From Teachers College Record

http://www.tcrecord.org

Accessed November 20, 2006

Confronting the “Boy Problem”: A Self-Study Approach to Deepen Schools’ Moral Stance

by Michael C. Reichert & Richard A. Hawley — October 25, 2006

This article offers a perspective on common educational concerns regarding boys as arising, often unnoticed, from schools’ man-making curricula. With an eye to the effectiveness of schools’ moral missions in relation to boys, the authors describe an approach for discovering more grounded ideas and practices developed recently in a research consortium of coeducational and single sex schools.

Looking the Problem in the Faces

Arranging to meet with a group of the school's "most difficult" boys was not easy. Invited to the campus to conduct a year-long "audit" of the personal and scholastic development of its boys, we were inescapably outsiders to what was an unusually intimate boarding school community. As would be true of any deeply committed school faculty, the headmaster and his colleagues were understandably concerned about what the "auditors" might conclude from frank exchanges with its most marginal students—boys who struggled scholastically, who had periodically been in disciplinary scrapes, who were believed most likely to weigh in critically about the school's program and atmosphere.

These concerns notwithstanding, we sat down one morning in a seminar room with a dozen wary, but by no means disagreeable high school boys, most of them juniors and seniors. As they introduced themselves and began talking about their experience at the school, it was clear to us that they did indeed represent the strata of the student body we had hoped to see: those with the most uncertain prospects coming into the school; boys who had clearly not thrived in their previous schools; boys without much experience of success; and little confidence, when they entered, that they would find any such success in their new school. These were boys most frequently assigned "down there"—a special supervised study hall in the school basement for students who were poorly prepared for class on a daily basis.

In the course of our conference with the group, we asked students to share a personal high point of their year at the school. One boy, a senior named Tom with a bad case of acne and a difficult time making eye contact, was eager to go first. He offered that, "School and I are not friends," explaining that he had not done well academically and had generally not gotten along well with most of his teachers. The other boys laughed and nodded. From their comments and Tom's manner, we could imagine how uncooperative and unpleasant Tom was when cornered by academic requirements or adult authority.

 Then he told a story of how he had always been overweight but had recently lost 50 pounds. Asked how he had done this, Tom explained that he had been motivated by his wrestling coach, himself a father to two boys and a former state police trooper: "I respect Coach Ross so much I would do anything for him." We asked how his coach had motivated him and Tom explained, to another chorus of agreement, that this coach just "cared" and was both encouraging and challenging, and wouldn't be put off by any of the boy's usual antics. Tom had been trying harder at other aspects of school of late, showing up less often in required study hall and getting into less trouble. He even seemed proud of himself for these accomplishments.

This young man's story struck a chord for us, particularly as we heard it echoed many more times throughout focus groups we conducted with both students and staff over the course of our visits to the school: not often about weight loss per se, but always about the transformative power of a teacher or coach's efforts in relation to boys who have proven difficult to engage. As Tom's story dramatically attested, even edgy and contrary male students can achieve significant goals when they are reached by a school's program. Tom's eagerness to share his success revealed the most significant aspect of his turnaround: however resistant he had seemed to the school before he was reached by his coach, it was clear to us that he was happier now that he was productively engaged in school.

In our audits, where we have heard such stories consistently related to systematic school strategies such as advisory or student services, we hear evidence that schools have achieved a true understanding of their boys' educational needs. In the case of this particular school, it was important that they hear back from us—outside "experts"—that their dedicated work, as represented in the savvy of Tom's coach and that of many others, constitutes a state-of-the-art practice in boys' pedagogy. Our audit, in fact, is designed as much to validate and commend practices that work in schools as to point out prospects for growth. But, perhaps even more importantly, helping schools to address the kinds of problems commonly presented by different groups of male students strikes us as an important way to help schools extend their moral practice. Everyone at the school we visited—the other boys, the faculty—was impressed, even heartened, by Tom's transformation.

