Michelle Rhee launches "Students First" Advocacy Group in U.S. Congrats!

From The Epoch Times website, December 15, 2010

Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor whose work was featured in the nationwide educational system documentary Waiting for Superman, has announced the establishment of “Students First: A movement to transform public education.”

Students First is an advocacy group with the mission of mobilizing teachers, parents, students, and administrators—and any other stakeholders in children’s education—to change educational policy.
Illustrating the need for change, the organization’s website (studentsfirst.org) cites an uncomfortable statistic: more than 67 percent of fourth grade students scored “below proficient” on a national reading test.
Given the failure of American schools to improve, Students First aims to change the system such that the needs of students come before “special interests or wasteful bureaucracies,” according to its website. Hence the name, Students First.
Students First has set forth the considerable goal of recruiting one million members and raising $1 billion.
The movement has four key policy points, as outlined on its website: (1) excellent teachers are the most important aspect of a child’s education, (2) everyone should be able to go to a great school, (3) government funding should go to what works, rather than bureaucracy, and (4) parents, families, and the entire community must be engaged in the effort to improve the educational system.
Rhee, who had run into conflict with teachers’ unions during her tenure in D.C., announced the organization on The Oprah Winfrey Show yesterday, along with a self-authored Newsweek cover story that explains Students First.
Part of the conflict with teachers’ unions stems from Rhee’s view is that the “purpose of the teachers’ union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members. And they’re doing a great job of that,” she says in her Newsweek article.
“Go to any public-school-board meeting in the country and you’ll rarely hear the words ‘children,’ ‘students,’ or ‘kids’ uttered," she wrote. "Instead, the focus remains on what jobs, contracts, and departments are getting which cuts, additions, or changes. The rationale for the decisions mostly rests on which grown-ups will be affected, instead of what will benefit or harm children.”
Rhee, as D.C. schools chancellor, shut down poorly performing schools and cut half of the jobs from the area’s central administration. But she says in the Newsweek article that two years later, D.C. schools were leading the country in test scores improvement for fourth and eighth graders.

Listen to Students, a great way to educate boys too!

By Sam Dillon, New York Times, December 10, 2010
How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers?

Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad.
Teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains on standardized test scores, according to a progress report on the research.
Financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the two-year project involves scores of social scientists and some 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa; Memphis; New York; and Pittsburgh.
The research is part of the $335 million Gates Foundation effort to overhaul the personnel systems in those districts.
Statisticians began the effort last year by ranking all the teachers using a statistical method known as value-added modeling, which calculates how much each teacher has helped students learn based on changes in test scores from year to year.
Now researchers are looking for correlations between the value-added rankings and other measures of teacher effectiveness.
Research centering on surveys of students’ perceptions has produced some clear early results.
Thousands of students have filled out confidential questionnaires about the learning environment that their teachers create. After comparing the students’ ratings with teachers’ value-added scores, researchers have concluded that there is quite a bit of agreement.
Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.
The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and, “My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”
The questionnaires were developed by Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard researcher who has been refining student surveys for more than a decade.
Few of the nation’s 15,000 public school districts systematically question students about their classroom experiences, in contrast to American colleges, many of which collect annual student evaluations to improve instruction, Dr. Ferguson said.
“Kids know effective teaching when they experience it,” he said.
“As a nation, we’ve wasted what students know about their own classroom experiences instead of using that knowledge to inform school reform efforts.”
Until recently, teacher evaluations were little more than a formality in most school systems, with the vast majority of instructors getting top ratings, often based on a principal’s superficial impressions.
But now some 20 states are overhauling their evaluation systems, and many policymakers involved in those efforts have been asking the Gates Foundation for suggestions on what measures of teacher effectiveness to use, said Vicki L. Phillips, a director of education at the foundation.
One notable early finding, Ms. Phillips said, is that teachers who incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics.
Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make smaller gains on those exams than other teachers.
“Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.”

#1 Seeds of a relationship-building curriculum for males

A friend made an insightful observation recently, about the need for a curriculum for elementary and secondary students, especially boys, in "building and sustaining relationships."
The observation accompanied another from the same source, that another blank spot in the curriculum in most students' learning is personal financial management.
The friend also noted that these missing pieces in the school curriculum show up in damages to many lives in later years, and most of those damages could be prevented, if the school system were to make it their priority to address these two missing learning curves.
For our purposes, let's focus for a few moments on the "building and sustaining relationships" issue, for boys.
Young boys, even newborns, need to have much more holding, hugging, eye contact and physical nurture than most mothers are currently giving them. (See Michael Gurian's The Wonder of Boys for more.) It is a fact that mothers make more frequent and longer eye contact with their daughters than they do with their new sons. It is also a fact that most mothers do not consider their approach to have any negative impact on their sons and, unfortunately, they are wrong.
When baby boys hurt, they will cry, and their crying is not a sign of danger, as some parents consider it to be. "Don't cry,"  "Be a big boy," or even, "Be a man!"...these are words uttered by both mothers and fathers, far too soon, in a little boy's life. Why should he not cry, if he hurts? It is only natural. And we adults have to get over our fear that our little "guy" is going to be a wimp, or like a little girl, or worst of all, perhaps gay.
So holding and breast-feeding as long as the little boy needs and wants to be fed in this manner are both good places to start, in any relationship-building initiative. They both set a tone, with parents, that will change the trajectory of the parents' attitudes for the next two decades, not to mention the little boy's attitudes and expectations to "relating".
Next, let's make eye contact with our new sons...and lots of it. Let's make faces at and with, and in response to his faces, and his sounds. Let's imitate his new sounds, as a way of reinforcing his new discoveries every day. It is fun, and it will also pay significant dividends in language deveopment. And these processes of visual contact, and auditory stimulation are essential for a little boy to grow up knowing both himself and his immediate environment. And he needs these stimuli as much, if not more than, his little sister.

In the post-nursey stage of the little boy's life, he will begin interacting with other children, of both genders, in a play situation, in a day care or day nursery. His care-givers will, if one can predict, be imitators of the attitudes and approaches of the mothers, urging him to restrict his crying, and his "wimp" or victim attitudes to physical or emotional hurt. And this stage could do we some debunking of the "macho male myth" that strides through our dining rooms, our family rooms, our playgrounds, and even our church schools, and especially our hockey teams, at the earliest of age. They will default the boys in their care with too little eye contact, with too little encouragement of language development, especially if that language development comes in a forte voice, that disturbs the pastoral atmosphere of most daycares and day nurseries.
Encouraging care givers to provide activities with some 'safe' risk-taking, some 'safe' yet competitive play, some opportunity to negotiate when and with whom to use the toys, games and spaces available, and lots of feedback time, with real active listening at the earliest stages, even if the language development is less than desireable...these are all routes to enhanced interaction between the boys and their care givers, and among the boys themselves.
Exchanging views, feelings, observations....these are all valuable opportunities, and skills that boys will need for the rest of their lives, even if their fathers exhibit a deficit in these areas. One way to encourage this kind of inter-activity would be to recruit male care givers for day care centres and for day nurseries. In fact, if I were a parent of a young boy, I would search for a centre that guaranteed male professionals would be present on a daily basis, as a constant in the setting. I would also expect male role models to supervise various "field trips" outside the centre, so that boys are given opportunities to both recommend new trips and then are expected to take those trips under male supervision as early as possible.
In the school setting itself, there is a tragic dearth of male teachers in the elementary panel, at least in Canada, in most provinces, and also in the administration offices of elementary schools. Consequenlty, male role models are simply not available, as mentors for male interactions. It is long past time for each school board in the country to undertake an effective recruitment program to attract male teachers to the elementary schools.
And, for in class activities, males conversant with their own emotions and their own values and their own would be required to provide dialogue setting about stories that engage boys in reading, in subject areas that generate emotional and intellectual responses that enhance the male student's engagement with both the instructors and the stories themselves.
With respect to learning goals, each boy would be required to prepare a time line for his family's history, from his earliest memories, to the present, starting probably in grade five or six. A time line would offer opportunities to mark out positive events and time to tell the story of those moments, to at least one classmate, and perhaps to the whole group...Is this activitiy better conducted in an all male group? Probably, but this is one question needing some practical research, to establish both the appropriate class culture and the time allotments for such an activity.
Paralleling memories of good times, yet beginning with sad events, and not traumatic ones, boys could be encouraged to share some of these memories with a classmate. In dialogue, each boy learns to listen more fully, even if the conversations themselves occur in an informal setting like a scavenger hunt where the boys are paired, and the items being searched trigger memories and stories.
Throughout, the skill of asking appropriate questions, not as interviewer, but simply as empathic friend, is modelled, demonstrated, taped, reviewed, and then practiced, so that each person learns the skill of "telling his own story" and the skill of "listening actively to the story of his buddy."
It is the sharing of our personal stories that helps everyone, male and female students alike, to grow some connections to others. And all opportunities to do this, not only in history and literature classes, but also in a class (perhaps under the curricular label of Health and Social Activities).
Each student could be given a task such as inviting a classmate (male) to lunch or dinner, and then accompany the guest to the event, learning about such civilities as the difference between being a guest and a host, and the attitudes and behaviours that cluster around each role. This kind of assignment has really no limits, since it might involve a local sports event, a local charity event, a local walk in a park or a local game of something as simple as playing catch....with adequate preparation in rehearsal, role-playing, expectations of both self and other, interviews with others about how similar invitations have transpired both positively and negatively (preferably in a humourous vein)...and then "the event" and a reporting back to the group about the successes and the changes that might seem appropriate for the next time.
In grades five, six and seven, these skills of listening, questioning, inviting, hosting, guesting, and the attendant preparation (different for each with common elements and common goals, including the feedback from both parties) could be conducted at least once each semester, with the length and the preparations and the expectations increasing in complexity and depth each time. No female peer yet!
And then, in grade seven, this could be a time to introduce the opposite gender.....to be continued.

