The War Against Boys (2 page)

“The school is all about structure,” Assistant Principal Ralph Santiago told me. The faculty places a heavy emphasis on organization, precision workmanship, and attention to detail. No matter how chaotic students' home lives may be, at Aviation, they are promised five full days per week of calm consistency. The school administrators maintain what they call a “culture of respect.” They don't tolerate even minor infractions. But anyone who spends a little time at the school sees its success is not about zero-tolerance and strict sanctions. The students are kept so busy and are so fascinated with what they are doing that they have neither the time nor the desire for antics. Many who visit the school are taken aback by the silent, empty hallways. Is it a holiday? Where are the kids? They are in the classrooms, engaged in becoming effective, educated, employable adults. “Do you have self-esteem programs?” I asked, just for the fun of it. “We don't do that,” replied the principal.

Study groups from as far away as Sweden and Australia have visited and are now attempting to replicate Aviation in their home countries. It would appear to be a model of best practices. But there are very few visits from American officials. No one from the US Department of Education has visited or ever singled it out for praise. Aviation High is, in fact, more likely to be investigated, censured, and threatened by federal officials than celebrated or emulated. Despite its seventy-five-year history of success, and despite possessing what seems to be a winning formula for educating at-risk kids, it suffers from what many education leaders consider to be a fatal flaw: the school is 85 percent male.
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The women students at Aviation High are well respected, hold many of the leadership positions, and appear to be flourishing in every way. But their
numbers remain minuscule. They know their passion for jet engines makes them different from most girls—and they seem to enjoy being distinctive. One soft-spoken young woman whose parents emigrated from India told me she loves the school, and so do her parents: “They like it because it is so safe.” She is surrounded by more than seventeen hundred adolescent males in a poor section of Queens, yet she couldn't be safer.

Principal Deno Charalambous, Assistant Principal Ralph Santiago, and other administrators have made efforts to reach out to all prospective students, male and female, but it is mostly boys who respond. From an applicant pool of approximately three thousand junior high pupils from across the five New York City boroughs, the school makes about 1,200 offers and fills 490 seats in its entering ninth-grade class. Admission is open to all, and the school admissions committee looks at grades and test scores. But, says Santiago, “our primary focus is on attendance.” Give us students with a good junior high attendance record and an interest in all things mechanical, he says, and Aviation can turn them into pilots, airplane mechanics, or engineers.

“Why did you choose Aviation?” I ask Ricardo, a ninth grader. “I liked the name.” The world of aviation—and classes with a lot of hammering, welding, riveting, sawing, and drilling—seems to resonate more powerfully in the minds of boys than girls. At the same time, it is girls who are the overwhelming majority at two other New York City vocational schools: the High School of Fashion Industries and the Clara Barton High School (for health professions) are 92 percent and 77 percent female, respectively. Despite forty years of feminist consciousness-raising and gender-neutral pronouns, boys still outnumber girls in aviation and automotive schools, and girls still outnumber boys in fashion and nursing. The commonsense explanation is that sexes differ in their interests and propensities. But activists in groups such as the American Association of University Women and the National Women's Law Center beg to differ.

The National Women's Law Center has been waging a decade-long battle against New York City's vocational-technical high schools—with Aviation High at the top of its list of offenders. In 2001, its copresident, Marcia Greenberger, along with two activist lawyers, wrote a letter to the then–Chancellor of the New York City Board of Education, claiming that girls' rights were
being violated in the city's vocational public schools and demanding that the “problem be remedied without delay.”
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The letter acknowledged that girls prevailed by large margins in four of the schools, but such schools, they said, do not prepare young women for jobs that pay as well as the male-dominated programs. “The vocational programs offered at these schools correspond with outmoded and impermissible stereotypes on the basis of sex.” The letter noted that “even the names assigned to vocational high schools send strong signals to students that they are appropriate only for one sex or the other.”
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In 2008, prompted by the National Women's Law Center, the public advocate for the City of New York, Betsy Gotbaum, published a scathing indictment entitled
Blue School, Pink School: Gender Imbalance in New York City CTE (Career and Technical Education) High Schools.
Why are there so few girls in vocational schools for automobile mechanics, building construction, and aviation? The report offered a confident reply: “Research shows that the reluctance of girls to participate in such programs is rooted in stereotypes of male and female roles that are imparted early in childhood.”
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In fact, the literature on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements. There is no single, simple answer.

I asked Charalambous, Santiago, and other administrators whether Aviation High had received any official complaints. They were vaguely aware of the 2001 letter and 2008 report, but were confident that the stunning success of their school, especially one serving so many at-risk kids, would allay doubts and criticism. The educators at Aviation define equity as “equality of opportunity”—girls are just as welcome as boys. They were frankly baffled by the letters and threats and seemed to think it was just a misunderstanding. But the activists at the National Women's Law Center, as well as the authors of the
Blue School, Pink School
report, believe that true equity means equality of participation. By this definition, Aviation falls seriously short. There is no misunderstanding.

