inadvertently, the stacked bar chart on intergenerational mobility shows how rare it has always been for a child to make it to the top quintile if parents were in the bottom...Horatio Alger tales are very rare, even rarer if you look at getting into the top 5% from the bottom 20%....
I am a higher education analyst. The boys arrive at college age far, far less prepared for college than the girls. So I have always pointed back to K-12 to better prepare boys for college than they are doing now. Richard has explored solutions in his past writings. So I would suggest building a reform agenda to prepare boys to be successful in college. Here are some topics to start the discussion:
(1) Redshirt boys in kindergarten. Boys are usually less school-ready than the girls.
(2) More adult males in the elementary classroom. For some boys these may be the first adult males in their lives.
(3) Single-sex classrooms.
(4) Active learning instruction for boys (and maybe some girls too) involving physical activity and physical problem solving.
(5) Sports team eligibility should be contingent on high (not minimal) academic performance and progress.
By the time boys graduate from high school I want to see them having taken a challenging college preparatory curriculum, aware of the importance of a college education to the opportunities they will have in their adult lives, and learned and practiced study habits and skills necessary to succeed in college. I expect women--and especially young women headed for college--to endorse an agenda such as this.
Red shirting means holding (some) boys back one year. Girls seem to more more mature and school ready than boys. Mothers seem to recognize this and many have decided this for their sons.
Redshirting is discriminatory. Full stop. Boys are "less ready" because school is designed for girls and led by women. Holding boys back a year because the school system is made for them tofail is cruel.
"designed and led by women" is just not true. School requirements are created by state and local school boards, which are dominated by men. Most principals are men. The people who run for the BOE positions often come from the white upper middle class and therefore reinforce the glass floor discussed in the article. Principals are beholden to the requirements set by BOEs. They have to discipline, push curriculum, etc that supports the BOE or they are removed.
Much of the change in school (specifically HS) is a result of No Child Left Behind, which was pushed by GOP and business leaders. Again, glass floor. Teachers have been TRYING FOR YEARS to make changes that allow for flexibility in the way school is done to better accommodate ALL students. However, they are mostly women without power in the system. And if they don't uphold the "company line" set by the district, they get pushed out. This is part of why teachers are leaving.... They see a better way and they can't make positive changes because of the system.
Furthmore, the reason more men aren't in education as teachers, paras, etc is because of the pay. Period. Women were traditionally hired as teachers and they paid them pittance. The view that men once dominated K-12 teaching is ignoring all of the early years of education. The cultural ideal that women are better with children leads more women to go into education fields. It's complicated and takes a long time to change the cultural narrative.
Above all, the parents who want flexibility and change in school systems must VOTE FOR THAT CHANGE. It can be done.
Anyway, to reiterate: holding back boys a year because the school system is designed for them to fail is sexist and cruel. It is likely due in no small part to schools (and especially elementary schools) female-led and dominated, but that isn't really the reason redshirting is sexist and cruel; it's just a large factor in the reason schools are so anti-male.)
Redshirting is a choice parents make, not determined by the school/district, which makes it a little bit fairer. In my "blue ribbon school" area, I had two parents in my small neighborhood hold their daughters back a year and it was not done out of need but, instead, for the advantages. Our "gifted and talented" public school program is overflowing with these "redshirted" children as the IQ testing is set by GRADE not age in months. SAT scores are significantly higher for older "children". While I do hope we can make schooling more useful for boys, especially in the early grades, understanding that "redshirting" is a choice, and most often a very carefully calculated and sometimes underhanded one, will help put it in perspective for everyone. No one, especially me as a parent of 3 boys would want boys labeled, binned or held back in any way but, instead, placed when and where they can best flourish.
1. What is not represented here is family wealth. For those in the top quintile, even if the kids end up lower in terms of income, they are likely to inherit significant wealth to offset their lower position income position. I know a lot of young adults who are not likely to ever make anything close to what their parents earned, but who don't have to because they will inherit substantial wealth.
2. How has the standard of living of those in the bottom two quintiles changed between the two cohorts? My guess is that a 27-year-old in the second quintile of the 1992 cohort has a much better standard of living compared with a peer from the 1978 cohort. Is that true?
People who consider consideration of men to be a narrative violation think too much about the men in the Fortune 500 and too little about the men in the Misfortune 5,000,000.
Correct. They also like to ignore the fact that for every man that sits on the corporate board of directors, there are countless men driving trucks or working in warehouses.
This data will perhaps allow people to see that poor white folks have an obstacles limiting their progress. It’s been hard to get people to wrap their heads around this. Data helps!
Now…let’s brainstorm how to float all boats in this rich and well resourced nation. Give every kid a shot at getting ahead.
Thank you Richard for this important essay. I find it amazing how often facts/data conflict with ideological narratives. Understanding and addressing our disparities requires bringing objective facts/reality to the forefront.
