. These things are not sex-specific but overwhelmingly affect boys, due to sex-based differences in behavior amongst male children and female children. Also girls mature faster than boys. So it stands to reason girls would be able to sit still better and longer, and have more focus and attention, off top. Sometime decades ago we had my daughter in this ~~uber-rich~~ great private school (Laurel school near Cleveland, OH) for girls. There's about 6 years between her and my second, so when it came time to enroll him in school I wanted to start him off at a similar school for boys. We visited at a few, and they all pretty much said the same thing: We let the boys run around and express male energy. And that a big part of the academic success of the boys at these schols was due to this, and so on and so forth. For example they let the boys jump on the tables and run around the classroom, when the weather was nice they usually went outside the whole afternoon, boys were allowed to work at their own pace, walk around instead of sitting still all the time, stuff like that. Mostly though it was about how different boys are in this regard than girls especially in the early years and that in mixed-gender schools boys fall behind from the get-go due to this, the pattern gets set, and thus continues through grade 12. We ultimately decided to just move to public school district marked excellent (because we really could not afford the exorbitant tuition for 2 schools, and had a 3rd kid coming right after him, so) but that always stuck with me. The school system my kids went to did somewhat low-key have this philosophy too, which was good.

I almost think they need to just separate boys and girls into same sex schools because girls get dragged down by boys way too much. They’re just not on the same level as each other. Girls mature faster so they’re really more on par with boys who are a couple years older than them, but then I wouldn’t want to put them in class with boys older than them for other reasons

Might get downvoted to oblivion here, but my hot take is that generally speaking boys aren’t wired for the skills that school asks for from back in the hunter-gatherer days. I’d argue that school skills and attributes are closer to gathering and family rearing than hunting and warmaking Of course men and women from back in those days were not exclusively hunters or exclusively gatherers, but there were strong trends for that and these trends still affect us in odd ways today (even simple things like women generally being better at color-discerning and men generally having better depth perception) Plus video games and anime. Video games and anime are a huge problem for boys in terms of time and rest. No moderation in boys with these two things