Tuesday, February 24th, 2009. "What Can NAPSG Learn from a Book About Boys?" Peg Tyre.

"What Can NAPSG Learn from A Book About Girls?" Dr. JoAnn Deak.

MR. GALBRAITH: Good morning, everyone. If you didn't stay for it, the band played until about 10:30, but it was lots of fun, and a lot of people have asked for the words to "My Little Boy Shoes." We'll try to get that out. It was kind of touching for a lot of us.

There was enough variety yesterday that I think everybody had something that was pretty special, and I hope the same thing will happen again today. The trips will go on as scheduled and listed in the program. As you know, the Steins are not here. There are three spots this afternoon if anybody would like to replace them. They'd love to get a refund, I bet. If you want to go on the Viva San Antonio trip with the river barge, that will happen this afternoon. And tonight's dining out experience is at the Southwest School of Art and Craft, which is a former Ursuline girls school, and we'll have dinner in the Copper Kitchen, where the girls and the nuns used to eat. We'll have a docent to take us on a tour of the campus and tell us a little bit about what it was like when it was a school.

There are box lunches again, and would you please let the Viva folks have first shot at those. Did you ever grow up with FHP, "Family Hold Back"?

The signup sheet for shared rides is out there. That's helpful and ecologically sound, too, if you can give somebody a break.

The evaluation sheets are here, they're yellow, and they lead directly into my introduction of our first speaker because it's from those sheets that we get ideas about good speakers, and so they come to us that way.

That's exactly what happened in this situation, in two different ways. I was making a reference call for a head-of-school candidate in a totally different occupation than I do, and they led me to a second person, which is often a good evaluation. Sometimes when you call the school where a person is, a good evaluation can be that they'd like them to leave. That's a joke. Well, maybe it's not a joke. But anyway, sometimes going two schools away or going to a second person is good.

So I called this person named Peg Tyre, and we started talking about the fact that she's an editor at Newsweek, and the wonderful things she's done that you have read about in the materials, about the speakers. But then somehow, the conversation about a book she had just written about the trouble with boys, and I said, "Well, that's really interesting because I work for the National Association of Principals of Schools for Girls, and if you had written a book about the trouble with girls, I probably could have hired you as a speaker."

And then we started talking about what was in the book, and I'd really like to think she was saying they actually do relate to boys and girls. And the next thing I knew, I'm at my daughter's house and I see in The New York Times that she's speaking, her first time to talk after the publication of the new book. So I hop in the car and I go up and hear her speak, and then introduce myself afterward.

Then I presented it to the program committee and I said, "This is going to work. But it's about boys." And there was a long silence on the conference call. But the more we did this -- I'm stealing Brad Lyman's thunder, because he's going to introduce JoAnn Deak -- but then we said, "Let's pair her with the best possible person," and that's what we're going to hear. This is going to work. And then we'll have a combined Q and A. So we'll have two speakers, boom, boom, take our break, and then come back and have question and answer with these two people, and we're going to know a whole lot more about the relationship of these two points of view and their congruence and the times when they aren't congruent.

So would you please join me in giving a very warm NAPSG welcome to our first speaker this morning, Peg Tyre.

MS. TYRE: Thank you very much for that warm introduction. And yes, Bruce was there the first time I ever spoke about this book. I wrote a book about boys in school, and it came out in September, right when the stock market crashed and during a heated presidential election, and I think the night I actually gave that first lecture, it was going on The New York Times bestseller list, and I have to tell you, I was astonished. I practically had to be defibrillated. I thought that my book would find an audience. I was confident, because I have done a tremendous amount of research for this book. I didn't think it would find an audience quite that fast, and at quite that level.

It's been an incredible couple of months for me. The book tour became very long and I have had an opportunity to go to many, many schools, and talk about this issue, to talk to teachers and talk to school administrators and talk to parents who are the very people that I wrote this book for. So when I was sitting in my office all by myself, I couldn't have envisioned this right here today, but I was actually hoping that I could reach people like you, to talk about the things that I found.

So just so I know a little bit more about you, how many of you are connected to an all-girls' school? And a co-ed school?

Great. I'll just tell you briefly that I'm an investigative reporter. I'm a hard news reporter by trade. I covered education at Newsweek for seven years. I left there in the spring. I come to this look at education really with an open mind. I am a grateful beneficiary of the feminist movement. I went to Brown University based on the fact that teachers said to me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And I said, "A stewardess or a secretary." And they said, "No, you'll be a pilot or you'll be a lawyer."