We must all be “willing to fight,” exclaimed Marcia Greenberger at a 2010 White House celebration of the Title IX equity law.
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To an audience that included Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, and White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett,
she noted that Title IX could be used to root out sexist discrimination in areas “outside of sports.” Said Greenberger, “We have loads of work to do!” She singled out Aviation High School as an egregious example of continuing segregation in vocational-technical schools. Ms. Jarrett concluded the session by assuring everyone in the room that “We are hardly going to rest on our laurels until we have absolute equality, and we are not there yet.”

Before Ms. Jarrett or the secretary of education or other education officials join Ms. Greenberger and her colleagues at the National Women's Law Center in their pursuit of absolute equality, they need to consider Aviation High School in the larger context of American education and American life.

In 2000, the Department of Education (DOE) published a long-awaited report on gender and education entitled
Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women.
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The research was mandated by Congress under the Gender Equity in Education Act of 1993.
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Women's groups such as the National Women's Law Center and the American Association of University Women lobbied heavily for the 1993 law and DOE study. Their own research showed that girls were being massively shortchanged and demoralized in the nation's schools. The AAUW, for example, called the plight of adolescent young women “an American tragedy.”
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It was because of such claims that Congress was moved to pass the Gender Equity in Education Act, categorizing girls as an “underserved population” on a par with other discriminated-against minorities. Hundreds of millions of dollars in grants were awarded to study the plight of girls and to learn how to overcome the insidious biases against them. Parents throughout the country observed Take Your Daughter to Work Day; the Department of Health and Human Services launched a self-esteem enhancing program called Girl Power!; and, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, members of the American delegation presented the educational and psychological deficits of American girls as a pressing human rights issue.
¹²

In 2000, women's groups eagerly awaited the DOE study. It promised
to be the most thorough assessment of gender and education yet. Solid and unimpeachable statistics from the federal government would be a great boon to their campaign on behalf of the nation's young women.

But things did not go as planned. The shortchanged-girl movement rested on a lot of unconventional evidence: controversial self-esteem studies,
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unpublished reports on classroom interactions,
¹⁴
and speculative, metaphor-laden theories about “school climates” and female adolescent malaise.
¹⁵
Here, for example, is a typical pronouncement: “As the river of a girl's life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing.”
¹⁶
Those portentous words were uttered in 1990 by feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, a leader of the shortchanged-girl movement. The picture of confused and forlorn girls struggling to survive would be drawn again and again, with added details and increasing urgency. By 1995, the public was more than prepared for psychologist Mary Pipher's bleak tidings in her bestselling book,
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls.
According to Pipher, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. . . . They crash and burn.”
¹⁷

The DOE's
Trends in Educational Equity
report was based on more straightforward criteria: grades, test scores, and college matriculation. By those standards, girls were doing
far better
than boys. The DOE's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) analyzed forty-four concrete indicators of academic success and failure. About half of the indicators showed no differences between boys and girls. For example, “Females are just as likely as males to use computers at home and at school,” and “Females and males take similar mathematics and science courses in high school.” Some favored boys: they do better on math and science tests, and they enjoy these subjects more and demonstrate greater confidence in their math and science abilities than girls.
Trends in Educational Equity
found that the math and science gaps were narrowing, but they still singled them out as areas of concern. On the whole, however, girls turned out to be far and away the superior students. According to the report, “There is evidence that the female advantage in school performance is real and persistent.”
¹⁸
As the study's director, Thomas Snyder, told me almost apologetically, “We did not realize women were doing so well.”

A few sample findings:

• “Female high school seniors tend to have higher educational aspirations than their male peers.”

• “Female high school seniors are more likely to participate in more after-school activities than their male peers, except for participation in athletics.”

• “Female high school students are more likely than males to take Advanced Placement examinations.”

• “Females have consistently outperformed males in reading and writing.”

• “Differences in male and female writing achievements have been relatively large, with male 11th graders scoring at about the same level as female 8th graders in 1996.”

• “Females are more likely than males to enroll in college.”

• “Women are more likely than men to persist and attain degrees.”

Figure 1: Average GPA of 12th Graders, by Sex

Source: US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics,
High School Transcript Study (HSTS), 2000, 1998, 1994, 1990.

Contrary to the story told by the girl-crisis lobby, the new study revealed that by the early 1990s, American girls were flourishing in unprecedented ways. To be sure, a few girls may have been crashing and drowning in the sea of Western culture, but the vast majority were thriving in it: moving ahead of boys in the primary and secondary grades, applying to college in record numbers, filling the more challenging academic classes, joining sports teams, and generally outperforming boys in the classroom and extracurricular activities. Subsequent studies by the Department of Education and the Higher Education Research Institute show that, far from being timorous and demoralized, girls outnumber boys in student government, honor societies, and school newspapers. They also receive better grades,
¹⁹
do more homework,
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take more honors courses,
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read more books,
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eclipse males on tests of artistic and musical ability,
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and generally outshine boys on almost every measure of classroom success. At the same time, fewer girls are suspended from school, fewer are held back, and fewer drop out.
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In the technical language of education experts, girls are more academically “engaged.”