Boys and Literacy (part 11 ... final)

 

 Perhaps the strongest intervention that surfaces in the research on arresting the falling literacy of boys is their connection with caring adults. Teachers, librarians, coaches, and parents that provide a social context for reading and writing realize more success with all adolescents but especially the boys. Often the discovery and growth goes two ways, as is the case with the story William Brozo (2006) tells about Rickey, a recently retired Navy pilot who mentored Marcus, a struggling 13-year-old. Brozo points out that Rickey was an ideal mentor for Marcus because gender-matched role models have the most positive effect on academic outcomes and are sorely needed in the lives of many boys. Marcus, who had been in and out of juvenile detention facilities, was reading at a 4^th grade level. He was gently introduced to increasingly challenging and meaningful literary projects of his own choice, all the while shepherded and encouraged by Rickey. Marcus began to read and compose letters about a subject he knew and felt passionate about, racism in the juvenile detention system, and began to feel empowered, competent, and active. Authors Smith and Wilhelm (2002) would say that Marcus was feeling flow. The mentoring relationship was a success for Marcus. His attitude toward reading and his test scores improved, and perhaps most importantly, through Rickey’s efforts, Marcus began to think of himself as a reader, determined to continue to improve. 

 Realistically, this is how this war against the growing illiteracy of boys will be fought. Battles will be won by caring adults utilizing creative and boy-specific strategies to engage young men in active and social literary pursuits that afford them a sense of competency. Ideally, the successes boys experience will build and transfer into self-images of being readers.  Education models of intervention techniques geared toward students at risk are really only as effective as the administrators who adopt them and the teachers who administer them. If the public, administrators, teachers, or parents, interpret this attention to boys as skewing some kind of gender parity in education, these interventions will fail. Education is never equal, and like a pendulum it swings in directions hemmed by public opinion, funding, and accountability. Girls have made tremendous strides because of the focus placed on raising their literacy in math and science. Ideally if those intervention successes were self-perpetuating, girls should now be able to continue improving on their own, utilizing the skills and support millions of federal dollars have afforded. The government could shift its support in a new direction. Boys are that new direction, but awareness of their rising underachievement in literacy is still the domain of specialized study and scholarship. Thirty years ago the attention focused on girls following embarrassing national reports and articles just at the time when the women’s movement was at its strongest. Perhaps such a recipe is needed now to move boys to the center ring. Without anxious public opinion influencing national educational reform to benefit boys exclusively, battles will be won, but boys in general will continue to fall further behind in literacy.