I'll admit, I'm surprised

At first, I kind of groaned when Eduwonk mentioned yesterday’s TNR article about the lagging achievement of boys. While I'm certainly aware of the seriousness of the issue, I’ve heard the “War Against Boys” arguments before. Indeed, the article started out w/ a snippy comment about people being upset by Larry Summers. But then, further down, this:

Combine Hilton's local research with national neuroscience research, and you arrive at this: The brains of men and women are very different. Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain associated with verbal skills. Now we've reached the heart of the mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers, especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills. Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.

[…]The teachers are only doing their jobs, preparing their students for a work world that has moved rapidly away from manufacturing and agriculture and into information-based work. It's not that schools have changed their ways to favor girls; it's that they haven't changed their ways to help boys adjust to this new world. (emphasis mine).

It's the first time I’ve heard this argument: that the skills our society requires are changing--and in a way that, to a degree, naturally favors girls' aptitudes. If this is true, at least part of the reason we're seeing the decline in boys’ achievement isn’t because we’ve encouraged girls at the expense of boys, but rather that we haven't thought about how to modify the way we teach to adapt an increased need for literacy skills to boys’ learning styles.

I find this stuff fascinating, but I'm also cautious. In the past, "scientific" notions of gender difference (now proven to be ridiculous) have repeatedly been used to oppress women and justify their absence in the highest echelons of power... hence the outrage at Summer’s comments that framed the TNR article. Teasing out the influence of nature and nurture in terms of gender tendencies is sticky territory—which I suspect is reflected in the absence of its inclusion in teacher prep programs. But, if the science that's emerging now is good, we'd be silly to completely ignore it in favor of a "we're all the same" mythology. The trick is to find the balance: what scientists acknowledge as tendencies to be dealt with could easily get codified into immutable truths or worse yet, excuses for persistent poor performance. Interesting work lies ahead for us on this one, I think.

ps. Whitmire complains that the ED report was only mentioned by name in 5 articles… then why doesn’t he mention it by name in his? I did a search of EdPubs, and couldn’t find anything from “about a year ago” that looked like what he was talking about. I’m curious: where does the data that says boys are performing worse relative to girls over time come from?