The economy of the United States has been restructured since World War II. Employment in goods producing industries (manufacturing, agriculture, etc, and male dominated) has declined from 48% of all jobs in 1948 to 15% by 2023. During this period employment in private service industries (education, health care, business and professional, leisure and hospitality, etc and female dominated) has grown from 41% to 71% of all employment. The confluence of emergent feminism, higher education opportunity, and female-friendly employment has been a blessing for young women over the last 50 years.
So the world has changed, and men have lagged ever farther behind the women in adapting to this new world. I grew up with many of these men. I saw and see them as honest, hard working, Christian, tax-paying , family men--who have been left behind and left out. The Democratic party shifted away from a blue collar focus to women and minorities, and even called them "deplorables". The abandoned left for Trump and his pathetic promise to turn the clock back. Ostensibly he cares for them and the Democrats don't any longer need them.
IF there is an answer to the male problem, it must include and probably be based on educating men for the world of work in which they will live as adults. That is mostly employment in service industries. And that involves retooling the entire education pipeline to treat boys as they are, and not as defective girls. Richard has explored this in the past and this agenda needs to be promoted in states, colleges of education and with school boards. I believe that women have as much at stake in this effort as men do and I welcome their engagement, support and advocacy.
In terms of concrete steps, how would you recommend beginning to retool the entire education pipeline to treat boys as they are, and not as defective girls? Like if you were speaking to a candidate for your local school board or superintendent or principal, what would you ask them to do?
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the primary issue is not schools failing boys. If that were the case, then we would expect upper class boys to be floundering as much as lower class boys. The data does not seem to support that supposition.
As noted in the comment above, the world has changed, both socially and economically. The average male is physically bigger, stronger and faster than the average female and those advantages have served males well for tens of thousands of years. In a post-industrial landscape, those advantages will gradually disappear. In the past, lower class men could use their brawn to dig ditches, forge steel and build cars. Those tasks required strength and endurance but, minimal discipline. It is obvious that, in the environment we are currently living in, those tasks are increasingly done by machines that can do things both better and faster.
And competition for jobs is less gendered than it used to be. When I was growing up (50s and 60s) women did not fly planes, drive buses, pilot ships or serve as conductors on trains. Now they do.
In a world in which discipline and cooperative social skills are the coin of the realm, girls will currently have an advantage. Generally speaking, it’s because parents raise them that way. Upper class boys are raised that way too.
I suspect lower class parents are more prone to view gender thru a more traditional lens and that letting boys run around more during recess will fix the problem. It won’t. Human beings are the apex species on this planet because we are endowed with the ability to adapt to changing environments. Cultures need to rethink how they raise boys.
I think I would love it to be true that we could just raise lower class boys like girls and upper class boys and get the same results. But there’s pretty decent evidence that boys and men are evolved to be more aggressive than girls and women on average. And upper class men and boys are genetically different from lower class men and boys (The Genetic Lottery is a great read on this.)
If you buy the genetic lottery theory, then there is no solution to this problem short of some apocalyptic event that erases our current post-industrial environment.
Or you could, I suppose, create make work physical labor jobs for lower class males and gradually push women out of the workforce so that employment competition is less while letting genetically well-endowed elite males rule everything.
I like the idea of changing how we raise boys better.
As an American it's easy to assume we are the norm and yet wealth inequality is higher in the United States than almost any developed country. No wonder less resourced boys & men are struggling when the top 10% of earners own almost 70% of US wealth while the bottom 50% own 2.5%. Our best zip codes have become gated communities while others rival apartheid townships (economically). Hoarding is a normal and adaptive human behavior often motivated by a desire to feel safer and more protected. It is also leading our nation to become less stable and less prosperous, let alone the tragic failure to thrive of those left behind. We are a country ripe for some form of wealth redistribution. You can see that in the marked increase in discussions of Universal Basic Income (UBI) which is no silver bullet. I am optimistic the future will be more fair but sober about what it will take to shift.
Studying the needs of boys and men goes beyond just having empathy for our fellow citizens and addressing cultural or political blind spots. It's also a life or death issue. Suicide and deaths of despair was mentioned. I'd also like to add school shootings and lone gun men in public places to that list of tragedies. The profile of a school shooter is almost always a young white male age 13-20years old. Why the heck are we not talking about that more and throwing everything we've got at figuring out what's going on with this specific demographic?! I have a child in school, if not out of empathy, I would want to help these struggling boys in the interest of my own safety and my child's safety. Of course it would need to be managed with sensitivity, but we can not continue to ignore the similarities between these shooters. This is slightly adjacent to the issue of poverty's effect on white men, but I imagine that there are overlapping themes. I also agree with the comment above that we need to be looking at this from an perspective of how do we support young boys' healthy development in school and in communities. Social emotional learning is great, but opportunities for experiences like free play, responsibility, confidence building by actually doing things and solving problems are crucial for healthy development. Thank you for this work and I hope more research continues to happen around this topic.
Agree. On an even larger, more systemic scale, this is why J.D. Vance is directing hate at immigrants and childless cat ladies. There's a cohort of angry, dumb white men who are genuinely worse off, and it serves those in power to scapegoat the outgroups for their plight. We've seen how this ends.