New website for Literary Teens!

By Julie Bosman, New York Times, December 5, 2010

Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site.
The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it “the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.”
Figment is an attempt to import that idea to the United States and expand on it. Mr. Lewis, who was out of a job after Portfolio, the Condé Nast magazine, was shuttered last year, teamed up with Ms. Goodyear, and the two worked with schools, libraries and literary organizations across the country to recruit several hundred teenagers who were willing to participate in a prototype, which went online in a test version in June.
Here is one of the best ideas to have emerged about linking teens to their literary talents, aspirations and their literary peers from across the globe.
We at The Canadian Journal of Male Education will be watching and reading the writings of teens from across the world on this very imaginative and useful ne website.

Attitudes to School differ between Male Graduates and Male Drop-outs

From Statistics Canada, Education, Training and Learning Section
The concept of school engagement takes into consideration the way in which young people participate and identify with school. The 1999 Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) asked youth aged 18 to 20 a number of questions about various aspects of their engagement with school.
Females were more likely than males to show attitudes and behaviours indicative of greater academic engagement in school (see Table 1).2 They were more likely to report getting along with teachers, finishing their homework on time and being interested in what they were learning in class. They were less likely than males to think that school was a waste of time.
Generally, dropouts revealed attitudes and behaviours indicative of less academic engagement in school compared to high school graduates. Male dropouts, in particular, appear to have been less engaged in school. They were least likely to have spent a lot of time completing their homework, and if it was completed, they were less likely to have completed it on time.
A larger share of school graduates (89%) than dropouts (60%) remarked that they got along well with their teachers most or all of the time. Again, male dropouts were less likely to be positive in their assessment.
Overall, male dropouts, in particular, appear to have been less engaged and more dissatisfied with their academic experience. They were clearly less likely to be “interested in what [they were] learning in class” and more likely to believe that “many things [they were] learning in class were useless.”
For young men and young women assessing their own skills, clear gender differences are apparent. Higher proportions of young women than young men judged their skills to be very good/excellent in reading and writing and to a somewhat lesser extent, in communication skills. In contrast, larger proportions of young men rated their problem-solving, math and computer skills as being stronger than young women did.
Attitudes to school differ between men who graduate and men who drop out
The concept of school engagement takes into consideration the way in which young people participate and identify with school. The 1999 Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) asked youth aged 18 to 20 a number of questions about various aspects of their engagement with school.
Females were more likely than males to show attitudes and behaviours indicative of greater academic engagement in school. They were more likely to report getting along with teachers, finishing their homework on time and being interested in what they were learning in class. They were less likely than males to think that school was a waste of time.
Generally, dropouts revealed attitudes and behaviours indicative of less academic engagement in school compared to high school graduates. Male dropouts, in particular, appear to have been less engaged in school. They were least likely to have spent a lot of time completing their homework, and if it was completed, they were less likely to have completed it on time.
A larger share of school graduates (89%) than dropouts (60%) remarked that they got along well with their teachers most or all of the time. Again, male dropouts were less likely to be positive in their assessment.
Overall, male dropouts, in particular, appear to have been less engaged and more dissatisfied with their academic experience. They were clearly less likely to be “interested in what [they were] learning in class” and more likely to believe that “many things [they were] learning in class were useless.”
For young men and young women assessing their own skills, clear gender differences are apparent. Higher proportions of young women than young men judged their skills to be very good/excellent in reading and writing and to a somewhat lesser extent, in communication skills. In contrast, larger proportions of young men rated their problem-solving, math and computer skills as being stronger than young women did.
Table 1: High school engagement indicators (percent) Graduates Dropouts
Let's look at a list of comparisons between male who gaduated and male who dropped out of high school:
% most of the time
  all of the time                         
                                                 Male Grads    Male  Drop-outs
                                                    
I got along well with teachers               85                 53.4
I did as little as possible
just want to get by                               20.8              39.6
I paid attention to teachers                   76.8              54.8
I was not interested in
what Iwas learning                               54.8              38.3
I felt like an outsider          
or left out of things at school                   3.7              13.5
I completed homework on time             74                 39.7

% Agree or Strongly Agree
I thought things learned
in class were useless                             40.4               59.1
I was treated with
as much respect as others                     91.5               76.5
I had friends at school I
could talk to about personal
things                                                   93.4                83                                  
I like to participate in
clubs, drama, sports
at school                                              61.8                41.4
School was often a
waste of time                                       16.6                 39.8
People at school were
interested in what I had to say              89.9                 80.3
% 3 hours or fewer
How many hours each week
on homework outside of
class during free time                           45.9                 68.1
Source: At a Crossroads: First Results for the 18 to 20-Year-old Cohort of the Youth in Transition Survey. Catalogue number 81-591-XIE.

Conclusion
On a number of counts, the evidence suggests that more young men than women are experiencing difficulties with school. Young men, particularly male dropouts, appear to be less engaged in school and they continue to dropout of high school before completing the requirements for graduation at a higher rate than girls. Young men rated their problem-solving, math and computer skills as stronger than young women, but their assessments of reading and writing were weaker than those of women. This is consistent with the results of standardized tests that show higher literacy scores for girls compared to boys. Finally, girls are more likely than boys to go on to post-secondary education; in all but a handful of fields, women outnumber men in university enrolment; and university graduation rates are higher for women than for men.

School Drop-out Rates, (Canada) higher for males than females

From Statistics Canada, Education, Training and learning section
The majority of drop-outs are young men. Of the 212,000 drop-outs in Canada in 2004-2005, 135,000 were men (Figure 3). The rates of dropping out among young men was 12.2% in 2004-2005, compared with 7.2% for young women. For both men and women, the drop-out rate has fallen from 1990-1991, when they were 19.2% and 14.0%, respectively.


 Thousand of High school drop-outs(1), by gender, Canada, 1990-1991 to 2004-2005

1 Defined as 20-24-year-olds without a high school diploma and not in school.

The over-representation of males among drop-outs is not new. However, the share of school leavers who are male has increased in recent years. In 1990-1991, a sizable majority of drop-outs were men (58.3%), but by 2004-2005, that proportion had increased to 63.7%. This was not because more men were dropping out – in fact, there has been a decrease in the number of male drop-outs – but rather because the decrease in the rate of dropping out has been larger for young women.
The finding that there are more male than female drop-outs holds across provinces. This tendency is strongest in Quebec, where in 2004-2005 seven in ten drop-outs were young men.
As noted in the October 2004 issue of Education Matters,2 the reasons behind the decision to drop out of high school reported by 20-year-olds in the Youth in Transition Survey differed somewhat between males and females. Young men were less likely to be engaged in school than young women and were more likely to report wanting to work/earn money as a reason for dropping out of high school. In contrast, teenage pregnancy plays a larger role in the decision to drop out of high school for young women. According to the Youth in Transition Survey, 15.9% of female drop-outs left school because they were pregnant or because they needed to tend to their child.3
School culture plays a major role in the "engagement" factor for all students; however, with the decreased  number of male teachers and administrators, particularly in secondary schools, the culture is naturally going to bend toward female interests, and female expectations and female activities and methods of accomplishing joint projects.

