Over the past several months, a phenomenon that had been mostly invisible for a decade or more--boys falling behind girls in school--has now resurfaced. This past November, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced that it was investigating whether colleges were discriminating against women by admitting less-qualified males. In January, the Pew Research Center released a highly publicized report on the fast-changing economic relations between the sexes, with married women increasingly finding themselves the family breadwinners and single women now more likely having to decide whether to "marry down" to a less-educated male.

In Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That's Leaving Them Behind (Amacom Books, 2010), Richard Whitmire, former USA Today editorial writer and board member of the National Education Writers Association, proposes that boys are falling behind because of awkward school reforms, not because girls are doing better. Whitmire explains that this recent trend is mostly the result of the push by school reformers to make students more college-ready while not taking into account the fact that young boys might have a difficult time absorbing intensive verbal skills at an early age. As the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind looms ahead, and the Obama administration pushes for national standards and Race to the Top funding, an important question remains: what can be done to keep boys from failing?

At this event, Mr. Whitmire; Sara Mead, Bellwether Education Partners senior associate partner; and Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI resident scholar and author of The War Against Boys, discussed these and other issues. AEI visiting scholar Mark Schneider moderated.