Teachers made it happen for me. Female teachers made it happen for me, and so that really is my orientation. I understand how teachers change the horizons for girls. All right? So that said, I was in classrooms about two years before I even thought about boys. I was really more looking at the difficult journey that girls go through, especially in those middle years. I read a lot of Carol Gilligan. I read How Schools Shortchange Girls from the '90s, the American Association of University Women. I was very influenced and swayed by that.

It wasn't until I was in schools for about two years that I happened to notice that the kids in the back of the classroom were invariably boys, and I knew that poor African-American boys and poor rural white boys were struggling, and their struggles had been well-documented. You can go many, many places and find and see in stark terms the ways that they have fallen behind. But it wasn't until I was talking to a headmaster at a private school in Manhattan -- a very elite school -- and he was telling me that they were very concerned about their lowest quartile of children. And from the looking at them, he believed that those kids were going to the bottom of the class and staying there. And that troubled him, because as an educator, of course, you understand that kids need to experience some failure and then rebound, and then learn from it. That's the essence of the learning process. And he said he didn't think that was happening.

So his board launched a big project and they tried to identify who are those kids at the bottom? And they weren't the rich kids or the scholarship kids or the jocks or the goths or the arty kids. There was no group, social group; there was no economic group; there was no zip code that seemed to define them, except for the fact that they almost all were male.

I was very intrigued by what he said, because I knew that kids at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder were struggling, boys were struggling, and that I'm hearing it anecdotally from this headmaster that boys at the very, very top are struggling.

So to do a national education story, you can't really just go to three schools, although I wish. You have to constantly go to the national data and see if what you're seeing in schools is reflected in what we know from the numbers.

So here are the numbers. I went to the data, pored over it for a few months, and here's the data that I found. Boys are expelled from preschool at five times the rates of girls. They're retained in kindergarten and first grade at twice the rates of girls. They're identified as having learning disabilities at twice the rates of girls. In many affluent communities and affluent schools, 20 percent of boys are on ADHD medication. 20 percent. One in five. In middle school and high school, they get more Cs and Ds than girls. They take fewer college preparatory classes. Right now there are 2.5 million more girls than boys in college.

I found those numbers kind of arresting and very sobering. So I decided to write about them. I wrote a cover story for Newsweek about that, and it became one of the best-selling covers of Newsweek in the last, I think, 15 years. People wrote to me, educators wrote to me, and they said, "Thank you for writing about what we see in our classroom every day." And especially older educators who had been in the business for more than five or eight years, the people who were really master teachers, wrote to me and said, "We have seen this transformation. Thank you for writing about it."

Parents wrote to me and they said, "Thank you for writing about the central drama of our family life and that is: My daughter's at Duke and my son is at community college. And what did I do wrong?"

I also got some push-back from the piece. There were a few academic feminists, and they said that it was inappropriate to write about the struggles that boys were having in school, because there's so much still to do in terms of gender equity in the workplace that to write about boys in school took oxygen away from that very important discussion.

I have to tell you, as a feminist, I reject that, because I do believe that ultimately the fates of boys and girls are intertwined, and I believe that what I'm writing about is really a more involved argument, that we have to step beyond the gender politics of 1973 and look really at what's happening to our kids. If we are creating an educational system that is bifurcated, where girls tend to be more educated and boys tend to be less educated, which is certainly what's happening in many demographics, then we need to address that or begin to talk about it.

It could be fine. I mean, I got an interesting e-mail from a woman. She said, "You know, men have been on top for thousands of years, and now women are on top for a nanosecond, and you're calling it a crisis? How unfair is that?" And I understand what she's saying. It could be okay. But I think we need to address head on what's actually happening, look at it squarely and see if that's a decision we want to make in our schools and in our communities.
So I want to give you a sense of what I found. I spent 18 months with the question of: Why is this happening? And I want to give you a sense of the kind of information that's in the book. The book is meant to be a very, very useful document. If you see this issue in schools, in your classrooms, then this book is a collection of some of the best data that I could find, because I am, as I said, not an educator and I'm certainly not a parenting icon, as my sons will tell you. But I am a good investigator, and so it is some of the very best information, so that you can start to have a constructive conversation in your school communities about how to go about changing this.

Let me tell you a little bit about what I found, and I'll give you a sense of how I approached some of these issues. Of the people who are at co-ed schools or connected to co-ed schools, how many are connected to little kids, as well?