Boys and Reading...a long-term worthy struggle

By Kate Hammar, Globe and Mail, December 8, 2010
Measured against 65 other countries, Canada places fifth overall in reading, seventh in science and eighth in mathematics in the Organization for Co-operation and Economic Development’s education assessment released Tuesday.

Quebec emerged as a Canadian leader in math scores, while Albertans topped the science and reading tests.

Girls outperformed boys in reading tests in every country and in every Canadian province. That gap was greatest, close to 10 per cent of total scores, in PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador.
“It’s time to take a leap and look at what strengths in reading we can bring in particular to our boys,” said Denis Mildon, a literacy expert and education consultant.
Because they represent close to half the population, boys provide an excellent target for efforts aimed at improving Canada’s PISA scores.
The writer does not claim to be an expert in the field having no academic credentials specifically in reading education. However, as a very slow, almost laborious child reader, and later a teacher of English for twenty-five years, especially conscious of the attitudes of many males to "reading," I can make a few tentative observations:

• boys want and need to differentiate themselves from "girls" especially in adolescence
• boys find the discussion of human emotions a little "girlie" and therefore a little "untouchable" for them
• boys substitute their feelings, especially those of compassion and empathy, with bravado and often ironic "dissing"
• boys like to manipulate things and, when turning a story into a moving picture, become quite engaged in the legitimate learning activity
• boys naturally like stories that focus on the life experiences of other males, especially those with whom they can relate, and even admire
• boys do not generally engage in lengthy conversations about "thematic" subjects but can become animated when they feel a competitive sense, even if that competition is basically friendly and cordial
• boys are essentially curious, and while they present an exterior of strength and confidence, they are much less strong and confident, especially those who are over-committed to that mask of bravado
• questions like "what would you do in similar circumstances" have provoked much better conversations in my classroom than "will this relationship in the novel survive?"
• there is a "ham" inside virtually every male student, and tickling that ham goes a long way to establishing a relationship with words, ideas, stories and the male "reader/student/explorer" in the classroom
• finding the interior questions that a boy who is coccooning might ask would begin a process of engagement and "connection" between instructor and male student
• exploring the subtle differences between "withdrawal" from others as a strength and as a "running away" could help male students in their search for their own legitimate responses to life situations
• rather than "how-to" manuals devoid of any narrative story line, teachers might use the story lines from newspapers, magazines, movies and even music as entry points to reading...wherever there are humans speaking, musing, writing, debating or even arguing...there is human drama (duh) and male students do enjoy a good "competition" and will sometimes even take sides, and begin to "dubb" for their favourite...
• it is the engagement with the internal self, the interior thoughts and feelings, and the capacity to articulate those thoughts and feelings that is a legitimate goal of any meeting of male adolescents and their reflections in stories, movies, novels, plays and even poems...(The Rag and Bones Shop of the Heart is an excellent source of poems for male readers.)

Proposal: Ombudsman for each gender in secondary schools

It seems that public attention to an issue brings a variety of responses to that issue, from those most closely involved, from those whose job it is to reduce the public spotlight on the issue. The reasons for this kind of development are multiple; however, one of the driving forces, in today's political climate, is the motivation of what the PR pro's call "damage control."
With the Globe and Mail's bringing the question, "Are we failing boys?" into the public spotlight, and with the accompanying conferences and research work that are going on, including the occasional interview with education professors at various universities, who have the courage to speak truth to the public's "denial," there is likely to be a "bar-the-doors" and "circle-the-wagons" approach from the public education system.
While on the inside, there will be attempts to minimize the achievement gap, the drop-out gap, and the positive/negative attitude gap between male students and female students, there is likely to be a political response, more than there is a concerted, open, frank and even controversial (if that is needed) discussion of the implications of "lost opportunities" and failed expectations for male students.
More physical activity, and more technology and more "reading of how-to manuals," while a meagre beginning to address the different learning styles of male students, is like putting a band-aid on a tumour.
It may lower the superficial irritation, but it wont heal the disease.
And we have to be very careful when we use the "disease" model to address any social problem, especially one as delicate and sensitive and important as the learning enterprise.
In a society fixated on "size" of anything, including a "problem", especially are those responsible for the public perception of the size of the problem, there is a natural inclination to minimize the problem, from the perspective of the professional managing the problem.
If one student drops through the cracks of the learning system, that would not be considered a tragedy for the system, especially since we all know that the system is available to re-engage with that individual at a later date, if and when that individual might be more "receptive" and "ready" to learn. And the reasons for that student to "drop out" are  not necessarly the school system's responsibility to fix. So there is certainly room for debate among all interested observers about the causes of student ennui, disaffection, detachment and boredom, poor performance and failure. And, over the twelve plus years during which a child attends public education, prior to post-secondary institutions, there will be many teachers who will leave their 'mark' on that child.
However, we can likely agree that a school's individual culture, and a school system's collective culture are both instrumental in the attitudes, activities, relationships, achievements and "progress" of the students in those schools under its jurisdiction. And if that culture is addicted to its own political correctness, and its own public image, and the achievement of political "achievement" grades, like positive media coverage, and enhanced repuation with the provincial purse-string-attendees, and positive parental reputation from such sources as the school councils...then all extrinsic indications are pointing in the "right" direction.
And extrinsic indications are the "holy grail" for a society dedicated, as our's is, to public performance, to polishing the public mask, and to reducing whatever is the core of the enterprise to measureable indicators.
To achieve in school, a student learns very quickly that "pleasing" those in charge is the first step toward that achievement. When the parent hears from the teachers on parents' night, "Johnny is a delight to teach, interested, energized, imaginative and positive"....the parent is drunk with self-satisfaction.
And when the principal hears, "This teacher is in full compliance with all of the standards of the ministry and the board," from a supervising officer, in a formal report, then that principal is delighted with the teacher and the report.
And managing those formal and extrinsic pieces of information is an important part of the equation called the learning enterprise.
However, there is much more to the situation that speaks to the underbelly of the schools unwritten code of "attitude, and conduct"....and that concerns the perpetuation of a compliant system. And a compliant system requires compliant participants to make it work.
And compliant teachers and students provide the kind of minefield of data that needs to be uncovered.
Is compliance coming more from fear, and from political manipulation by all participants, or is it coming from the joy and excitement and successful prosecution of the enterprise by those engaged in it.And what is the appropriate equation of ingredients in the generation of compliance.
Naturally, this question has as many answers as there are "meetings" within the school. And yet, the numbers of "meetings" and the quality of those answers, is important. And those answers, while anecdotal and narrative in nature, are bouncing off most of the walls in most of the rooms in the school at any given time.
Forming teams, encouraging participation, active listening, appropriate challenging and even discipline...these are all integral to the student's development, learning achievement and life-skills.
Nevertheless, positive attitudes can sweep over a body of adolescents like a tsunami, drowning out the undercurrents of alienation, isolation, abuse of power and all of the forces that undermine the effective functioning of the institution and the system.
And the pursuit of a positive "persona" in any organization is frankly thwarted by a denial of those negative forces, and a refusal to deal openly with those forces. And those forces are in every school, and in every school system. And an approach that shuns negativity, if that negativity is honest and honourably based in the reality of the culture, will only enhance the power of that negativity.
Male students are less compliant than female students. That fact is a given. And how the school system meets that "lower level of compliance"  is important. Giving a male student who is not compliant, about any specific task or responsibility, a detention for his non-compliance will likely miss the root of his non-compliance.
Busy teachers want and need compliance and may be "getting it" in the short run, but losing the long-run goals of having the student become his own best guide, mentor and monitor. And compliance is eagerly and earnestly sought by the classroom teacher, so that s/he can do the job effectively. After all, that teacher is also pursuing a positive reputation of achievement.
I once found a grade twelve student sitting in the school cafeteria, when I went looking for him, because he had apparently been 'present' previously that day, and when I asked, "What's going on?" he broke into tears and informed me, "I just don't understand anything in that Shakespeare play, I don't get it!" He was afraid of both failing the subject and of speaking out about his inadequacy. I'm not absolutely confident that together we "solved" the problem completely; however, I do know that he was able to ask more questions, some of them privately, about the Elizabethan language, and at least address his legitimate fears, after that first courageous break-through.
Conflict is going to occur in any building shared by hundreds of individuals. And, how the school deals with conflict, whether it is verbal, or all of the various shades of "physical" from a "look" in the eye, to a "poke" in the arm, to a "prank" to embarrass another, to a competitive "threat" ....the nature of the human being includes conflict. Reduction of its frequency, and the severity of its occurences is a requisite for any school to function effectively. However, some conflict, when expressed appropriately, is both healthy and thus to be encouraged. And a system that "does not like conflict" is going to repress any indication of conflict, to keep the "ship moving"....
Many educators are educators because they find the system "protective" in both the positive and the negative meanings of that word. Power and control are the teacher's best friends. When the classroom door closes, the teacher is "in charge" and how that power and control are used, administered, negotiated, deployed...these are the most important questions of the whole enterprise. The learning of academic skills, while important, recedes to the necessary ascendancy of the question of "authority" and that includes power adn control.
Used effectively, creatively and sensitively...authority will be healthy in the students' lives. Dave Brubeck, then enrolled in Veterinarian school tells of being called aside by his Zoology teacher. "Brubeck, your head is not into this stuff; you're just not into frogs and formaldehyde; your head is into the 'conservatory' across the lawn; so, please go over there and study!" Wanting to work on his father's ranch, Brubeck had enrolled in veterinary college, but his heart was in music, the piano and jazz...and his Zoology teacher knew it, and coached him toward his own best destiny. And on Monday, December 6th, Brubeck will turn 90!! And we can all be thankful for both Brubeck's life and music, and for the coaching of that Zoology instructor!
It says here, that whenever power and control are being exercised, especially among young children, there needs to be some monitoring of that exercise, in the best interests of the student first, and secondarily in the best interests of the educational enterprise.
Consequently, each school system could well deploy an ombudsman for each gender, to monitor and mentor the interactions between teachers and administrators on one hand, and students on the other. This could be especially helpful if a female teacher is interviewing, disciplining and prescribing specific measures to a male student, and vice versa when a male teacher is dealing with a female student, in conflicted circumstances.
Naturally, a requisite for the ombudsman for female students is to be a female teacher, while the ombudsman for male students would be a male teacher.
As a student, I would have appreciated a male "advocate" in my corner when I was being disciplined; and as a teacher, I certainly would have appreciated a second opinion whenever I was in a conflict with a female student, prior to and during any encounter with that student that could have lasting consequences on her learning and her life-long attitudes towards power. And, as a parent of three daughters, I would certainly have appreciated a female advocate to have been present, when, for example, one mathematics teacher reduced one daughter to tears, for whatever reason no one knows.
Guidance teachers would not be my recommendation for this ombudsman role; their function is more curricular, career and documentative, in keeping the student's progress monitored. The Ombudsman's role would be exclusively to accompany the student and teacher in any discussion in which specific negative conflicts were being addressed and punishments administered. The adminisration officer would be the first place for this role to begin to function, where the discipline of the school is being administered daily, hourly, minute by minute....and the question of fairness, equity and justice both in perception and in fact is critical.

