For the past few years I have heard endlessly about the education crisis for boys. In short: Compared to girls, boys around the world are underperforming academically, and this is described as a distinctly modern problem. At this point, it is assumed that young boys and men are at a disadvantage in schools, and need help that girls and young women do not.
Reactionary conservative commentators, including Jordan Peterson, say boys are underperforming in school because the “vast majority of teachers are not only female but infantilizing female and radically left,” boys are made to sit for hours at a time, which is against their “nature,” and they are told that their “ambition is pathological,” Peterson said in a conversation with my Times Opinion colleague David French.
More liberal or centrist pundits, such as Richard Reeves, the author of “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It,” agree that part of the problem is a lack of male teachers, and track the problem back to 1972, when Title IX was passed; “within a decade, women had caught up and then just blew right past the men” in terms of college graduation rates, Reeves said.
I had long accepted the basic premise that a lack of male teachers drove the crisis of learning in boys, and that these problems are fairly recent. But sometime this spring I started thinking about the stories I had heard from older friends and relatives, men and women, about their own school experiences.
Boys and girls were made to sit for long periods of time in the 1950s, and their punishment for disobeying was likely harsher than it is in many schools today. (I have heard so many tales of nuns hitting kids with rulers.) I don’t think there was a widespread embrace of boys acting out in the classroom in previous generations, and yet no one is arguing that American education of the Eisenhower era made boys less ambitious. This revelation made me want to see if there was actually empirical support for the boy-crisis argument.
What I found shocked me. There’s not much solid evidence that boys do better with male teachers. And girls have been getting better grades than boys since before women had the right to vote.
Let’s start with what Peterson says about the “radically left” political leanings of female teachers. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation, hardly a liberal bastion, found that “a nationally representative survey of K-12 teachers does not support the idea that America’s public schoolteachers are radical activists.” And further, “Teachers may very well be allies, not opponents, in the pushback against the application of critical race theory and other divisive ideologies in the classroom.”
But what about the fact that the majority of American teachers are now women? The teaching force in the United States has been majority female for over 100 years. Reeves notes that the current teaching force is 23 percent male — which is roughly what it was between 1920 and 1940. The number of male teachers ticked up a bit after World War II, but peaked at around 30 percent.
It’s not like our public schools are bereft of male leadership, either. While women make up the majority of elementary school principals, men dominate middle school and high school administrations. Only a quarter of superintendents, who are in charge of multiple public schools or districts, are women.
What’s more, the evidence that students do better with same-gender teachers is mixed at best. For example, a 2021 study using seven years of data looked at students in Indiana from grades three through eight and found that “female teachers are better at increasing both male and female students’ achievement than their male counterparts in elementary and middle schools,” and “contrary to popular speculation, boys do not exhibit higher academic achievement when they are assigned to male teachers.” (The biggest positive effect was for girls when they had female math teachers.)
All that said, the research that really surprised me was a meta analysis from 2014 by Daniel and Susan D. Voyer that showed that girls have been outperforming boys in school since 1914. This suggests that female academic achievement is hard to correlate with the post-1972 impact of Title IX or other downstream consequences of second-wave feminism. And going back further, I find it hard to believe that a teaching force trained before women had access to their own credit cards was somehow favoring girls, when the society around them wasn’t even sold on higher education for women.
The Voyers discuss in the paper a similar “boy crisis” news cycle that happened almost 20 years ago:
A 2006 Newsweek article suggested that boys across the United States are falling behind girls in terms of school achievement, whereas 30 years ago, it was presumably females who were lagging. Unfortunately, no specific references were provided to support these statements. However, this did not prevent more reporting of this so-called boy crisis in various newspapers, magazines and other media.
Judith Warner wrote an essay for The Times in 2006 very much like this one, called “What Boy Crisis?” It showed that “the near-ubiquitous belief that our nation’s boys are being academically neglected and emotionally persecuted by teachers whose training, style and temperament favor girls” was “little more than a myth.”
The myth persists because there’s always a market for anti-feminist backlash, and now that we’re in the middle of an anti-education backlash as well, a mostly female teaching force is sadly an easy target. The “crisis” doesn’t seem to be that boys are doing particularly poorly of late. It seems to be that girls are finally being rewarded in the form of college attainment and more equal pay for their efforts.
Make no mistake, there are boys and men who are legitimately struggling now, in school and in life, and they deserve our care and respect. Boys may be cognitively behind girls when they enter school, and we should prepare them better. Everybody should have more recess time, not just “fidgety boys.”
We should figure out why fewer men than women are choosing to go to college. Is it the cost of higher education? Is it that they think they’ll earn more money without college, in a trade? In rural areas, young men may be making a rational economic decision to eschew college, as they can earn well without it, and young women are making a rational decision to attend college because that’s their only ticket to financial solvency. According to a 2024 report from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, “More than half of men in rural areas with no more than a high school diploma have a good job, but the same is true for only 21 percent of women with a high school diploma.”
These are all important questions to consider. But if we are identifying the root of boys’ problems based on vibes rather than real evidence, we are not going to find helpful solutions. By incorrectly blaming female teachers, society may also end up downplaying some of the gendered harassment that girls and their female teachers experience — another problem that doesn’t seem to be abating.
I called Daniel Voyer to ask him the million-dollar question: If it’s not because of some kind of discrimination against boys, why do girls get better grades? Voyer said the first thing to note is that the differences between boys and girls are still not enormous — they are more alike than different. But while we can “speculate until hell freezes over” about why girls do somewhat better, one of the reasons could be the way boys are socialized.
To sum it up, it’s seen by some as unmanly to study, and there’s less of a social cost to girls to be nerdy and to be seen trying to do well. Based on Voyer’s analysis, gender performance gaps were smallest in regions like Scandinavia, “because they are very strong on gender equity,” he said.
I also wondered if boys are being socialized at home to know that they don’t have to put in as much effort as their mothers and sisters, which might have a knock-on effect. So much of doing well at school and in the modern work force is executive function and organization.
If every domestic task or household plan is carried out by a woman, boys may not learn that they need to try. As one high schooler interviewed about why boys take on fewer leadership roles in school told Education Week’s Elizabeth Heubeck earlier this year, “Guys know that if they sit back and relax, something will get done by somebody else.”
End Notes
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The Scarlet Jumbotron: Like everybody else, I have been following the Coldplay concert cheating scandal. (If those words mean nothing to you, catch up here. In short: A former C.E.O. and a fellow executive were caught canoodling on a Jumbotron in Massachusetts and their whole lives were blown up. The C.E.O. resigned.) On one hand, I really hate our hyper-surveillance culture. I know that there are cameras everywhere, but I don’t think it is good for us as humans to all accept that we are being watched and judged constantly. I won’t defend cheating on one’s spouse, but I think the internet’s outsize moralizing is over the top. Everybody’s grounded, and your homework assignment is to read “The Scarlet Letter.” On the other hand, it really is pretty dumb to cheat someplace so public.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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