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Boys falling behind

Why Boys Are Falling Behind In School (And How To Fix It)

American schools and kindergarten specifically are not designed for boys … But they should be. That’s the conclusion from a piece in the New York Times this weekend that focuses on why boys are regularly falling behind girls when it comes to their performance in primary schools:

“Kindergarten has become significantly more academic because of the effects of a national law passed in 2001, with children expected to spend more time sitting still and learning math and reading — and many boys do not enter with the skills to meet those expectations … in just over a decade, teachers had allocated much more time to academic subjects and desk work, and less time to art, music and activities like blocks or dramatic play.”

There are several ways experts suggest to solve this problem. The first, which would benefit both boys and girls, is to bring more play and activities back into the earliest schooling years. There is plenty of research suggesting that this is how kindergarten children of any gender learn best. Other suggestions include trying to recruit more male teachers who “could be role models who know what it’s like to be a boy in school,” and generally including more movement, music, time outside to help children build skills like self-regulation and executive function.

Alongside emerging research showing that the long-standing metric of teacher to student ratio may be flawed, it seems we need to rethink some of the more fundamental assumptions around how we educate children and what works.

Just as we are seeing many initiatives right now targeted at supporting girls in later years of school to further achievement in STEM fields (for example), it seems we also now need a similar focus on making sure we have the right methods to ensure that boys don’t fall behind at an early age too. The only way the world gets better for everyone in the next generation is to make sure we aren’t unintentionally leaving anyone behind.

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