Questions for Education Leaders re. Male Education..a beginning

Some Questions for consideration by leaders of the Education Enterprise regarding Male Education


1. Is the school system conscious of the unique relationship between the learning enterprise and the male student?

2. Is the male student engaged in a representative teaching population, balanced between male and female?

3. Are the accomplishments of male teachers and students respected, recorded, rewarded adequately?

4. Is the hiring process focused on attracting male teachers to the elementary and secondary panels?

5. Would a male candidate from the Faculty of Education feel welcome in his first interview, in his first staff meeting, and in his daily encounters in the school and in his own classroom for the first five years of his contract?

6. Does each male teacher have a successful male mentor, to support his entry, transition and development as an educator?

7. Does each school have both strategies and tactics in place that would welcome, reward and support the unique development of male students?

8. Does the school system have a library of research material about the development of male students in each staff room? What is the frequency of those materials being circulated?

9. Does the school system seek, consciously, with deliberate goal setting and accompanying strategies and tactics, the enhanced achievements of male students, including reduced misdemeanor incidents, reduced detentions, improved test and assignment scores, reduced drop-out rates, graduation rates and successful graduation from post-secondary institutions of male students?

10. Does the school system face more inquiries and investigations about the activities of male students than of female students?

11. Does the school system hold seminars for teaching faculty on the nature of male students generally, rather than on case studies for action plans?

12. What is the general attitude of the school system toward the needs and aspirations of male students, including a conscious awareness of those needs and aspirations, the required steps for achieving those goals and aspirations, the school’s support of the achievement of those goals and the mentoring of each male student’s path along that road?

13. Does each male student have an assigned mentor, to support his learning goals, and his healthy relationship with peers, teachers, and the system generally?

14. Does each school offer learning opportunities in life skills and relationship building to male students?

15. Does each school have as one of its primary goals, the enhanced support of the learning achievement of each male student?

16. What services are available to male students in troublesome circumstances, whether those situations have been “generated” primarily by the male student or by other factors?

17. Do male students generally access those services in each school? To what degree, measured in percentage? What are the reasons for both access and resistance?

18. What is the role of the school council in the process of enhancing the learning achievements of male students, if any? What role could they play in this process?

19. What are the perceived impediments to the achievement of all learning goals of male students in each school in the system?

20. What are the hidden impediments to the achievement of all learning goals of male students in each school in the system?

21. In the school system’s strategic planning, how important is the record of achievement of male students in the short, medium and long range planning of each principal?

22. In an ideal world, with unlimited budgets and faculty specifically selected to enhance the learning opportunities and achievements of male students, what changes would you like to see implemented, to achieve that goal?

23. What are the specific impediments to the implementation of those changes?

24. Is the school system open to research into the experiences of male students, with the information available to teachers and administrators, for designing both curriculum and delivery modes, as part of an initiative to enhance the learning achievement of male students? If not, why not?

25. Is the school system, including programs like those for “gifted students” skewed in favour of female students? If so, why?

26. What community support is available to each school to advance the cause of enhanced achievement of male students? Are those supports being accessed adequately?

27. What specific steps does the school system take, with what frequency, to enhance the learning opportunities and achievement of male students, support by what kind of budget line? In an ideal world, how would that budget line change, with what effect?



General Topics for Discussion;

Male Students and their unique opportunities and struggles with the learning enterprise

Faculty expectations of male students

The culture of the education enterprise, with respect to the achievement of the learning goals of male students

Research and faculty development with respect to male learning needs and aspirations and achievements

Tips for Parents and Teachers Re: Boys

By John Lorinc (with reports from Erin Anderson) Globe and Mail, October 20, 2010
When Lukrica Prugo wants to deliver lessons on workaday topics like geometry or grammar, she likes to haul her kids out of their desks and take them on what she calls her “gallery walks.”

Inside a boy friendly classroom Like a Pied Piper, the suburban Toronto teacher leads her Grade 7s around the school, getting them to identify shapes or rhyme off adjectives to describe what they see. Or she'll have them move around the class, ranking the assignments pinned to the wall, as if scrutinizing art in a museum. Sometimes she takes them on nature walks and asks them to write poems about what they observe.
“Getting them to be physical is huge,” she says. “They're focused for longer and they answer questions for the full 40 minutes.”
A growing number of educators have pushed themselves to develop innovative ways to engage boys and girls in the classroom. A sampling:
1. Recess:
Many teachers do it almost instinctively: when elementary school children step out of line, they forfeit recess. It's a practice that drives Toronto District School Board director of education Chris Spence crazy. Most boys (and girls) simply need to blow off the surplus energy that accumulates during class time. By missing recess, they may have a tougher time learning for the rest of the day. Alternative punishments could see transgressors running laps of the field, doing sit-ups, or helping with chores around the school.
At home: Talk a walk around the block before your child sits down to do his homework and use the time to brainstorm on big projects and discuss the assignments. (Boys are often more likely to work out their thoughts verbally with mom or dad, while doing an activity that doesn't require a face-to-face chat.)
2. Snowballs/Play fighting
Most school boards now live in fear of liability lawsuits, with the result that many administrators have imposed blanket bans on uncontrolled outdoor activities considered to be risky, such as snowball throwing and play fighting. At St. Andrew's College, a private boys school in Aurora, Ont., the administration took a different tack with winter highjinks: One part of the field has been designated as the snowball zone. Students who venture there may throw snowballs, and they also consent to be targets (the boys must wear goggles to prevent eye injuries). Those who prefer to avoid the mayhem simply stay off the field. At C.B. Stirling, a public middle school in Hamilton that has experimented with all-boys classes, one classroom has been retrofitted with mats for supervised play wrestling.
At home: While family wrestling bouts have been shown to reduce aggression in boys, if you aren't that keen on a pillow fight, encourage your child to take mini-breaks in homework – play a quick game of ball hockey.
3. Fidgeting
Many boys simply have trouble sitting still. They fiddle, tap their feet and squirm within the unyielding confines of a desk. It's less about naughtiness than about body chemistry. Some teachers have experimented with abandoning desks altogether, letting boys sit or lie on the floor. At Upper Canada College, exceptionally fidgety kids have the option of sitting on a Pilates ball instead of a standard-issue desk chair. The ball provides just enough bounce to help the boys work off surplus energy and therefore improve concentration.