 Troubles with Boys

 We are in great need of good ideas in our educational and character building work with boys. Concern about male students has been rising in the U.S. and around the world. Though there is debate about the meaning of the findings, there is little dispute about their dimension: boys are increasingly falling behind in academic comparisons with girls. Much of this outcome reflects the success of schools, families, and societies in supporting educational equality for girls. New opportunity structures on all levels have buoyed this generation of female students to break through many barriers to school and subsequent success. A front-page New York Times article (Lewin, 2006) made clear that across every major ethnic group in the U.S., and throughout most of the industrialized countries, girls earn a growing percentage of college degrees. After college, as they enter the world of work, though women still earn less than men in comparable positions and men predominate in the highest-paying jobs (Murphy, 2006), the pay gap between women’s and men’s wages has shrunk to the “smallest on record” (Conlin, 2003, p. 82). In large part, new concern about boys arose because educational and vocational efforts have been successful for girls. As a report from an educational think tank recently characterized the “boy crisis,” “The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse; it’s good news about girls doing better” (Mead, 2006, p. 3).

But the same report underscored that a college attainment disparity between male and female students has developed as much because of boys' greater likelihood to drop out before graduation and the fact that fewer male students enroll in college to begin with as because of girls' success. In her overstated cover story for Newsweek, Tyre (2006) wrote that from elementary years all the way through graduate and professional training programs, patterns in boys' achievement reveal that more boys than ever appear to be turning off to education. The article cites one study indicating that the number of boys who said they "didn't like school" has risen 71 percent over the last two decades (p. 46). And in the world of work, where women's participation in the labor force has displayed robust growth, the participation of males shows flat earnings and increasing signs of "dropping out" (Conlin, 2003, p. 80).

We regret that comparisons between boys and girls have had a perverse effect on educational debate, inviting quirky, opportunistic policy recommendations and sparking the present "moral panic" among those uncomfortable with women's gains (Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998). Many, in fact, have read backlash into the attention paid to boys' educational struggles (Epstein et al, 1998; Martino & Meyenn, 2001). But we trust that the faddish romance with uncertain brain science (Gurian & Stevens, 2005; Sax, 2005) and the more serious resurrection of "ancient forms" (Hawley, 1991) like single sex schooling for new populations of urban boys, are also commonly motivated by a moral imperative that schools find more effective approaches to boys. Even though, as Cohen (1998) helpfully pointed out, boys have long had problems fitting themselves to the demands of schooling in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy (Friedman, 1999), the broad-scale failure of schools to be more successful with boys, including boys like Tom, is simply unwise and unjust (Weaver-Hightower, 2005).

Boys dramatically dominate the poorest levels of school performance in most schools and school districts. Though the particular school we were visiting when we interviewed Tom and his fellow bottom dwellers was a boys' school, when we have conducted similar audits in coeducational settings, this fact has consistently stood out: as much as 90 percent of students in the bottom quartile of achievement, even at the most elite and accomplished schools, are male. There are boys like Tom, exhibiting academic, motivational, relational and behavioral problems, in just about every school the two of us have experienced in our combined 60 years working with schools of all types. And, turned off to the central goals of schooling, boys are primed for trouble. In one school we visited that relied upon a demerit system to manage student behavior, an end of year tally showed boys' demerits outnumbering the girls' by 10,000 to 200! Just as their poor achievement reflects their disengagement from the school’s academic program, so have boys' bad behaviors       indicated the degree to which school rewards and sanctions often miss their mark. As one school dean described the frustration he and his colleagues felt as they dealt with boys' bad behavior: "They just don't buy in!"

We have learned some disturbing things about schools' bottom ranks. Especially dismaying has been the finding in our research that once a boy's achievement places him at the bottom of his class, he is six times more likely to graduate high school in that same bottom quartile. In other words, it is unlikely, given what boys carry with them into the schools we have studied and how those schools respond to them, that boys will learn much that will help them to be more successful. Another finding, reported with great consistency across many national studies and echoed in our own work, is that it is often boys of color and of lower social class, in particular, who wind up at the bottom in schools (Ravitch, 1998; Epstein, et al., 1998; Salamone, 2003). This finding has occurred to such an extent that psychologist Claude Steele (1992) has written of academic "disidentification" to explain the poor school performance of many African American boys. Such snapshots of the bottom of academic rankings present a worrisome picture of the psychological fallout from our curricula for boys, indeed.

