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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38246 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Redshirt the Boys

The value of a later start, which many teachers and administrators call “the gift of time,” is an open secret in elite circles. And it’s a gift overwhelmingly given to boys. In the past few months, I’ve interviewed dozens of private-school teachers, parents, educational consultants, and admissions officers, largely in the D.C. metro area. I learned that a delayed school entry is now close to the norm for boys who would otherwise be on the young side. One former head of an elite private school who now consults with parents on school choice and admissions told me, “There are effectively two different cutoff dates for school entry: one for boys and one for girls.”

On almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates. The trend is so pronounced that it can result only from structural problems. Affluent parents and elite schools are tackling the issue by giving boys more time. But in fact it is boys from poorer backgrounds who struggle the most in the classroom, and these boys, who could benefit most from the gift of time, are the ones least likely to receive it.

there was a discussion on ssc a while back about why boys underperform relative to girls in school. the most common explanation was that school is simply 'feminized', but maybe boys simply mature slower; the article certainly doesn't shy away from nature over nurture

The problem of self-regulation is much more severe for boys than for girls. Flooded with testosterone, which drives up dopamine activity, teenage boys are more inclined to take risks and seek short-term rewards than girls are. Meanwhile, the parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, and future orientation are mostly in the prefrontal cortex—the so-called CEO of the brain—which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.

Other relevant centers of the brain follow suit. The cerebellum, for example, plays a role in “emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,” according to Gokcen Akyurek, an expert on executive functioning at Hacettepe University, in Turkey. It reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. Similarly, there are sex differences linked to the timing of puberty in the development of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that contributes to memory and learning.

this seems like a simple enough way to perhaps help boys stop falling behind in education.

  1. Redshirting of boys is a good idea for an individual parent. But I suspect there's a Red Queen aspect that's being ignored: relative age/size/development plays a big role in school outcomes, particularly for boys. (E.g. short boys put on HGH show improved social and emotional outcomes). If all of a sudden all boys in a grade level are a year older, no one really benefits. This relative hierarchy is also consistent with girls not benefitting as much from red shirting: if it was merely that people who are more developed tend to do better in school and boys are delayed a bit, girls who are redshirted would still show a comparable benefit just even more so. And single sex schools don't show as large a benefit for boys as redshirting does.

  2. Boys and girls develop differently. Areas where boys tend to develop faster (independence; exploration; spatial and analytical reasoning; objective tests) are increasingly deemphasized in schooling. If you judge boys and girls according to who develops the most like girls, it's not surprising when girls have better outcomes.

  3. Age-based grade levels are outdated: there are enough factors of development that targeting instruction at a given grade level at some hypothetical child who is average in all those factors is not a "one size fits all" or even a "one size fits some" model, but one size fits none. (cf the curse of dimensionality). If I were to have a kid, public schools are the last place I'd put him or her.

If all of a sudden all boys in a grade level are a year older, no one really benefits.

Sure they do, they have an extra year of brain development to use in tackling the material they're being given at that grade level.

My point is that it's a relative development effect as well as an absolute development effect.

Girls also undergo a year of development in a year, same as boys. But redshirting doesn't increase their outcomes nearly as much. If it were purely a matter of absolute level of development, girls who redshirted would improve outcomes compared to their one year lower peers, same as boys, but they don't.

A good test of this would be redshirting all boys in a year. My prediction is that the improvement in outcomes would be substantially less than for a class composition with a smaller proportion of redshirt boys, and the effect would be dose dependent.

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