At home: Accept that many boys fidget by nature. Read to your son, even if he gets restless. Most of the time he's still listening.
4. Corners
Teachers who know how to engage male students understand the value of encouraging them to debate ideas rather than just passively digest information. The reason: Many boys prefer to work out their thoughts verbally before putting pen to paper. One successful technique is an exercise called “corners.” The teacher puts up four signs – “agree,” “strongly agree,” “disagree” and “strongly disagree” – in each corner of the class and then throws out a deliberately controversial statement, e.g., “Homework is good for you.” The students then go to the corner that most closely represents their views and each group develops an argument for debate.
At home: Discuss the news over dinner, and encourage debate on the issues. Boys respond to assignments that seem practical. Take the time to talk about how schoolwork might relate to real life or future goals.
5. Confronting male stereotypes
For University of Western Ontario professor of education Wayne Martino, the conundrum in the boys education debate is the constant risk of stereotyping. In his view, the question isn't, “Whither boys?” but, “Which boys?” Case in point: the push to create boy-friendly reading curricula dominated by books or graphic novels about sports, technology and fantasy/science fiction. When he teaches male teens, he chooses non-traditional stories that confront dominant pop culture images about hyper-masculinity, homophobia and male relationships (e.g. Billy Elliot). Prof. Martino encourages his students to write their reactions in journals and debate provocative statements about the texts.
At home: Be mindful about projecting gender stereotypes, such as encouraging boys not to show their feelings. Encourage your son to hang around – instead of disappearing to his room – when you have company so he can observe social interaction.

76.9% of first year medical students female at McMaster

By Carolyn Abraham and Kate Hammar, Globe an Mail, October 21, 2010
For Harold Reiter the tipping point was the entering class of 2002.

As the new chair of admissions at McMaster University's medical school, he took one look at the proportion of women admitted – a whopping 76.9 per cent – and wondered what had happened to the men.
The gender gap at the university's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine was one of the widest in the country and one of the factors that prompted Dr. Reiter to rethink the admissions criteria.
“It was those very numbers that made me start to look at the breakdown of the applicant pool, in terms of the ratio of male to female, and the discovery of what was, I think, an over-emphasis on grade point average,” he said.

Basing admissions mostly on marks, it seemed, had contributed to the decline of men's numbers in medical schools. Dr. Reiter, who was new to the position, decided the school should put less emphasis on marks and broaden its requirements, which eventually it did. The proportion of men has since slightly increased.
There is, apparently, an unstated, even under-the-table initiative to attempt to balance enrolment by gender, among Canadian medical schools; however, the idea is so politically explosive that few will speak about it.
(From the above piece in the Globe and Mail)
However, according to Paul Cappon, more than one faculty has done something about the gender factor.

Dr. Cappon, president and CEO of the Canadian Council on Learning, says that for the past five to eight years, some universities across the country have been tinkering with admissions to boost the number of men in medical school – looking beyond marks to give male applicants, in particular, credit for things like community service.
He predicted no one would say it was going on.
Dr. Cappon, who was a vice-president at Laurentian University, a former director-general of the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada and a former professor of medicine at McGill University, says “schools are doing that surreptitiously in Canada, deans of law and medicine. I used to be an academic VP running a university and I know they are doing it.”
Schools are “doing it surreptitiously, because it's politically incorrect to do it,” he says.

Journal finds readers in surprising locations

CJME (Canadian Journal of Male Education) is finding readers slowly and globally. Here is a summary of pageviews, and their countries of origin.
Canada 77

United States 35
Singapore 17
China 16
Slovenia 12
Russia 7
Bulgaria 6
Poland 3
Denmark 2
Taiwan 2

While our existence is still  at the 'incubator' stage, it is clear that Canada is not the only place where the future of male education is being considered and reflected upon.
Should any of these readers wish to contribute to the content of the journal, in terms of offering indigenous research, or through observations on the content they find, we would welcome their input, their scholarship, and any bibliographic references.

"Head in sand, to say no problem with boys" (CEO, Can. Council on Learning)

By Carolyn Abraham, Globe and Mail, October 15, 2010
It’s no mystery that talk of males in need can become a powder keg of sexual politics, said Paul Cappon, president and CEO of the Canadian Council on Learning. “We don’t like to talk about it, because we think it’s denigrating the achievements of females, but that’s not the case,” he said. “You have to ask what is happening, and you have to ask why. It’s a head in-the-sand, politically correct view to say there’s no problem with boys."
Whether parents, with lower expectations of their sons graduating from university than their daughters (60%-70%), or video games as distractions, or the old nugget that 'boys develop more slowly than girls, or the perennial "boredom" with school on the part of boys, or some other background factors influencing the facts, there is a problem with the achievement of males in Canadian education. And it is not necessary to complicate the facts or the politics of those facts by equating them with the denigration of women.
While there is no denying that, according to one source, 32% of boys are achieving A averages, (compared with 46% of girls), and that the presence of every boy in a post-secondary institution is an investment in Canada's future, as is the presence of every girl, there is also no denying that there is considerable loss of both talent and development.
One male education professor, Jay Bradley, at McGill, told the Globe reporter that he felt embarrassed whenever he mentions this deficit in male academic achievment.
Gender politics is still a very hot political topic in North America, and that certainly includes Canada.
There is not a day that goes by that we cannot find another male behaving badly in terms of notice to the law enforcement community, or to the school authorities, and thereby to the "news media" which thrives on "bad news."
There is no doubt that whenever an average person thinks about a simple concept like "bully" or "robber" or "thief" or "abuser" or "derelict" or "no-good" or "fighter" or "troubled" or "sick" or "dangerous" or "pervert" or "deviant" or "bum" or "drunk" or "unemployed" or "swindler" or "cheater" or "sicko" ....that average person is picturing a "male" in the frame of the concept. And the trouble is that such pictures prevail in the minds of both men and women.
They are cultural stereotypes, even cultural archetypes. These are words we apply to "men" and not to "women."
There is also clinical evidence, especially from adolescence, that the male mind is far more fragile and vulnerable than the image those same males project in their interractions. And so adept are they in their capacity to "act" out their cover-up, that they have convinced many of their parents, teachers and people in positions of authority that the mask trumps the reality.
All of us need to stop buying the "macho" image which every adolescent male born in the last century has either mastered, or at least attempted to foist onto the belief system of some adult(s), in an attempt to cover his fear, his vulnerability, his confusion, his detachment, his superiority, his awkwardness and his hatred of school and all of the implications of that mask.
He does not want to do homework; he certainly does not want to be the teacher's pet with all the right answers, because that would bring the avalanche of contempt from his male peers; he does not want to imagine himself in an academic role, because to do so would include all those pictures of "the student" and the "goody-two-shoes" that conflict with his needs to rebel. He does not want to be seen as another of those do-gooders who volunteer for Doctors without Borders, not at sixteen or seventeen. He does not want to aspire to be a courtroom lawyer, unless his father or mother are coaching him in that direction. He certainly does not want to be an actor, artist, dancer, pianist, or sculptor because to go in that direction risks the bullying of being called a "fag" by his peers which is one of the most hated epithets a young male can have hurled at him. You see he actually believes, wrongly, that the only route to self-discovery is through the hamlet, village, town, city, province and state called "What-the-Hell!"
 Rebellion is the self-imposed medication for all the pains of weakness, for the adolescent male. And because all males take the dose, it is not only an individual thing; it is cultural.
And school does not fit with the prescription, and certainly neither does post-secondary school.
Of course, these comments are something of an exaggeration; nevertheless, they merit some careful consideration when we are considering the plight of males, and we need not be wasting our time or energy in false conflicts with the worthy and laudable achievements of females in school.

Individuals differ more than genders

By Suzanne Nadeau, Grand Forks Hearld, found on MenTeach website.  She interviewed
Marcus Weaver-Hightower, the author of the new book "The Politics in Boys' Education: Getting Boys 'Right." Weaver-Hightower spent a year in Australia looking at their approach to the education of male students. He is currently an assisstant professor at the University of North Dakota.
Why Australia?

