Peg Tyre says schools may not be designed

in ways that encourage boys to do well

            CLEARWATER, Fla. (Oct. 30, 2008) -- Journalist Peg Tyre didn’t set out to write a book about the problems that boys have in school. As a feminist, she admitted Wednesday to a gathering at St. Petersburg College’s Clearwater campus, she was really more interested in academic challenges faced by girls.

            But it wasn’t long, she said, before she realized there were a number of problems that seemed to be holding male students back.

            The result is “The Trouble with Boys,” a book that came out last month and which quickly found its way to the New York Times Best Seller list. Tyre discussed the findings of her book Wednesday during an appearance at the Arts Auditorium. Watch the video.

            In her book, she acknowledged the efforts of St. Petersburg College. She visited the college while she was doing her research and was most impressed.

 “My bias is much more that of a feminist,” Tyre said. “I am the beneficiary of the gains of the feminist movement, and I am more apt to read about girls – when I started covering education, I looked for issues that girls face in the classroom.”

            But Tyre, who was covering education at the time for Newsweek, said she became aware of significant issues facing boys when she interviewed the headmaster of an exclusive secondary school. That headmaster, she said, told her that his school’s lowest performing students were almost exclusively boys.

            When Tyre began looking into the subject, she found that young male students are five times as likely as girls to be expelled from school; are much more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities; do less homework in middle school; are more apt to earn Cs and Ds through their high school years; and are much less likely than girls to find their way to a college-bound track.

            Tyre’s findings are in keeping with enrollment numbers at St. Petersburg College, where male enrollment numbers have dipped below 40 percent. The college has established the Male Enrollment Initiative, a program aimed at encouraging men to enroll and stay in school.

            Declining male enrollments, according to Tyre, have broad implications.

            “It seemed to me that we were looking at data at the start of a massive social change,” She said. Teachers worry that they can’t reach disinterested boys; parents worry that they aren’t doing enough to encourage their sons academically.

            Tyre said the president of the University of Pennsylvania told her that boys are falling out of the “pipeline” that carries boys from pre-school all the way to college.

            “She told me, ‘Don’t look at college, look at the pipeline where boys are falling from.’ I thought that was very good advice.”

            Tyre said there are three areas that deserve examination:

• Pre-school. Stimulating pre-school programs may have good results, but those results may not be long-lasting.
• Elementary school, where boys may not get enough opportunity to move around and be active.
• Reading and writing, where materials may not be interesting or stimulating for boys.

            “Boys like science and facts,” she said. “They like the Guinness Book of World Records. They like bios and things that are a little funny or irreverent or gory or scary, but a lot of those books are not what are considered classroom material.”

            Until recently, Tyre was a senior writer for Newsweek, and wrote a number of cover stories. Besides “The Boy Crisis,” she wrote “The Power of No,” a story about materialism in American families. Besides education, she has written about crime and health, and also has reviewed books for Newsweek.

             Before joining Newsweek, she worked for CNN, covering crime and terrorism. Earlier, she was a staff writer for Newsday, where she was part of a team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for stories about a fatal New York subway crash.

            Tyre has written for the Columbia Journalism Review, Hallmark, and O, and has contributed to the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour. She is the author of two novels as well as a book about the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.