Let me talk a little bit about the issues that affect little boys in lower-school communities. You have this astonishing number of boys who are expelled from preschool, and you also have a very high number of boys who are retained compared to girls. So I asked myself, what could be happening? What could be happening in those years?

Let's take preschool. What could be happening in those preschool years? The first thing I asked myself is: What did preschool used to be like? And the answer is: There was no preschool. Preschools are the new experiment, especially at the levels at which kids attend preschool now. It's a new experiment for our country. So while we've always had some form of preschool, this very broad, almost universal, preschool in many communities is something quite new. So you can't really look back historically to say what's changed. But if you look back even 15 years, you can see that preschool and

kindergarten and first grade have changed very, very dramatically.

So, of course, my next question is: Why has it changed? And in order to really understand it, I had to go back to the 1990s, which were the decade of the brain, okay? So what happened in the 1990s, taking a little bit of a journey, in the 1990s, we started to become very familiar with a technology called an FMRI, which gave us a view of the functional brain. For the first time, white-coated scientists confirmed what kindergarten teachers had been saying all along, which is that children, little children, can learn a lot more than you think. In popular culture, we thought of little children as sort of intellectually dormant and socially developing and physically developing, but intellectually a little on the quiet side. But suddenly we had these FMRIs, and what we saw is that, in fact, very young children were burning huge amounts of glucose, and so we saw that they were learning. We could actually see it. It was very exciting. And there's a huge response to this. Organizations like the Zero to Three Movement, which Rob Reiner was the head of -- and he was connected with the White House. They launched the Zero to Three Early Education Seminars at the White House. Because we saw that children were learning much earlier, the big push was then to bring enrichment to children much earlier. That was the message, that we can teach children earlier than we thought.

Now, this message of early academics was focused really on very poor children, the children who are put in front of a television day after day, whose parents don't really speak a lot of words to them. Okay? But it was heard by middle class parents who began pressuring schools to bring more early academics to their children, earlier and earlier. And when you bring scientific discoveries to a popular audience, as I saw time and again with Newsweek, it's often a very blunt message, and it's often a message that morphs over time. So we had this message that children can actually learn much earlier than we thought, that a window opens up much earlier, okay? But over time, the message morphed to parents that a window does open earlier, but then it shuts.

So through the '90s, really picking up speed in the last, I would say, four to six years, parents had this idea that there's a window of learning that opens and then it shuts and that you must bring your children to many, many activities, many, many kinds of activities, if you ever hope that they'll achieve some sort of proficiency as adults.

Now, as educators, you know that that's not right. You know that in terms of human development, we learn well into our eighth and ninth decade. If we're lucky to live that long, we continue to learn. There are a few exceptions. Language seems to be one that if you don't become get introduced to a language by a certain age, you may never speak it as fluently as people who were introduced to the language earlier. But that may be one of the primary exceptions.

We know that this emphasis, this frenetic push for early academics, is, in fact, based on misunderstanding the message that came out in the 1990s. But what you see in preschools and in kindergarten is that most programs have pushed very strongly into the highly, highly academic realm. So teachers tell me what used to happen at the end of first grade or the beginning of second grade now happens routinely in kindergarten. And what's happened in many schools is that they have scaled down what fourth-grade learning looks like into kindergarten classes. So there's a lot of seat work and a lot of holding a pencil.

And what educators know is that's actually not that appropriate, but the parents want it, because the parents say, "Hey, what am I paying all this money for? They're just playing all day?" Right? I'm sure you have heard that, those connected to lower schools.

Now, the truth is, that's the way small children learn. So what does this have to do with boys? I'll tell you what it has to do with boys. For many kids, that sort of learning is inappropriate. That scaled-down academic learning is inappropriate. But many, many of them tend to be boys. Why is that? Well, it turns out, when you look at the research, children need different levels of activity. There are people who actually study how much movement children require at different times of their lives. Boys and girls all need to move around. We all need to move around in order to learn. We need to balance our physical movement with long periods of focus. We know that as adults.

But when you look at people who study movement and children, what they tell you is that boys and girls both move around about the same, boys a little more, okay, but the outliers, the ones who move around the most, are invariably boys. So when you create programs that are very, very academic, that are very focused on seat work, you disenfranchise a large group of kids, and they're disproportionately boys. And what happens in school -- and your lower-school teachers will confirm this -- is that children who get the most negative attention throughout the school day tend to be little boys. And when you go into classrooms you can see this. It's, "Sit down, Stephen. Stop fooling around, Jules. Don't bother your seat mate, Peter." Boys are in the crosshairs very early on, and it creates a very negative environment for them in their earliest learning experiences.