A. Australia had really gone farther than any other country in addressing boys’ issues, doing practice-oriented research to see what was actually going on.
I wanted to see if they are so far ahead in these issues, what can we in the United States do to follow them? The focus of the book is the Australian policy directed toward boys’ education, but there is a concerted effort to compare it to what is in the United States.
We share a pretty firm idea about masculinity and gender: They’ve got the Crocodile Dundee image. We’ve got the John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone images. Both countries have this idea of hyper-masculinity. Both are trying to look backward to define masculinity, and my own take is that’s the wrong direction and we really need to redirect masculinity, especially in culture and an economy that has shifted and made hyper-masculinity more of a burden than it is an asset.
Q. You were a high school teacher and coach, can you tell us if boys learn differently than girls?
A. I think it depends. If we really wanted to generalize, I think there are differences between boys and girls. There are some biological differences, obviously, but we’ve trained boys and girls to be different.
Kids are different. But, I think there’s far more difference between boys and boys than between boys and girls.
There’s more variability between boys and between girls than there is between the two groups.
I think teachers, and really parents, know this at an intrinsic level. For example, parents might have two sons that are vastly different; then they might have a son and a daughter who are very similar.
Canada may not have either Crocodile Dundee or John Wayne as models of hypermasculinity. However, we certainly have models of "macho" masculinity that may be in conflict with academic achievement. These could include NHL "fighters" like Colton Orr, Tie Domi, Sean Avery...and then there are the 'high-scoring' recruits like Sidney Crosby, Taylor Hall, Alex Ovechkin, Mike Camelleri, and Phil Kessel.
And we look also to more complicated role models like Dr. David Suzuki, and our new Governor General, David Lloyd Johnston. And then, on the political level, compare Stephen Harper with both Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton, and you might get a glimpse of the tension between such different examples of masculinity, irrespective of policy.
If the learning of this professor, from year of study in Australia is "one size does not fit all" in terms of educational policy and practice, perhaps that is instructive for our approach to learning in Canada.
Individual differences actually trumping gender sterrotypes in the perceptions, attitudes and interactions of educators with their students could go a long way to enhanced achievement of all students.

Young Men: "Canary in National Coal Mine"

Br Mary Sanchez, Kansas City Star, October 18, 2010
But the unheard subtext to all this hand wringing is that boys are in trouble. As one participant in a College Board study of American education noted, “Our young men are the canary in the national coal mine.”
As vice president of the D.C.-based College Board Advocacy and Policy Center, Ronald Williams attends many a college graduation ceremony. He notes the clickety-clack of high heels across the stage floor as graduate after graduate crosses to accept her diploma. Increasingly, Williams is aware of the dearth of men.
Researchers are starting to look into the ways our schools are failing certain students more than others. There are a lot of factors at play: race, class, and poverty both urban and rural. And, of course, there is the impact of broken families and single-parent households. Academics and administrators are trying to understand the way all these things affect the attitudes and expectations of the young, especially young men.
In the most troubled school districts, however, reflecting on these issues is a luxury they can’t afford. Here is how one former K-12 superintendent framed the issue to Williams: If you have 30-some schools and 16 are being threatened with being taken over by the state, you don’t have time to figure out which part of the population is messing up.
Still, some points of consensus are emerging about the difficulties boys face in school.
One is that schools are punishing “boy behavior” harshly and ineffectively. From a young age, boys tend to have excessive energy and more trouble settling down. Speaking loudly, not being able to focus and follow instructions, and the like tend to get a kid in trouble in school. Research has shown that boys are twice as likely as girls to be suspended, labeled learning disabled or diagnosed with attention deficit or attention deficit hyperactivity.
Others studies seek to unravel how particularly for African American and Latino teenagers, school becomes a “pipeline to prison” rather than to college. Disciplinary measures often cast boys to the street (out-of-school suspension) rather than imposing penalties in school, which can lead to delinquency and juvenile detention. It’s a pretty well-worn path that has helped the U.S. achieve some of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
President Barack Obama targeted 2020 as the date by which the U.S. should regain its marker as the nation with the highest percentage of postsecondary degrees. But it should be blatantly obvious that a nation only educating half of its population to its potential can’t advance, much less reclaim, past global prominence in academic standards.
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/10/18/2327281/add-this-to-the-list-boys-are.html#ixzz12sxAmMxr
While Canadian norms are different from U.S. norms, and the data disclose different patterns (for example, our prison intake is significantly smaller than the U.S.), the fact that this story is emerging in the heartland of the U.S. suggests that it is a broadly recognized societal trend, looking for answers in that country too.
Perhaps it can also legitimately be said that "young men are the canary in the national coal mine in Canada, also."

Drugs for Boys...is this an outrage?

By Carolyn Abraham, Globe and Mail, October 18, 2010
Figures compiled for The Globe and Mail by IMS Health, an independent firm that tracks pharmaceutical sales, show prescriptions for Ritalin and other amphetamine-like drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder shot up to 2.9 million in 2009, a jump of more than 55 per cent in four years.

More than two million were written specifically for children under 17 – a leap of 43 per cent since 2005 – and at least 75 per cent of them were for young males – a ratio some see as evidence that society is making a malady of boyhood itself.
“What if we were drugging girls at the same rate?” asks Jon Bradley, education professor at McGill University. “What if [the majority] of these prescriptions were being written for girls? There'd be a march.”
If you want a benchmark for the culture of schools, this is one good place to start.
Prescribing drugs mainly to boys continues unabated and with little push back from a public seeking to have their child "conform" to the norms of the school authorities.
Concentration and conformity may not be mutually supportive goals. In fact, as John Steinbeck once wrote, man is most creative and most loyal to his nature in rebellion.
While we are damping down the nervous energies of many boys, we are also, perhaps, creating a compliant client for teachers to control more easily. And one has to wonder if that is a more accurate description of the agenda.
One October, I conducted a workshop for teachers in a small village in which a young boy (12) had died under the wheels of a flatbed during a hayride on Civic Holiday weekend. Some forty plus kids and adults, including his siblings were also on the ride and witnessed the tragedy. Of course we talked about grief, and the implications of such an event. We also talked about empathy and compassion and the rubbing up against each other of the emotions in the community/school and the teaching agenda of the faculty.
At the first break, one teacher approached me seeking a time to talk privately.
When the morning session ended we met in an office in the well-appointed school.
"I teach his ten-year-old brother, and I told him yesterday, the honeymoon is over!" came the words rushing from her lips.
"Let me get this straight; I think I just heard you say that you told this boy's brother, who had witnessed his brother's death a few weeks ago, under the wheels of the flatbed, that 'the honeymoon is over'," I responded. "Is that about right?"
"Well, he is not concentrating and he is not doing his work," she continued.
"And just what honeymoon are you referring to?" I inquired. "His?"
"Oh, my God!" she blurted. "I never actually realized what I was saying when I told him the honeymoon was over. I just wanted and needed control so badly that I stamped on his grief."
"I think you've got a better picture now of the situation," I suggested. "Do you think you have?"
"This might take a little while for him to get over, eh?" she tried.
"Perhaps," I agreed.
The story is certainly not emblematic of or typical background to these prescriptions. There may be many other situations in the lives of their students about which the school administration and the teachers are unaware. However, the attitude of this teacher, focused and driven and conscientious as it was, was precisely not the approach that was going to work.
In fact, focused and driven and conscientious are all adjectives that walk through the classroom door with many teachers. And, while some of these qualities are certainly laudable, there is an optimum level of "drive"mixed with empathy, and just simple "checking in" that brings the current reality of the students' "day" to the awareness of the teacher.
And such "radar" (it has been called intuition, and connection and empathy and vision) is essential to the effective relationship between teacher and student. I can only hope and trust that the teacher in the story above returned to her classroom in a different spirit and attitude from the one in which she began our private conversation.
We now know that research indicates young people prefer texting to phone calls, and one reason is that they control the message, and do not have to engage in a more complicated conversation then they seek.
I remain convinced that the conversation related above would be very different in either phone or texting mode, and perhaps schools will have to take up the challenge of nurturing healthy relationships as a core part of their "unwritten" curriculum.
And such relationships cannot be engendered if the starting point is that one of the two genders in the classroom starts from a problematic posture, in the eyes of the professionals.

See UPDATE Toronto School Board considers specific school for underachieving male students

Update:
By Heather Mallick, Toronto Star, November 17, 2010
Toronto District School Board trustees have told Education Director Chris Spence, a man well-versed in the crisis in American schools that doesn’t match our own difficulties, that they first want to know if such schools will work before they start quizzing parents about whether they’ll send their children there. Good for them.

