Schools are failing our boys — but Trump, Dems can bridge the gap

Will President-elect Trump champion economic policies that help the white, working class families that elected him? Let’s hope so — sure beats ginning up more tax breaks for the country club set.

Conservative think tankers are full of ideas about how to pursue that goal. Among those speculated about: easier occupational licensing, paid maternity leave, lower payroll taxes and more apprenticeships. All ideas worth considering.

But there’s one policy action that I have yet to see broached, a reform that many Democrats might step up to support: Make schools work for working class white males.

{mosads}Not until I started researching my book, “Why Boys Fail,” did I realize that rural schools aren’t coming up short with all students — just the boys. Drop into a community college that serves rural students and you’ll find classrooms chock full of women. It’s their brothers who are left floundering.

Actually, the same is true in the cities, where African-American women are proving themselves to be quite capable of both getting into college and graduating within six years. Once again, it’s their brothers who come up short.

A conspiracy against boys masterminded by the mostly female teaching staffs? Not really. What I found in my research was that a key component of the national education reform movement — pushing reading and writing skills into the very early grades — ended up backfiring, at least for boys.

I think of it as a giant “oops.”

Here’s what happened. Governors insisting on raising the college readiness of all students chose to push literacy skills downward by about two grades, meaning kindergartners today deal with decoding/reading/writing demands that a couple of decades weren’t seen until second grade.

It was a reasonable action to take, and it worked really well with the girls. But not so much with boys. You don’t have to be a neuropsychologist (Just plain parents are well aware) to know that boys develop literacy skills later in life.

Boys just aren’t hard wired for early verbal challenges, explain reading experts such as William Brozo, a professor of literacy at the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University, and also the co-author of “Bright Beginnings for Boys.”

With the right teaching techniques, boys can catch up to girls in verbal skills between the fourth and sixth grades, said Brozo, but those techniques were never incorporated into the reforms.

After the reform changes, boys saw that mostly girls were succeeding in the early grades. They logically concluded that school was for girls and did what boys do best: zoned out, often with video games. Making everything worse were the ramped up reading and writing demands in other subjects, such as more word problems in math.

Girls, who were always better at school than boys, suddenly got a whole lot better.

Just look at colleges today, which struggle to maintain reasonable gender gaps on their campuses (57 percent women overall). Colleges threatened with gender imbalances of over 60 percent female often get caught admitting freshmen males far less capable than the women.

Do these school gender gaps entirely explain the phenomenon of the thousands of men who have given up on the workplace?

Of course not. Coal mines shutting down, manufacturing jobs moving overseas, robots taking human jobs — none of those huge players has anything to do with schools failing boys.

But that doesn’t make the schooling factor a minor player. By failing boys, our daughters are now far more likely to demonstrate nimbleness in adjusting to a fast changing jobs marketplace. And that’s a big deal.

So what can Trump and his new education secretary, Betsy DeVos, do about it? For starters, they could use their bully pulpits to make it clear that schools aren’t doing right by boys.

The message won’t be well received.

Superintendents don’t like meddling from above, teachers unions don’t like any challenges to their poverty-explains-all explanation for low performance, and powerful advocacy groups such as the American Association for University Women will fight any policy change that takes the focus off girls, the group they insist remains the most disadvantaged.

But think about it. Aren’t these groups Trump may be just itching to take on? Prime Twitter targets.

Once you have the full attention of those three groups, the actual in-school policy changes are pretty simple. For the book research, I followed three boys through three separate schools — all schools where boys were doing as well as girls, which is not the norm.

It didn’t take a full year of observations to determine the reason for the boys’ successes. At each school, reading and writing skills were completely infused with the curriculum, even in math and science classes. And boys were never allowed to fall behind in reading, even if that meant intensive tutoring.

There are multiple strategies that can work with boys. It’s just a matter of trying.

Now here’s the true beauty of deciding to focus on this one reform. Because urban boys face roughly the same challenge (a bit more severe due to gangs and fatherless families) I’m guessing you could get a lot of Democrats willing to step up and join you.

It’s a way to both keeping your promise to improve the lives of working class whites, all while joining with Democrats in a common cause. A true win-win.

Richard Whitmire is a Kauffman Foundation senior fellow and the author of several education books, including “Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Education System That’s Leaving Them Behind.”

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.