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McCallie School to create National Center for the Development of Boys
Boys being boys
* Boys score as well as or better than girls on standardized tests, but boys receive up 70 percent of the Ds and Fs given to all students. * Three out of four learning-disabled students are boys. * Boys create 90 percent of classroom discipline problems. * Eighty percent of all high school dropouts are boys. * In the Boston Public Schools' graduating class of 2007, there were 191 black girls for every 100 black boys going on to attend a four-year college or university. Among Hispanics, the ratio was 175 girls for every 100 boys, and among whites, the ratio was 153 girls for every 100. Sources: Christina Hoff Sommers, "The Boys at the Back," a 2013 opinion piece in the New York Times. Michael Gurian, "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and in Life."
McCallie School, a 110-year-old, all-boys college prep school here, is establishing a research institute for boys' learning.
The National Center for the Development of Boys will be aimed at finding out what kind of teaching and discipline works and doesn't work for boys. It is an effort to turn around trends of the past few decades that show boys with lower grade-point averages, higher drop-out rates, more discipline problems and fewer advanced college degrees.
"Across the board, boys are having a tougher time," McCallie Headmaster Lee Burns told the Times Free Press last week. "That's a great thing that girls are doing well, but in the last couple of decades, it's the boys who have trended down in some pretty significant ways."
There are plenty of education experts who agree that more research and outside-the-box effort is needed to help boys in today's classrooms. Burns says McCallie already has raised nearly $1 million in seed money and will begin a fundraiser sometime in the future.
The headmaster says single-sex classrooms are only one of the tools educators already try. Similarly, some schools also already experiment with tailored reading assignments geared to boys -- science fiction, fantasy, sports, military adventures.
But more is needed, he said. Boys are high-energy and more geared to visual, spatial and hands-on learning.
"It seems to me that a lot of our classrooms are not well-designed for boys. A lot of time, school is, 'Sit quietly, be still and color inside the lines.' That doesn't resonate well with most boys," he said.
The center will share its research, programs, resources, conferences and ideas with the broader public, according to a McCallie news release, and "will aim to do so for free or very little cost to the public."
"We want this center to be a resource to all different types of schools," Burns said.
That will be the real key. For this to be a successful and truly valuable exercise, this research and McCallie's living laboratory cannot be a one-size-fits-all-upper-and-middle-class-boys undertaking.
Private schools like McCallie, Baylor, Girls Preparatory School and others already comprise more than 20 percent of local students, sapping our public school classrooms of students who have plenty of confidence and high potential. At the same time, that also saps from public schools the involved parents who have resources to contribute to schools' special needs.
This built-in inequity makes it imperative any McCallie research effort become -- in effect -- a communitywide laboratory that will help schools without advantages.
And frankly, as high-minded and altruistic as McCallie's plan seems to be, asking that kind of research in a setting where things are worlds different is a tall order.
We commend the effort. And we truly hope it works.