Single-sex schools are based on junk science — actually it’s not science, it was a 2005 Newsweek cover story titled “Boy Brains, Girl Brains”— and a lazy notion, fuelled by the U.S. Christian right, that became a theory.
Now many parents think boys and girls have different learning styles and that classrooms are becoming excessively “feminized.” The theory is now a conspiracy. In fact, it was all nonsense to begin with.
Boys do learn differently from girls at some stages — they have to be told to sit down and be quiet more, for one thing — but these differences hardly overshadow the similarities between male and female children who all have to learn to read, write, add, and talk intelligently. Turning schools topsy-turvy to accommodate an entirely unscientific schema about which gender has more oxytocin flowing in their brains in reading class is absurd.
According to the CBC, as revealed on their crawl, October 17, 2010, The Toronto District School Board is giving active consideration to the establishment of a specific secondary school for underachieving male students.
In the national media, and in the large scheme of national issues, this may seem like very small potatoes.
However, with the director being as committed to the successful education of all students, including male students as their director is, and with the size of the problem of underachieving male students, there much be considerable pressure from a variety of directions, to make such a historic decision.
For one thing, the principals and the teachers' federations, if not the parents and the school councils, must be looking at the non-development of many male students, who face the rather high risk of dropping out, and the often inevitable ensuing drama of unemployment, 'negative influences' and potential risk of crossing the line into legal infractions...and demanding "something be done."
The bottom 10% of the student achievement scores belong mostly to male students, and some, if not all of these would become elegible for the new experiment. That would take a large load off the shoulders of principals and teachers who now have these students in their classrooms, halls, cafeterias and buses every day. The achievement records of each school relieved of the burden of these students would immediately rise. The working conditions of the faculty and staff in each of these schools would improve significantly, and fairly quickly.
Furthermore, the parents and guardians of these students would know that the likelihood of their son, foster son, adopted son.. getting a high school diploma would rise. And that fact in itself would give hope to these custodial guardians.
There is also something known by social researchers for several decades called the Hawthorne effect. This involves the level of participation and achievement of those involved in what they know to be an experiment. The very fact of the experiment apparently engenders enhanced enthusiasm for the participants, whose performances improve, whose attitudes improve and the documenting of these results can be attributed, in part, to the experimental conditions themselves.
While there are and will continue to be many adjustments in scheduling, busing, staffing and a reallocation of resources in such a monumental change to the system, it could well prove to be more than worthy of the effort of all participants.
At the end of the day, if such an experiment were to prove to have positive results, measured in all the appropriate ways, including scholastic testing, attitude and behaviour records, relationship building both between students and between students and the school authorities, enhanced parental participation in the daily school life of the students, and in a significant drop in the numbers of "drop-outs" from the cohort of initial enrollees...imagine how that single experiment might impact other boards of education across the country, and the story of the next decade could prove quite different from the one unfolding under the current strategies and tactics.
The Journal of Male Education will continue to watch this pending development, and others dedicated to similar results.

McGill Professor proposes affirmative action to attract male teachers

By Carolyn Abraham, Globe and Mail, October 18, 2010
Having trained elementary teachers at McGill for 25 years, and seeing “the vast majority” of former male graduates eventually leave teaching, Prof. Bradley (Associate Professor of Education at McGill) believes it's time to move beyond billboards.

“We need to get fairly draconian,” he says, and use affirmative action to ensure that 20 per cent of teachers at every school are male.
When most of the teachers, elementary school principals, and support staff are women and “the token male on staff tends to teach phys ed,” he says, the entire system has an intrinsic bias against boys.
“Females are making the decisions, they're choosing the books, and setting up the class.” Which is why he believes that the early grades focus too heavily on sitting still, and stress co-operation over competition.
While there is no evidence that male teachers will improve the scores of boys in the classrooms, there is indisputable evidence that schools are staffed primarily by female teachers. It is clearly not only possible but even likely that students can pass from elementary through secondary school without having experienced a male teacher at the front of the classroom.
Professor Bradley's proposal of affirmative action "to ensure that 20% of teachers at every school are male," while laudable, may be hollow in the implementation. It may not be possible to attract that many males to the teaching profession where the 'odds' of normalcy appear very low. That means that male teachers report working in a constant state of anxiety about their 'potential' for perceptions among their peers of inappropriate behaviour to the students.
Some will argue that the classroom is the only place where the interaction of students and teachers matters. However, the culture, the tone and the everyday practices and policies of the school establish an expectation among both students and teachers, and if there is no "legitimate" room for male teachers then a billboard on every corner attempting to recruit males into the profession will not work, and might even be counter-productive.
There is a "stigma" to being a male teacher, and it stems from the fear that males who like to work with children must be so different as to be either gay or perverted. It is this stigma that needs to be addressed.
It is a form of unstated, yet obvious, prejudice against a single group of potential educators.

Globe and Mail opens debate:" Are we failing boys?" Oct. 16, 2010

From the Globe and Mail, in their new section entitled "8 Discussions Canada needs to have
October 4, 2010
For the last few decades in Canada, as in most western countries, statistics have piled up suggesting that boys are falling behind girls in most measures of academic achievement.

In the early years, evidence shows boys are more likely to fail a grade, more likely to repeat a grade, and more likely to land the lowest scores in standardized literacy tests. In high school, they are more likely to drop out, more likely to report a sense of disengagement with school, less likely to spend time studying and less likely to pursue post-secondary education. At Canadian campuses, once a male-dominated domain, females now significantly outnumber males.
The Globe and Mail, to its outstanding credit, is inviting all Canadians to contribute to their debate, discussion and their platform on the question, "Are we failing boys?" starting October 16, 2010.
The "Journal" welcomes this important development in the debate and discussion of the issues, numbers, opinions and prospects from all Canadians.
We will be watching, along with everyone else.

"Nobody cares about men...or boys" says Concordia Sociologist

By Sean Gordon, Globe and Mail, September 10, 2010
But what of less tangible effects on things like identity and ambition?

Part of the problem in answering the question is a lack of scholarship on the specific effects the situation is having on Quebec's boys and the men they become.
“What's going on? I'm not sure. And I hate to say it, but nobody cares very much about men, and nobody cares very much about boys. Nowhere is that more true than Quebec,” said Anthony Synnott, a Concordia University sociologist and expert on gender issues and masculinity.
The risk, he continued, is the creation of “a permanent low-income population,” and he noted that, despite the considerable political impact of feminism on Quebec's social development since the Quiet Revolution, “men continue to dominate at the top – and also at the bottom” of the income ladder.
At least one academic, Anthony Synnott at Concordia, "gets it" in all of its ugly dimensions. Thank you, Sir.
And once the discussion begins to have the interest and cache and the cover of the academic community, in general, and that will take some time, the applications for research grants will begin.
And as one professor at RMC, Dr. W.A.D. Allan, told me in a conversation, "It is often the education departments themselves that are part of the problem, and the study needs to begin with the sociologists."
Only when we can all see the real data of unemployment, and increased social costs like the costs of childrens' services, the courts, and lost productivity will the whole society begin to take notice, perhaps.
In one Ontario city, a program director in alternative measures for legal referrals indicates that although funding for boys and girls in the program is on a 50-50 basis, the numbers in the program are roughly 70-30, with males holding the higher number. That is only one of the discrepancies that will be unearthed as we move through this swamp.

40% male drop-out rate, up to 80% in one school in Quebec

By Sean Gordon, Globe and Mail, September 10, 2010
A shade under 40 per cent of boys in Quebec drop out of high school in their teens, a rate that is among the highest in the Western world, according to statistics compiled by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

No one is entirely sure what it all means.
Some experts hint darkly at a lost generation of boys, others brush aside such dire talk as myth and alarmism. Whatever slant is applied, it's a harrowing reality.
Among the 500 or so students at Pierre-Dupuy, the overall dropout rate is close to 80 per cent, the highest in the province.
“You have to understand that those are pretty crude numbers, we have a very mixed clientele, people with developmental delays, children with autism, kids who study trades, and the regular academic high-school stream,” said Ginette Rioux, the school's principal. “We never say, ‘We're not going to take this or that student.' … Some unfortunately leave us, but we're working hard at keeping them.”
Link these figures with the current debate about the role of neuroscience, that is the "brain differences" between males and females, which is gathering heat, especially in the design of educational opportunities for male students and female students, versus the sociological influences based in male and female archetypes and you have a very complex "stew."
Focussing on only one school, in one extremely complex neighbourhood, in one province, is also merely a song from the canary in the corner of a vast coalmine of male education. A snap-shot, if you will, in a very lengthy movie.
Nevertheless, the movie is starting a) to be filmed deliberately, and b) to be watched and listened to by a growing number of concerned individuals.
While the feminists may certainly have unlocked the lock on the vault of sexual differences, expectations, roles as well as political and cultural histories and futures, and they have, for the most part, done a superb job in their own academic disciplined development, it is long past time for men to begin to look closely at who we are in a new era, who we have been in our many past editions, and who we are likely to become, depending on our cultural expectations.
And education is one of the core stages from which to gather important data.