Justice and Schooling

Poor school achievement, disciplinary problems, over-diagnosis and referral to special educational services, athletic over-injury, bullying, peer harassment and school violence: these are some of the issues that raise concerns about the effectiveness of schooling for boys. In fact, we have found these kinds of problems to be so widespread and predictable, in school upon school, that we have come to think of them as virtually institutionalized. As such, because they represent defining features of the educational landscape that confronts boys entering our schools, we must question the fairness and justice of our approach to boys.

For the past several decades, concerns for equity and justice have properly focused on ensuring that schools' gender curricula eliminate bias and barriers to equal rights, equal access, and fairness for girls. This work has "come a long way" but must now extend even further—as researchers from the Wellesley Center for Women proposed—to "a conceptualization of gender as a set of social constructions and societal assumptions about the possibilities and limits of male and female experience and behavior" (Spencer, Porche & Tolman, 2003, p. 2). In particular, among the societal assumptions still limiting girls' educational experience, is a "public-private dialectic in social life and schooling itself, and men's and women's asymmetrical relations with that dialectic" (Foster, 1998, p. 1). Addressing such myths and social constructions is necessary if we are to continue to make schooling and its rewards fully accessible to girls, these writers argue. Even more profoundly, in terms of the moral lessons students absorb from school communities, Fine (1992) has argued for an expanded understanding of equality of opportunity: "With access to this moral community established as legitimate and universal, the issue of social justice has shifted to the process of exclusion, that is, students' differential experiences and outcomes once inside these communities" (p. 102). More baldly, according to Valerie Lee, educational equity will be indicated by "the absence of gender differences in educational outcomes" (1997, p. 139).

But for boys it seems we must first deal with our ambivalence about the need for justice in their lives. Efforts to advance boys' full psychological and social access to education have been met with skepticism, even as they have also generated lots of press, and have been characterized as the coded, unconscious, backlash impulse to lick male wounds—"masculinity therapy" (Connell, 1995)—and to shore up male advantage—"recuperative masculinity" (Lingard and Douglas, 1999). Yet at the most obvious level, as the Ms. Foundation report explained, "A focus on boys is crucial. Boys—and the men that they become—are active participants in and gatekeepers of a rigid gender order that structures our lives, informs our public policy and creates and defeats possibilities for boys and men, and for girls and women" (Pimentel, 2004, p. 1).

And, more basically, societies (not to mention, schools) get the men they grow: as research attests, if we want males who can care about fairness and justice for others, we must create schools in which they experience justice—in their classes, relationships, school experiences, and outcomes. Berkowitz (1997; 2002), for example, culled through the various efforts to teach morality and values for "what works in schools" and came up with a number of "rules of thumb" (2002). First, he made clear that the "primary influence on a child's character development is how people treat the child" (p. 58). To our minds, his finding suggests the critical importance of ensuring that boys experience schools as welcoming, safe, supportive, and hopeful opportunities, spaces in which they can see possibilities for, in terms of Young's "enabling" theory of justice, "the development or exercise of capacities" (1990, p. 39). Access to educational opportunity, in other words, must take into account social and school conditions that can either enable the exercise of students' capacities, or create insurmountable barriers to their educational investment.

For boys—ones like Tom, and many others who struggle to fit themselves to the structures, pedagogy, and relationships of schools—are there biases and barriers impeding the exercise of their abilities, woven into the practices, beliefs and very ways we "recognize" boys in our schools (Mann, 1994)? More practically, how well are we enabling boys to learn? To our minds, despite the current buzz, it seems that much of what happens for boys in schools escapes notice, much less good explanation. For example, given the gender effect in achievement outcomes, where boys in each major U.S. ethnic group—whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans—perform less well than their female counterparts, what can we say we know about how schools actually influence boys' education? Clearly, there is something to schools' "masculinity curricula" exacerbating class and race pressures and mediating boys' investment in learning and schooling. But, exactly how does this curriculum operate?

