You're asking the wrong question about the boys

       New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks column, Honor Code, of July 5th, 2012 discusses the achievement gap between boys and girls.  Brooks describes how males are falling behind in a variety of subjects and attend and graduate college in far smaller numbers than do females.  Brooks worries that boys who don't fit in to the current sharing and sitting still culture are given Ritalin and told they are bad kids.  The real answer, accord to the non-teacher Brooks, is for schools to celebrate, "Not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose." 
       Forgive me, dearest David, but do you actually remember school?  School is all about winners and losers!  Yes, there are friends in school.  But from the first day of pre-kindergarten, school is about who wins the spelling bee, who makes the honor roll, who has the coolest backpack, who makes the basketball team, who gets the solo in the school musical, who gets a date to the dance.  What did you study in history class?  Because I learned about military victories - not how everybody just got along in some giant love-in.
       But I digress, that's not my real issue with David Brooks' column.  First of all, the achievement gap has been discussed in numerous news articles for years and years.  Somebody points out about how boys are falling behind girls in reading, college attendance, perfect posture, whatever.  The other side points out that at age 14, girls may be better at analyzing poetry about daffodils, but it's the boys who are going to have higher powered jobs and making more money 20 years later.  Nobody ever gets anywhere. 
       I think that the media keeps having the same discussion, and it's the wrong one.  I don't think that boys are falling behind girls, at least not in the way everybody keeps describing.  I don't think it's relevant to compare boys to girls in this way.  I think we should be comparing boys to other boys. 
        Sure, female college students outnumber male college students - overall.  But males students outnumber female students at Harvard Business School.  If you look at the most competitive programs, the achievement gap disappears.  There were 82 Rhodes Scholars in 2012, 40 were women, 42 were men.  The achievement gap was nowhere to be seen.  When it comes to who owns commercial and licensed patents, only 5.5% are owned by women.  Now let's look at the far end of the spectrum, specifically people on death row awaiting execution for a capital crime.  At the end of 2011, less than 2% of prisoners scheduled to be executed were women. 
       My point is that males are not falling behind females.  Young women are just taking advantage of educational opportunities their grandmothers may not have had.  Young men aren't falling behind young women.  Young men are becoming more stratified.  Young men go to elite business schools, and they get into gang fights.  They become millionaires, and they become deadbeat dads.   And most of the ladies are somewhere in between those two extremes.
       A few other things have happened to American society since this so called "achievement gap" started getting some attention.  The first is the growing percentage of Americans (mostly American men) behind bars since around 1980.  This isn't because crime is out of control so much as due to mandatory long sentences for drug crimes.  When a man is in jail, his children suffer tremendously.  Perhaps, although I have no figures to back this up, his sons suffer most of all without a male roll model.  Additionally, American society itself has become financially far more stratified than in previous decades.  If a young man can't rely on a secure, well-paying manufacturing job to provide for a family (as he possibly could have in 1955) he may see little use in straightening up and flying right. 
       Boys aren't falling behind girls.  They are just mirroring what is happening in society as a whole.  A few of them will win the science fair, and many more will just drop out.  And the average is slipping.  When compared to the more middle-of-the-road females, boys are, on average, dropping.  Much the way the average American household income doesn't have the same buying power it did in 1975, the average school boy's test scores are going down.  If you want to see boys do better in school, maybe it would be helpful if the adult men weren't in prison.  Maybe it would be helpful if the adult men could make a decent wage at a reasonable job. 
       Yes, David Brooks, I agree with you.  Schools do need a culture change.  But schools don't need to focus on celebrating toughness and physical exertion and winning - they already do that.  The message to a group of 12 year olds should not be:  any one of you could be the next President/founder of facebook/rock star.  The message should be:  with a little hard work and playing by the rules, even if you aren't the best at math/baseball/spelling, you'll still be able to get a decent job and have a good life.  And (here's the tricky part) it has to be true.