by Ivan Johnson, Middle School Program Head and Tom Baker, Middle School Social Studies Teacher

I’ve noticed that lately, the news is full of articles about boys falling behind in school. When I bring this up in different circles, I get strong reactions. Some folks believe there’s a real issue to address, while others feel it’s been blown way out of proportion. Still others argue that the very idea of a “boy crisis” is less about boys themselves and more a natural result of the strides made by the movement for gender equality.

For example:

• The New York Times published two opposing op-eds within a month: It’s Not Just a Feeling: Data Shows Boys and Young Men Are Falling Behind and The ‘Boy Crisis’ Is Overblown.

   

• Fox News ran a street-level report: Are young men falling further behind?.

   

• MSNBC featured: Boys falling behind girls in education, data shows.

   

First, anytime the news claims to have “analyzed the data,” concerning schools, I think it’s worth questioning. Not because reporters have bad intentions, but because understanding how schools work and what actually helps students is far more complicated than headlines suggest.

The problem with analyzing data in schools is that it can give a very misleading picture. Every spring, most schools hand out a standardized test, and kids take it after nine months with a teacher. On the surface, it looks like you could judge the teacher by how those kids score. But learning doesn’t work that way. It isn’t neat or rational. It’s an art. It’s messy and surprising. It takes creativity. And when learning finally clicks, it can be just as much about hormones and brain development as it is about the teacher in the room.

And that’s only one layer. Students carry years of schooling with them. Maybe last year they had a weaker teacher, or perhaps they’re dealing with stress at home. Often, the best teachers are assigned the hardest classes. All of that matters. Which is why trying to reduce something as complex as learning to a single set of test scores is absurd. And when news outlets turn that same inconclusive data into sweeping claims about boys “falling behind”? That’s even more absurd.

These reactions have led me to hypothesize that at the core of the issue of boys falling behind is measurement: how we assess development and potential.

Think about height in fifth grade. At that age, girls are often taller than boys, and if you freeze the picture there, you might assume girls will always be taller. But give it a few years, and the growth patterns flip. The same thing can happen with academics. Boys often develop later, and if we rely on early test scores alone, we risk branding them as underperformers before their growth has even begun. This belief, instilled in the education system at a young age, has broader implications. In other words, the danger lies not just in misunderstanding the potential of a learner, but in how that learner begins to believe they are not capable of or deserving to be in academic spaces.

Psychologist Claude Steele takes this further in Whistling Vivaldi, showing how these kinds of assumptions become a form of stereotype pressure that weighs on all learners. He explains how stereotype threat, often unconscious, adds a mental burden to learning something beyond the task itself. He writes, “The problem is that the pressure to disprove a stereotype changes what you are about in a situation. It gives you an additional task…You are multitasking, and because the stakes involved are high…this multitasking is stressful and distracting,” (Steele 111). So if you are a student who believes the teacher sees you as a problem and distracting, or not capable, slow, behind everyone else, or with no potential, then while you are learning or being assessed, you will be forced to multitask by dealing with the academic content and the voice in your head telling you that you are not capable.

He goes on to say the solution isn’t to push harder on students’ internal attitudes, but to change their environments: “If you want to change the behaviors and outcomes associated with social identity—say, too few women in computer science—don’t focus on changing the internal manifestations of the identity, such as values, and attitudes. Focus instead on changing the contingencies to which all of that internal stuff is an adaptation,” (Steele 215). Many kids have tendencies that don’t suit them well for heavily structured environments that limit individual autonomy. Oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and anger are highly associated in kids with ADHD, and even higher in boys (Meyer et al., 2023). It simply doesn’t feel right to put all kids into the same environment and judge them accordingly. 

Who actually gets to feel confident in school? As a society, we’re not doing a great job of helping boys build that confidence at a young age. Since the 1990s, boys are less likely to have college degrees (Schaeffer, 2022). They are also less likely to graduate high school (Dynarski et al., 2022). After dropping out, that means higher rates of crime, substance abuse, suicides, poverty, and unemployment (Maynard et al., 2015). In 2020-21, nearly 500 preschool kids were expelled in the U.S. every week, and of those, 380 were boys (U.S. Department of Education, 2021). But that doesn’t mean other types of learners are being supported instead. Neurodiversity isn’t just a label for a small group of students—it’s the recognition that every brain is different. Learning and academic expression should be shaped to fit each learner. No matter your identity or intersecting experiences, especially in middle school and below, schools must focus first on individual needs. 

That also means rethinking how we measure success. If we depend too heavily, if at all, on standardized metrics, we create narrow definitions of achievement that undermine confidence and misrepresent ability. For lower achievers in academics, those who are targeted toward mastery goals – pursuing their own self-improvement – are associated with lower disruptive behavior, while those with performance goals – trying to outperform others – are associated with more disruptive behavior (Gheen et al., 2002). This suggests that educational environments that rank kids or use traditional grading systems may be causing more behavioral problems. What we need instead are alternative systems of measurement that honor growth, creativity, and different developmental timelines. As Claude Steele reminds us, the key is to shift the conditions of learning so that every student has a fair chance to see themselves as capable and to be seen that way by others.

Yet, if we swing too far in the other direction, emphasizing capability without pairing it with high expectations, we risk undermining growth. Out of fear of discouraging children, parents and teachers may stop holding them accountable. Without clear expectations, students often gravitate toward activities that require little self-regulation or perseverance, such as endless video games or TikTok scrolling. Over time, this erodes grit and resilience, creating habits that can have lifelong consequences. School should be challenging, and we should never suggest that students don’t need to work hard. The task is to balance: set expectations high enough to demand effort while also making goals feel attainable, so that students’ sense of worth is not tied to test scores but to their growth and persistence.

Middle school is a pivotal time for building self-confidence in all kids. The prefrontal cortex, which governs the executive function skills essential for success in school, continues developing into the late teens and early twenties, making it especially sensitive to environmental influences as kids grow. The earlier these skills are learned and the more they’re practiced, the more established they’ll be in the brain’s neural structure as it continues to develop through adolescence and young adulthood (Thomas et al., 2020). If kids experience success early, it becomes part of who they are. That resilience is what stays, not any measure or metric. Helping all children, regardless of gender, identity, or background, learn in ways that suit them isn’t just inclusive, it’s essential for cultivating confident, capable adults down the road.

Works Cited

Dynarski, Mark, et al. The Unreported Gender Gap in High School Graduation Rates. Brookings, 9 Mar. 2022, www.brookings.edu/articles/the-unreported-gender-gap-in-high-school-graduation-rates/.

Gheen, Mia, Avi Kaplan, and Carol Midgley. “Classroom Goal Structure and Student Disruptive Behaviour.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 72, no. 2, 2002, pp. 191–211. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1348/000709902158847.

Maynard, Brandy R., Christopher P. Salas-Wright, and Michael G. Vaughn. “High School Dropouts in Emerging Adulthood: Substance Use, Mental Health Problems, and Crime.” Community Mental Health Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2015, pp. 289–99. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-014-9760-5.

Meyer, Anneline, Reabetswe M. Mphahlele, and B. J. Pillay. “Symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder and Anger in Children with ADHD.” South African Journal of Education, vol. 43, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.15700/saje.v43n1a2136.

Schaeffer, Katherine. “10 Facts about Today’s College Graduates.” Pew Research Center, 12 Apr. 2022, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/12/10-facts-about-todays-college-graduates/.

Steele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Thomas, S., Denis Mareschal, and Iroise Dumontheil. Educational Neuroscience: Development across the Life Span. Routledge, 2020.

U.S. Department of Education. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). 2021, civilrightsdata.ed.gov/.