At the broadest level, what researchers have been learning is that schools are both active agents in promoting particular ideas of masculinity ("masculinizing practices," according to Connell, 1996) as well as sites within which boys act out certain gender scripts in relation to each other. The various identities available to boys within a particular school culture are almost always organized hierarchically (Reichert, 2000; 2001). The dominant identity is not necessarily the most common type of masculinity, but will be the most influential, and is usually organized around qualities such as physical size and skill, affluence, emotional control, social confidence and latent, sometimes overt, violence (Reichert & Kuriloff, 2004; Kuriloff & Reichert, 2003). Spending so much time in their particular school, boys' experiences of the school's "gender regime" (Connell, 1996), while generally unconscious, is highly consequential: "It confronts them as a social fact, which they have to come to terms with somehow" (Kessler, et al., 1985, p. 42).

Boys' experience of schools' gender curricula bear directly on their relationship to education in the sense that, as they "do gender," they adapt themselves to the opportunities afforded them by the pressures, inducements, and punishments of the school community's norms and gender possibilities (Swain, 2005). Some boys find room to care about academic achievement and establish positive relationships with the reward and authority structures of schools. Others have more difficulty. Chu (2000), in a careful microstudy, accompanied a group of boys through school and described the "overcompromise" some boys make with this masculinity structure and the attendant "psychological costs and social consequences" of this adaptation (Froschl & Sprung, 2005, p. 5).

But Chu's respectful approach toward boys is still too rare. We fear that, though the past decade has created more consensus about concerns for boys, it has led to more politicization than humility. From those on the right, a "war against boys" has been claimed as an outgrowth of the women's movement and society's push for social justice (Sommers, 2000). From the left, there have been a host of feminist critiques of "masculinism." In 2004, for example, the Ms. Foundation convened a symposium among researchers and practitioners that called for a "full-scale transformation in how we imagine, define, and model masculinity" (Pimentel, 2004, p. 19). Michael Kimmel, a spokesperson for the National Association of Men Against Sexism and preeminent pro-feminist sociologist, has argued that it is our conception of boyhood itself, as "the entitlement to and the anticipation of power" that interferes with boys' abilities to invest themselves in efforts to learn in school (Foster, Kimmel & Skelton, 2001, p. 16).

While both perspectives may offer real insight into the situation for boys, we have come to believe that too many of the reactions to boys' troubles offered today share the problem named by Maxine Greene, of "seeing things small": "To see things or people small, one chooses to see from a detached point of view, to watch behaviors from the perspective of a system, to be concerned with trends and tendencies rather than the intentionality and concreteness of everyday life” (1995, p. 10). We suggest that too many of those drawn to respond to boys' educational problems have done so impelled by their own predispositions, detached from boys themselves. Over the past several decades, social science has helped developmentalists and educators realize the key role of methods of inquiry for generating solutions to problems of inclusion and equity. Gilligan (1982), for example, discovered her insights into girls' lives by cultivating a new sensitivity to their voices. Dynamics of power, she concluded, were woven into all social interactions, including research efforts to capture girls' experience, requiring methods that account for the impact of the research context itself on subjects' ability to name and describe their experience. Michelle Fine, another feminist methodologist, said it well: "The only way to do activist research is to be positioned explicitly with questions, but not answers; as mobile and multiple, not static and singular; within spaces of rich surprise" (1992, p. 230). Or, as another feminist researcher put it, "If we want someone to tell it like it is, you have to hear it like it is" (Reinharz, 1988, p. 16).

In sum, we have come to feel that the most helpful and humane perspective on the "boy problem" may require an intellectual openness to boys themselves and to what may appear to be opposed, or at least dissonant, understandings of masculinity. It is certainly possible—and practically very important—to navigate through the implications of opposing gender theories while addressing clear and present problems actual boys face in their schools and beyond.

