Excerpt from The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The difference between Britain and the United States is perhaps most striking in government policy. At a time when the British government is confronting and constructively dealing with boys' underachievement as a serious national problem, American government agencies are behaving like resource-rich chapters of the AAUW, dutifully pursuing policies of girl advocacy, including initiatives to raise girls' self-esteem and help them find their "voices." The U.S. Department of Education disseminates more than 300 pamphlets, books, and working papers on gender equity, none of these aimed at helping boys achieve parity with girls in the nation's schools. As the plight of boys grows, with no relief in sight, programs for girls multiply. One recent initiative is Girl Power! In 1997, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala launched Girl Power! to raise public awareness about the needs of America's demoralized girls. The National Science Foundation spends millions each year to offer remedial programs to help girls with their science and math skills. The idea of special reading and writing classes for boys rarely surfaces. In schools, boys are the gender at risk. But no one is asking for money to cope with their academic shortfalls.

In this climate, so inhospitable to boys, American educators who wish to help boys face formidable obstacles. Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., includes several poor, mostly black public schools. According to one school board member, many of the boys "are at the bottom in every respect, in every academic indicator, every social development indicator." To help such boys, the county organized a "Black Male Achievement Initiative." Beginning in the early nineties, approximately forty young men met two weekends a month with a group of professional men for tutoring and mentoring. The program was popular and effective. But in 1996, it was radically restructured by order of the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, which found that it discriminated against girls. The woman who chaired the Prince George's County School Board was pleased: "The point here is that we were shortchanging female students, and we're not going to do that anymore."

In the United States, a proposal to do something special for boys usually gets plowed under before it has a chance to take root. In 1996, New York City public schools established the Young Women's Leadership School, an all-girls public school in East Harlem. The school is a great success and many, including The New York Times, urged then Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew to establish a "similar island of excellence for boys." Crew rejected the idea of a comparable all-boys school. He regarded the girls' school as reparatory for past educational practices that neglected girls. That made it permissible. As he told the Times, "This is a case where the existence of the all-girls school makes an important statement about the viable education of girls. I want to continue to make that statement." Presumably the statement would lose its force and point if an all-boys school were allowed to exist alongside.

What do such statements say to the boys in East Harlem? For the record, African-American women vastly outnumber African-American men in higher education. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, "Black women in the United States account for nearly all of the gains in black enrollment in higher education over the past 15 years." In 1994, for example, African-American women earned 63 percent of bachelor's degrees and 66 percent of master's degrees awarded to African Americans. At historically black colleges women comprise 60 percent of enrollments, and make up 80 percent of the honor roll. The disparities are worsening.

One wonders what happened to black males between the early eighties and the late nineties. It would be an apt question for another PEN conference to explore. It would have been an apt question for Chancellor Crew to consider. But in gender-equity circles, that question is of little interest, if not altogether taboo.

Copyright © 2000 by Christina Hoff Sommers