Jennifer Buckingham: Let's make a start to fix boy troubles

COMMENT

Many boys are not doing as well at school as they could and should be. National and international statistics show that boys have not kept up with the educational progress made by girls.

The replacement of the School Certificate with NCEA Level One seems to have exacerbated the problem.

There were 49 NCEA achievement standards last year, and girls outperformed boys in 42 of them. These included languages as well as the traditional male domains of the physical sciences and technology. Furthermore, the gender gap favouring girls in literacy is larger in New Zealand than almost every other OECD country.

Fundamental changes have occurred in the two most important institutions in boys' lives - families and schools. There now seems to be a mismatch between boys and schools which has seen them become disaffected and less academically successful, although not necessarily in that order. Three trends underlie the educational decline of boys.

First, there is a diminishing presence of men in boys' daily lives. One in three boys lives apart from his natural father and only 14 per cent of primary classroom teachers are male.

It is possible that many boys can go through primary school without a male presence in their daily lives, either at home or at school. Boys need good male role models for guidance and encouragement.

Secondly, schools have evolved over the past two decades in ways that have made them more suited to girls. This feminisation does not simply mean that there are mostly women teachers. It means that curriculum, pedagogy and assessment now suit the sorts of capacities and interests more common among girls.

There is no suggestion that this has been intentional, but the subsequent disadvantage to boys cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately, resistance to the idea that boys are disadvantaged remains strong, an attitude exemplified in a Ministry of Education report, Explaining and Addressing Gender Differences in the New Zealand Compulsory School Sector, published in 2000.

The NCEA is a prime example of the effect of assessment. Many countries are heading down the path of increasingly school-based evaluation of student achievement. Research suggests that boys do better at high-stakes, knowledge-based exams.

This in turn suggests that part of the problem is not that boys know and can do less than girls, but that the assessment instrument is more finely tuned to girls' abilities. This might be justified if continuous assessment were a more valid form of assessment than a well-designed exam, but that is yet to be proven.

The third - and perhaps most important - factor influencing the underperformance of boys, however, is the relationship between socio-economic status and the gender gap. The difference between achievement levels of boys and girls is larger in low socio-economic groups than in high socio-economic groups.

One might think that this is because of poverty. But in fact, research consistently shows that family background, including income, is responsible for only a small proportion (between 5 and 10 per cent) of student achievement. By contrast, teacher quality accounts for 30 per cent of student achievement.

The chain of logic suggests that the lower performance of low socio-economic status children must be largely the result of the quality of teaching they receive. And boys, for a variety of reasons, are more vulnerable to ineffective teaching than girls.

The challenges are numerous but well understood. First, all efforts must be made to get good teachers into the schools where they are most needed. This means reviewing the industrial and other conditions that create disincentives for teachers to take on more difficult work. Attracting and retaining male teachers are important facets of this.

Secondly, classroom strategies to which boys respond should be more widely disseminated and deployed. Happily, many of these strategies are those identified by researchers as characterising effective teaching for all students. They include structured, teacher-led lessons, with frequent evaluation and lots of feedback to students.

Thirdly, both schools and parents must create constructive partnerships. Parents often hand over the task of educating their children completely to schools. This is perhaps because they have become accustomed to a system that gives them few choices and therefore little responsibility.

Many schools are equally culpable by neglecting to engage parents and to provide them with the information they need.

These are not the only ways forward, but offer a place to begin. Either we deconstruct masculinity for a few more years, or we use what we know today to make schools better places for boys tomorrow.

* Jennifer Buckingham is a policy analyst for the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia.