Letters

Your article "Boys to Men," (On Assignment, Jan. 23, 2002) provides a valuable overview of recent research on boys' problems and struggles in school. However, the article implies an opposition between earlier research on girls' experiences in school and new research on boys' outcomes.

The American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, whose 1992 study ("How Schools Shortchange Girls") you cite, believes, to the contrary, that research on the experiences of both sexes in education is complementary rather than in competition. Indeed, as many of the researchers you describe would agree, much of the current research on boys builds on a solid base of research in the 1980s and 1990s that trained our eyes on issues of gender and achievement in the first place.

To be sure, boys face problems in school, including higher rates of diagnosis for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and, by some measures, lower performance on reading tests, to name two. Yet we do not believe that research on gender and education is a zero-sum game, where there is room for only one "victim" in the schools. In fact, last year, the AAUW held a symposium, "Beyond the 'Gender Wars': A Conversation about Girls, Boys, and Education," at which experts on both boys and girls agreed that gender equity does not occur if girls win and boys lose, and vice versa. Rather, it is about finding approaches...