Island Provinces: significantly fewer male full-time university students, 2003-2008

A review of the full-time enrolment patterns of Canadian university students from Statistics Canada
 from 2003 through 2008 reveals some interesting findings. Female student enrolment is consistently higher than male student enrolment. This is not surprising considering the population generally finds slightly higher numbers of females than males, by 2-3 percentage points.
However, the gap in full-time university enrolment by province is more significant than the population demographics would suggest.
In Newfoundland/Labrador the gap ranges from 19% up to 22% more females than males for those five years.
In Prince Edward Island, the gap ranges from 22% up to 34% more females than males for those five years.
In Nova Scotia, the gap ranges from 14% up to 16% more females than males for those five years.
In New Brunswick, the gap remains constant at 16% more females than males for those five years.
In Quebec, the gap remains constant at 12% more females than males for those five years.
In Ontario, the gap ranges from 12% up to 14% more females than males for those five years.
In Manitoba, the gap ranges from 14% up to 16% more females than males for those five years.
In Saskatchewan, the gap ranges from 10% up to 14% more females than males for those five years.
In Alberta, the gap remains constant at 12% more females than males for those five years.
In British Columbia, the gap ranges from 12% up to 14% more females than males for those five years.
Clearly, the gaps in Newfoundland/Labrador (from 19% to 22%) and in Prince Edward Island (from 22% to34%) are significantly higher than all other Canadian provinces.
While Quebec, (12%) and Saskatchewan (10% to 14%) Alberta (12%) and  British Columbia (12% to 14%) and Ontario (12% to 14%) provide the smallest gaps.
Speculation as to the reasons for both island provinces having the largest gap (fewest males by percentage) of university students might include  more rural, agrarian societies where the male children are more likely to go to work to provide either income or work support for the family, rather than pursuing academic learning.
The slightly larger gap in Manitoba (14% tp 16%) and in New Brunswick (16%) above the remaining provinces might have a similar economic foundation.

REDESIGNing Education..by including design in curriculum

If there is any truth to the notion that male students are being turned off in schools, colleges and universities, perhaps the curriculum needs to be amended to become more fitting to the needs, aspirations and intellectual capacities of male students.
Curriculum design based on the Aristotelian model of naming aspects of a subject, and then learning through memory to repeat those facts, or even to be able to replicate the equations at the base of each mathematical inquiry, or chemical or physical experiment, while interesting, is not likely to stimulate the imaginations of many of the students whose goals differ from those targetting medecine, law, accounting or economics.
While making money is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile avocation, the creation of new approaches, or new ways of doing things is far more interesting and exciting in and of itself.
Most industrial designers will say that they never talk about design to a client who hires them. They speak only about increased efficiency, or decreased costs but never about design. The reason, according to Lionel Tiger who writes about conversations with industrial designers, is that they believe the society generally is illiterate about the subject of "design." And that includes both the theory of design and the practical applications of that design theory.
As we move ever more intimately into a knowledge-based economy, with the processes that enable, and then drive and then store and recall whatever it is that we are "knowing" designed by an ever diminishing number of design engineers, it is the applications of those new designs that we are going to have to "create" and to implement.
In the industrial society, according to Lionel Tiger once again, we lost focus on the reproductive capacity of the society, while focussing exclusively on the productive capacity. And, in the process, we turned the reproductive capacity of humans into another "productive" capacity, through the birth control pill, and other choices for females to make regarding whether or not they wished to procreate thereby "industrializing" procreation.
Today, we need to re-capture the male intelligence through an intimate and rigorous education into the processes, theories and capacities of creating and designing.
We need to raise our general and societal knowledge and appreciation for the goals, theories and processes of design, through a curriculum that introduces students to new societal needs, and also newly designed, and evolving design processes.W can no longer count only on the economists to turn the economy around; we need a concerted collective political and intellectual movement that understands where the economy fits in the larger picture. We can no longer count on the medical schools to bring about an optimum human wellness; they are so stuck in the "disease" model of diagnosis and treatment that they cannot see beyond it to prevention, without pharmaceuticals. We can no longer count on the lawyers to write the laws in our legislatures, because they write them for their profession, and we can no longer afford to give up our democratic access to the political levers to accountants and lawyers. We need generalist thinkers who are familiar with change, with change theory, with design theory and practice, to provide leven to the society of specialists that have "left" the rest of us behind.
We need people trained in thinking outside the box, and the one thing the Canadian, and perhaps to a little lesser degree the North American education system is not is, "outside the box." The system is a traditionalist, conserving, preserving and repressing system run by people who are addicted to the perfection of the system, both men and women. And that repudiates the intellectual and aspirational needs of, especially, male students.
And while female students are and will continue to be compatible and compliant with such a system, male students will not comply. Nor should they.
We have the capacity to create individual curricula for every student, witness the recent story in The Atlantic of one male student who dropped out of college, because he could not withstand the monotony of the routine. Becoming a professional writer is only one of the clear indications of his intelligence.
We need to harness every student's innate capacities, cognitively, creatively, socially and industrially.
And we are not doing that. We do not need to conduct labour market needs surveys to determine what those who are hiring need, because those needs will be obsolete before the students whose curriculum meets those goals graduate. We need to truly democratize the curriculum, including everything we know, and everything we do not know, about the dangers our planet faces, our bodies and spirits face, and the potential for creative imagination inherent in each student and demanded by every force contending against our well-being.
And we need to stop trying to replicate the past, with our "standardized testing" to make the politicians and the replicators happy, and returned to office. We must stop holding our schools, colleges and universities hostage to the needs of the "establishment" because they have proven conclusively that they cannot be trusted to even consider goals, in both content and pedagogy, that are appropriate to the individual student, not to mention to the long-term aspirations of the society, exclusive of its need and desire for money.
And that is another reduction "up with which we will not put" nor will the students.
We fail our students by reducing "sex" education to "morality" and "body parts."
We fail our students by reducing the management of money to economics 101 without showing, first, how the economy must serve the students and citizens, and not the other way round.
We also fail our students by refusing to design and deliver a wholistic curriculum around the creating, sustaining and adapting to changing circumstances in RELATIONSHIPS! Little wonder there is at least a 40% failure rate in our fmaily relationships.
If that were the rate of failure in our schools in the subjects they are currently teaching, there would be ratepayers tearing down the school doors in every town and hamlet across the country.
And yet, that is one of the measurements of today's schools: we fail at least that percent of students who have no idea how to communicate, how to read symbolically, how to negotiate with both peers and with authority, how to create and improvise with raw materials, for any project, and how to capture their dreams in a cogent and creative manner.
And so they wander about "connecting" with digital instruments that serve primarily as distractions, and certainly not as provocateurs of new ideas. While they also remain the most alienated, and isolated generation yet to appear. And that's not THEIR fault; it is our's. We have failed them!
An influential statement of the classical position was made by William Morris in a famous lecture on The Beauty of Life given at the Town Hall, Birmingham, (Alabama) in 1880. He spoke of the 'danger that the present course of civilization will destroy the beauty of life,' and that 'the civilized world' will forget 'that there had ever been an art made by the people for the people as a joy to the maker and the user'. He struck the populist note that 'You cannot educate, you cannot civilize men, unless you can give them a share in art.' (Lionel Tiger, The Manufacture of Evil, p. 304)
Here is a comment from one who has taught secondary school and has gone through the conventional school system, including undergraduate and graduate schools (obviously a male!):
The problem is the school system itself: the Classroom setting is no good. Sitting, staring at the front, being lectured. It doesn't work. Especially for boys who in general are very high-energy and filled with hormones. Perhaps some kind of curriculum designed to take that into account. I a not a someone with a myriad of academic qualifications to suggest the best way to design curriculum, but I think the general schema would be to make it more experiential, more physical and more dynamic (in that the classroom isn't locked into one place).