1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
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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,
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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.
| 3:45 p.m. | Registration | |
| 4:00 | Presentation: | Richard Whitmire, Author |
| Discussants: | Sara Mead, Bellwether Education Partners | |
| Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI | ||
| Moderator: | Mark Schneider, AEI |
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| 5:30 | Adjournment | |
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-862-5933
E-mail: raphael.gang@aei.org
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-862-5806
E-mail: hampton.foushee@aei.org
Speaker biographies
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. A former philosophy professor who taught ethics, she is probably best known for her critique of late-twentieth-century feminism. She is also known for her extensive writings, which include Who Stole Feminism? (Touchstone Books, 1995) and The War Against Boys (Touchstone Books, 2001). Her textbook, Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, a bestseller in college ethics courses, will soon appear in its eighteenth edition. She recently edited the The Science of Women and Science (AEI Press, 2009) and is preparing to write a book on the lost history of conservative feminism.
Sara Mead is a senior associate partner with Bellwether Education, where she focuses on thought leadership and strategic advising. Her work on federal education policy, charter schools, preschool, and gender in education has been featured in numerous media outlets including the Washington Post, New York Times, and USA Today, and she has appeared on CBS, ABC News, and NPR. Before joining Bellwether, Ms. Mead directed the New America Foundation's Early Education Initiative. She has also worked for Education Sector, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the U.S. Department of Education. Ms. Mead serves on the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which authorizes charter schools in the District of Columbia and holds them accountable for results, and on the board of Democrats for Education Reform.
Mark Schneider is vice president for new education initiatives at the American Institutes for Research and a visiting scholar at AEI. He is a former commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics--the primary federal office that collects and analyzes data relating to education--and he writes about a broad range of education issues, including charter schools, consumer choice in education, the relationship between school facilities and academic outcomes, and higher education policy. He also studies and writes about urban politics and public policy. He is the author and coauthor of numerous scholarly books and articles, including the award-winning Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools (Princeton University Press, 2000). From 2000 to 2001, he served as vice president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and simultaneously as president of APSA's public policy section. Mr. Schneider's research at AEI focuses on higher education, particularly the issue of accountability in postsecondary education.
Richard Whitmire, a veteran newspaper reporter and former editorial writer at USA Today, is the author of the recently published Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That's Leaving Them Behind (Amacom Books, 2010), which explores why males are falling behind in K-12 schools and why they are enrolling and graduating from colleges at lower rates than females. His commentaries have appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other publications. He has appeared on Good Morning America and Fox & Friends, and his work has been discussed by Education Next and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Mr. Whitmire is the immediate past president of the National Education Writers Association. In 2009 he was the project journalist for the Broad Prize for Urban Education. Most recently, he worked as a writer for a New America Foundation project on a successful developmental education program at Northern Virginia Community College.