Discovering Better Ideas for Boys' Education

Can schools, for the sake of including male students more fully, apply the insights about voice and the lived realities of students' experience to their curricula for boys? Can we discover, from a careful study of the boys in our lives, a more fine-grained understanding of how schools actually work for them? Our efforts over the past several years—in co-ed, coordinate, and single-sex schools—have been encouraging. In 2001, five U.S. independent schools came together to create a new consortium, the Center for the Study of Boys' Lives, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Two of these schools are day schools for boys, one is a boys day school with a coordinate program and a contiguous girls school, one is a co-ed day school that converted from a girls school in the 1970s, and one is a top-tier boarding school that became co-educational in the 1990s after a long career as a boys school. Each of the schools, in short, has a considerable track record dedicated to boys' education and reasonable claim, on that basis, to success and expertise in that work. Yet, their support for the new center reflected their desire to put a finer point on that expertise. The mission of the new center was "to conduct research, encourage public discussion, and advocate on behalf of boys. Using research tools that give voice to boys' lived experiences, the center will strive to promote the widest sense of possibility and greatest hope for integrity in boys' lives…" (Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives, 2001).

Member schools worried that their historic curricula for educating boys might unwittingly feed whatever educational struggles their male students experienced. More dimly, perhaps, but more courageously, at some level they wished to be sure that their own man-making curricula was not implicated in the problems boys were evidencing. Helping schools to excavate their "hidden" masculinity curricula through a process of school-based action research, The Center for the Study of Boys' Lives was also committed to helping them develop programs based on actual evidence, systematically collected such as: how were the boys doing, what did they need, how did they react to the schools' efforts? These schools developed a protocol for conducting systematic research on their boys, with a commitment from the start to translate what they found into new programming, and to follow these curricular innovations with regular evaluation research.

The schools, thus joined, hoped that what they learned about working with their own boys could be generalized to other schools. Based upon their experience conducting research on many different aspects of boys' experience in schools, the center has developed a Boys' Audit for other schools interested in deepening the evidence basis for their curriculum. The Boys' Audit is a combination of directed self-study and rigorous outside assessment enabling participating schools to take a measure of how well boys are thriving in a number of scholastic, personal, and interpersonal domains. The audit should serve to confirm positive practices already in place, and it may also point to practices that could serve boys better. Perhaps the most important result for the school undertaking an audit is a greater awareness of what it is doing on behalf of its boys, how well these efforts are working, and prospects for improving these efforts.

The protocol for the CSBL Boys' Audit emphasizes mixed methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, internally driven and externally directed. It is designed to be both rigorous, combining nationally accepted survey instruments with sophisticated statistical analyses, and capacity-building with a school-based team charged with guiding the process, collecting data and responding to recommendations. In the end, the goal is to help schools describe how boys are doing. The full protocol of the Boys' Audit includes these elements:

A student survey sampling multiple domains, including self-concept, masculine identity, risk-taking, emotional wellness, connection and character education lessons;

•    A faculty survey designed to elicit shared perceptions and beliefs about both boys' development and boys' education;

•    A self-study guide to assist an internal team in their inventory of the school's current boys' curriculum;

•    Focus groups with both students and faculty conducted during visits to the school by the audit team to provide an independent perspective on student and faculty experience.

•    An outcomes inventory, to create a statistical portrait of educational and behavioral outcomes such as GPA, standardized test scores, and college placement.

•    A summary report and faculty workshop intended to provide overall commendations and recommendations, as well as to facilitate faculty discussion about reactions and next steps.

Extending the Reach of Our Moral Communities

Returning to Tom for a moment, we realize that his story of finding a mentor and a pathway to some success in his school stirred us because we have seen so many boys like him grow hardened, cynical, and nihilistic, committed to failure in school. Stories such as his give us hope to the extent that they suggest the possibilities for a group of students—hapless, disaffected males—who seem bound and determined to make all the wrong choices. Possibility—instead of narrowed options and the default position of boys merely fitting themselves to conventional identities—always inspires hope for a different, better future.