Now, as educators, I think that those preschool issues can be addressed in a couple of ways. One of them is by education, because it turns out that all those FMRIs and that early learning stuff that was foisted on us in the 1990s -- parents really believe it. We sign our children up. I took my son to Mommy and Me Mandarin -- you think I'm immune to all this? -- because I believed that it was the right thing to do for my son, for my children. That's what I was told, and I wanted to do the best, I wanted to give them every opportunity. That's who I am. Education is important to me.

So you have these parents for whom education is a top priority, but they have the wrong information, because it turns out that window doesn't open and then shut. That window opens and stays open.

It also turns out that the basis upon which we kicked off this whole Zero to Three movement was wrong. What we were looking at, it turns out later, were FMRIs that showed the brain's alive with glucose. And it turns out what we figured out in about 2004 is that's actually inefficient learning. Yes, they're learning more, but they're not at a peak of learning at age 4. Actually a brain that's in the flow, that's learning very efficiently, hardly burns any glucose at all. So while they are learning earlier, it's not the be-all-and-the-end-all.

But parents don't understand this, and so they'll ask you for things like work sheets, even though the teachers who are actually in those classrooms know that pedagogically, giving kids work sheets at age 5, and for certain active kids, largely boys, it's going to be a disastrous move. They're in a tight spot and you're in a tight spot, too, and I think you can address it with better education.

Now, I think that you're uniquely positioned to do this kind of education, because I think that you serve populations that tend to be more affluent, and what I observe is that as affluent parents go, so goes the nation. So if you can have these discussions with your parent body, if you can start to counter some of those arguments about "Why are they just playing all day" with real research and real discussions about what early learning looks like, I think that you could actually do a lot to try and lower the suspension, expulsion, retention levels in those early years. You can actually change the experience of little boys in classrooms without hurting our girls, without hurting the kids who are doing fine, by having discussions with parents, with your learning community.

Now, I'm going to talk about one more crossroads that happens early on, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about another crossroads that happens later, for those of you who are connected to lower schools. So there's a big issue, when you look at boys and girls and education, in every demographic around reading and writing. So everywhere you look, it seems that boys are far behind in reading and writing. And it used to be that boys were better in math and science and girls were better in reading and writing, and that reversed itself. Girls caught up in the early 1990s, so now, it seems that girls are almost at parity in math, except for computer science and physics, and that boys have remained far behind in reading and actually fallen backwards in writing. So they have actually done worse in the last 15 years than they used to. And yet we don't have a whole lot of discussion about the reading and writing gap for boys. And there are people who will say, "Well, this is really only important for poor boys who might drop out, and that's not really your population. Your children, by and large, are going to be going matriculating to college."

But even in the most affluent school districts, when you look at the reading and writing scores, what you see is a big gap between boys and girls. So why is this happening? We do know that boys come into school, kindergarten, speaking fewer words and having been read to less and been to the library story hour less than girls. I don't know whether that's because the parents are gender-norming or whether that's a sensitive response

to what the kids seem to want to do. The data is not clear on that, and I don't really know.

We do know that boys come in speaking fewer words and having had fewer experiences of early literature. But from the first day of kindergarten, that gap begins to grow until, by twelfth grade, they're about a year and a half behind most girls in reading, and even more in writing.

So why would that be? What's creating that gap? Well, it turns out that there's a very important transition in about second grade where children go from learning to read to reading to learn. So they make their own book selections, and in many, many schools, which are lower schools which are predominantly female, the books that are surrounding children are books that teachers want to talk about and teach through. And they tend to be books that teachers are comfortable with.

But when you talk to little boys, those don't tend to be the books that they like. They tend to like books that are funny or irreverent or have a lot of plot or involve men in leotards or have some swashbuckling. Captain Underpants comes up over and over. A book that I don't think a single woman has ever read called the Guinness Book of World Records seems to come up a lot. I consider it more of a compendium than a book, but that's just me. But when you talk to little boys, those are the books that they like. And yet, those books are rarely represented in the classroom.

And so what you get is reluctant readers, and many, many of them are boys. And by eight and nine years old, when you ask reluctant readers, "Why don't you like reading?" they say, "Reading is girly," which is a terrible, self-defeating attitude because we know that reading is the master virtue in school; that in order to do well in school, you must read, and you must read

competently, and you must build your stamina year after year in order to eventually progress and succeed.

