On Top of the News
Plastic Women vs. Cardboard Men
USA Today| 10/7/12

Behind the Headline
Gender Gap
Education Next | Spring 2010

Popular books trumpet “the end of men” and the rise of female breadwinners. These books suggest that “vast, immutable economic upheavals are the sole causes of these setbacks for men.” In today’s USA Today, Richard Whitmire argues that there may be a different trigger: new education practices that emphasize higher literacy skills in the early grades.  He continues

Educators somehow overlooked the fact that boys pick up literacy skills later than girls. When boys get slammed with early academic demands they can’t handle, they tune out. They assume school is for girls, and they move on to more interesting activities, such as video games.

Richard Whitmire makes his case at greater length in Gender Gap: Are Boys Being Shortchanged by K-12 Schooling? published in the Spring 2010 issue of Ed Next.

-Education Next