Research on boyhood has begun to detail the pressures, peer inducements, and narrowed choices that influence many boys' school performance. While it is important to acknowledge boys' agency in their self-development, it is critical that schools also appreciate the degree to which their gender structures can constrain the freedom boys actually experience as they navigate their way through these processes. Good research in the case of girls demonstrated a potential to guide educational policy in the direction of greater sensitivity to lived experience and more accurate pedagogy. The results, for generations of girls now and to come, validate the usefulness of that approach. Given the increased attention focused upon the "boy problem" on the part of educators, therapists, and the commercial media, it is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to institutions and practices that clearly work. In certain settings and in certain schools, boys continue to thrive. The current crisis some see in boys falling further behind girls' educational accomplishments should underscore the opportunities before us, if we can get up under the real aspirations and needs of boys. Good research on boys' lives is likely to benefit all boys, achievers and under-achievers alike, as schools become better informed about the nuances and actual workings of their gender curricula on the many different kinds of boys in their care.

Not to mention the way such work can benefit schools themselves. How much pain, in faculty hopelessness and frustration at boys' poor performance or bad behavior, do schools routinely endure? How much negative attention is devoted to boys who can only seem to act out in disruptive, self-destructive, or angry ways? How many teachers' careers that began with the greatest hopes for helping children toward positive futures crashed on the unyielding rocks of a boyhood that flat out rejects what they have to offer?

Sizer & Sizer (1999) and many others have drawn our attention to schools as moral communities. What their work—and the research of others directed to the moral lessons children absorb from their experience in schools (Peterson & Seligman, 2004 ; Solomon, et al., 2000)—suggests is that we must first know how boys actually experience their schools, and second, we must build our curricula upon this more careful, better informed understanding. Only by undertaking the work of listening and observing can we expect to connect our schools to male students or to translate our caring for them into concrete practices that make education safe, accessible, and uplifting.

The authors would like to thank Professor Peter Kuriloff of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania,  Brett Stoudt, Senior Research Associate and Christopher Soto, Research Assistant, of the Center for the Study of Boys' Lives, for their important feedback and challenge to earlier drafts of this paper.

References

Berkowitz, M. W. (1997). The complete moral person: Anatomy and formation. In J.M. DuBois (Ed.), Moral issues in psychology: Personalist contributions to selected problems, (pp. 11-42). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Berkowitz, M.W. (2002). The science of character education. In W. Damon (Ed.), Bringing in a new era in character education, (pp. 43-63). Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

Cohen, M. (1998). A 'habit of healthy idleness': Boys' underachievement in historical perspective. In D. Epstein, J. Elwood, V. Hey & J. Maw (Eds.), Failing Boys?, (pp. 19-34). Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Connell, R. W. (1996). Teaching the boys: new research on masculinity and gender strategies for schools. Teachers College Record, 98(2), 206-235.

Chu, J.Y. (2000). Learning what boys know: An observational and interview study with six four year old boys. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Boston.

Conlin, M. (2003, May 26). The new gender gap. Business Week, 75-82.

Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives. (2001). Brochure. Haverford, PA: Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives.

Epstein, D. (1998). Real boys don't work: 'underachievement', masculinity and the harassment of 'sissies'. In D. Epstein, J. Elwood, V. Hey & J. Maw(Eds.), Failing boys: Issues in gender and achievement, (pp. 96-108). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Fine, M. (1992). Disruptive voices: The possibilities of feminist research. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Foster, V. (1998). Gender, schooling and post-school pathways: Beyond statistics and populist discourse. Paper presented at the meeting of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Adelaide, AU.

Foster, V., Kimmel, M. & Skelton, C. (2001). 'What about the boys?' An overview of the debates. In W. Martino & B. Meyenn (Eds.), What about the boys?  (pp. 1-23). Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Friedman, T.L. (1999). The lexus and the olive tree. NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Froschl, M. & Sprung, B. (2005). Raising and educating healthy boys: A report on the growing crisis in boys' education. New York: Academy for Educational Development.