So there's very little motivation on the parts of teachers to actually change that, because by and large, the teachers that I have talked to are not aware of it. They teach the books that they like to read. I did this. I saved my copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods, through all my moves, through my tumultuous 20s, and I saved my copy, I had read it over and over, I dog-eared it when I was a little kid. I gave it to my son tremulously and I said, "Here. Read this. You'll love it. I loved this when I was a girl."

And I remember him looking through it and going, "Yeah? What happens in it?"

And I said, "Well, Ma and Pa live in the woods, and they shoot the bear, and winter comes."

And I remember my son saying, "Yeah. Not my thing," and handing it back to me. And I understand that it feels like a rejection of high culture, like, "You'd rather read Captain Underpants than Laura Ingalls Wilder?" Like what's up with that? And I could feel myself sort of straightening up and being, "Oh, boys."

But, in fact, reading is important, and whatever you read is going to build stamina. Now, we don't want all the girls reading Middlemarch and the boys reading The Gas We Pass; right? We understand that we can't have a bifurcated system; right? That we can't have the boys reading their dumb thing and the girls reading their high-brow stuff. But what we do need to do is bring it in the middle somewhere.

To build readers, we have to have all children read, and the attitude that reading is girly is devastating. And not to address that I think is to set boys up for school failure.
Now, I'm going to talk quickly about one other thing, and that is organization. Because I know for people who are connected to middle schools and upper schools, this is an area where boys really struggle. And I want to talk to you a little bit about what I have seen in schools to address that. There's this arms race going on about organization. I have been in schools where freshmen get organization classes in order to keep themselves organized for high school. I have been in schools where sixth graders get organization classes to keep themselves organized for middle school and prepare them for high school. I have been in fourth grades where children get binder reminders and all kinds of Martha Stewart kinds of prompts to keep them organized, color-coded, you know, size-ordered. It's crazy.

When you ask the fourth graders' organization person, "Why are you doing this?" they say, "Well, you have got to get them ready for middle school."

Or when you ask the middle school people, "Why are you doing this?" they say, "We have to get them ready for high school."

Okay. Stop the madness. Stop the madness. Organization turns out to be, in many kids, a developing skill and for many boys a skill that doesn't develop until they're into high school. Everyone needs to be organized. The days of being an auto executive and having a couple of secretaries is done as we know it. So we all need to be organized. Every man has to get his socks in the laundry. Those are societal ideas I think we can all sign on to. But it doesn't have to happen in fourth grade. And what happens is, schools set up programs where organization becomes the master virtue and you can't really succeed in middle school unless you are organized.

When you go to talk to people who study organization, who look at clinically disorganized kids who have diagnoses and stuff -- I went to the New York University Child Study Center, and I asked them -- they work with kids who are all over the place. And I said to them, "Talk to me about: Are boys and girls equally organized, or do boys tend to be" -- my observation was boys tend to be less organized. And they laughed at me. They were like, "It's such a stupid question. Like why are you even asking that? Of course boys are less organized."

Now, what happens is, in many middle schools we tie those skills together so that you can't succeed in middle school unless you are organized, and organization turns out to be a developing skill. So what boys observe is a game that they can't win because they don't have developmentally what it takes to win at this game. And so you know what? They don't want to play, and they disengage in great numbers. And you see this in your middle schools, that boys will step back and say, "I don't want to do this," because they understand that organization, something that's not quite there for them yet, is crucial.

So I just want to talk a little bit about what I have seen at one particular school and then I'll finish. There was a school in Virginia and they had a very high attrition rate, 17 percent, largely boys. And they looked at this issue of organization and what they decided to do was untangle organization from academic success, to separate them so you actually got a grade in science for thinking like a scientist, or a grade in history for thinking like an historian, and you also got an organization grade. And it worked very, very well. And they were able to stop the attrition of boys. They did a few other things, too, and they were able to increase the level of engagement among those schoolboys because this organization wasn't the master virtue. And I was very encouraged by that. That's a very intelligent group of people, a very powered group of teachers and administrators, and they were able to make a change really over a summer that changed the fortunes and fate of their school, certainly the fate for those boys who were attending school.

I'm out of time so I'm going to stop here, and listen to JoAnn, whom I'm dying to hear. And then I guess we'll take questions.

MR. GALBRAITH: Thank you, Peg, very much. Both of the speakers have their books here available in case you'd like to have them, and will probably even sign them for you.