Gilbert, R. & Gilbert, P. (1998). Masculinity goes to school. St. Leonard's, UK: Allen & Unwin.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.

Gurian, M. & Stevens, K. (2005). What is happening with boys in schools? Teachers College Record, Date Published: May 02, 2005. http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 11854, Date Accessed: 9/29/2006 2:29:00 PM.

Hawley, R. (1991). About boys' schools: a progressive case for an ancient form. Teachers College Record, 92(3), 433-444.

Kessler, S., Ashendon, D.J., Connell, R.W. & Dowsett, G.W. (1985). Gender relations in secondary schooling. Sociology of Education, 58, 34-48.

Kuriloff, P. & Reichert, M.C. (2003, November). Boys of color, boys of class: Negotiating the academic and social geography of an elite independent school. Journal of Social Issues, 59(4)

Lee, V. E. (1997). Gender equity and the organization of schools. In B.J. Bank & P.M. Hall (Eds.), Gender, equity, and schooling: policy and practice (pp. 135-158). New York: Garland Publishing.

Lewin, T. (2006, July 9). At colleges, women are leaving men in the dust. The New York Times, A1.

Lingard, B. & Douglas, P. (1999). Men engaging feminisms. Philadelphia: Open University Press.Mann, P. S. (1994). Micropolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Martino, W. & Meyenn, B. (Eds.) (2001). What about the boys? Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Mead, S. (2006). The evidence suggests otherwise: The truth about boys and girls. Washington, DC: Education Sector.

Murphy, E. (2006). Getting even: Why women don't get paid like men - and what to do about it. New York: Touchstone.

Peterson, C. & Seligman, M. (2004). Character strengths and virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pimentel, A. (2004). Supporting boys' resilience: A dialogue with researchers, practitioners and the media. New York: The Ms. Foundation for Women.

Ravitch, D. (1998, December 17). Girls are beneficiaries of gender gap. The Wall Street Journal, A22.

Reichert, M. C. (2000). Disturbances of difference: Lessons from a boys' school. In M. Fine & L. Weis (Eds.), Construction sites: Excavating class, race and gender among urban youth. New York: Teachers College Press.

Reichert, M.C. (2001). Rethinking boys' lives: New ideas for schools. In W. Martino & B. Meyenn, (Eds.), Teaching boys: Issues of masculinity in schools. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Reichert, M.C. & Kuriloff, P. (2004, March). Boys' selves: Identity and anxiety in the looking glass of school life. Teachers College Record, 106(3), 544-573.

Reinharz, S. (1988). The concept of voice. Paper presented at meeting of Human Diversity, Perspectives on People Context. University of Maryland, College Park.

Salamone, R. C. (2003). Same, different, equal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sax, L. (2005). Why gender matters. New York: Doubleday.

Sizer, T.R. & Sizer, N.F. (1999). The students are watching: Schools and the moral contract. Boston: Beacon.

Solomon, D., Battistich, V., Watson, M., Schaos, E. & Lewis, C. (2000). A six-district study of educational change: direct and mediated effects of the child development project. Social Psychology of Education, 4, 3-51.

Sommers, C.H. (2000). The war against boys. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Spencer, R., Porche, M.V. & Tolman, D.L. (2003). We've come a long way-maybe: New challenges for gender equity in education. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1774-1807.

Steele, C.M. (1992, April). Race and the schooling of Black Americans. Atlantic Monthly, 68-78.

Swain, J. (2005). Masculinities and education. In M.S. Kimmel, J. Hearn & R.W. Connell (Eds.), Handbook of studies on men and masculinities, (pp. 213-229). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Tyre, P. (2006, January 30). The trouble with boys. Newsweek, 44-52.

Weaver-Hightower, M. (2005). Dare the school build a new education for boys? Teachers College Record, Date Published: February 14, 2005 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 11743, Date Accessed: 9/29/2006 2:32:35 PM.

Young, I.M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.