I am simultaneously thankful for this piece and frustrated by how it must sculpt its arguments.
These data and analyses deserve to stand alone - the plight and people described deserve the dignity of being seen *as themselves* instead of *as compared to*.
I understand the reasons this does not happen. Context allows the ‘controversy’ to pass political and academic muster.
I look forward to the day when we no longer need to mention one group’s needs to justify discussing another’s.
I believe that day will come, and I am thankful for what AIBM does to bring it to fruition!
Essentially, things have gotten better in the past 20 years for people at the top (in terms of income). They're more likely than ever to stay in the top half.
But when you look at people in the bottom half, things have changed.
Economic opportunity is slightly better for Black men raised in a bottom-half family. So we're talking about the average Black man whose family earns less than area median income. And we're talking about his likelihood of being employed and earning more money than his family did once he becomes an adult.
Looking at the same data for white men, the picture is much worse. A white man whose family of origin earned less than area median income (a bottom-half family) is much less likely, today, to be employed and earn top-half wages.
Hopefully that's helpful! It was helpful to me to write, haha.
Working as pediatric behavioral health nurse I've become extremely disappointed in they way our education system treats boys. Often, with a greater need for physical activity and physical play, they are diagnosed with ADHD or otherwise labelled aggressive, inattentive, or hyperactive.
Appropriately or not, there seems to be virtual no effort or resources available to give these boys "reasonable accomodations." Instead, their normal behaviors are punished which contributes to Development of anxiety, depression, and further behavioral and mood issues. It becomes a feedback loop that spirals into an inpatient admission in my psychiatric unit where they fall further behind in school.
I think, honestly, we need to rethink the purpose of "school."
For most of human history, most boys did not go to school. And if they did, it usually wasn't for very long. As you point out, most boys are not cut out to sit still and follow directions for hours and hours every day.
Some boys are cut out for school. But for the rest, wouldn't vocational training be a much better fit?
If you were speaking to a candidate for your local school board or superintendent or principal, what would you ask them to do to change in terms of concrete steps?
The political response to any politicians recommending more vocational education is to look up where the children of the politician attend school and went to college. The problem with claiming that boys are not cut out for school is that the male children of the elite seem capable of doing it.l
I study primarily inner city boys, and I disagree, K-12 and college really only works for boys, if they have strong family and financial support, and a upper middle class social network to draw inspiration and professional connections, which poor boys don’t have, yes a vocational tracking system will lead to some boys who could have been doctors, becoming electricians, but it will also lead triple that amount becoming electricians instead of convicts. No system is perfect, but that’s a good trade off
All of the men who got through college under the GI bill from the 1940's to the 1970's would disagree with one's thesis.
And if one wants to learn about the different pathways through college and the influence of parents, one should review "Parenting to a Degree" by Hamilton. She explains the workings of the modern public university much better than anyone else.
The GI bill was a diffeent time when high housing prices did not stratify neighborhoods so those boys had way better social networks,to the extent they do today. There is a seperate alternative of maybe using financial incentives to get boys through highschool and college, but the system they have in Germany and Switzelrland seems to mitigate the worst of inner city and rural poverty.
I feel strongly that education("school") is a large factor in the success and earning potential of people, both men and women. Vocational training is often unfairly offered to boys in an attempt to remove them from schools that are not helpful places for their learning. People are quick to say plumbers make a nice salary but what they do not tell you is that the journeyman/apprenticeship involves about 7 years of low pay, where they buy their own tools and none of the 4 years at a vocational high school count towards this. Parking challenging boys in votech doesn't help bright, energetic boys reach their potential. When 4 years of votech make you a plumber, electrician, certified automechanic or LPN, I will suggest boys and girls avail of the excellent opportunity. Meanwhile, it is time to make sure the free, equitable public education guaranteed to all Americans in K-12 is just that.
Capitalizing "Black" but refusing to capitalize "White" is an obvious example of anti-White racism, that is very common among Leftists.
inadvertently, the stacked bar chart on intergenerational mobility shows how rare it has always been for a child to make it to the top quintile if parents were in the bottom...Horatio Alger tales are very rare, even rarer if you look at getting into the top 5% from the bottom 20%....
My dr prescribed it for me for weight loss. It gave me grotesque nightmares and the loss of sleep wrecked me. Had to stop.
I am a higher education analyst. The boys arrive at college age far, far less prepared for college than the girls. So I have always pointed back to K-12 to better prepare boys for college than they are doing now. Richard has explored solutions in his past writings. So I would suggest building a reform agenda to prepare boys to be successful in college. Here are some topics to start the discussion:
(1) Redshirt boys in kindergarten. Boys are usually less school-ready than the girls.
(2) More adult males in the elementary classroom. For some boys these may be the first adult males in their lives.
(3) Single-sex classrooms.
(4) Active learning instruction for boys (and maybe some girls too) involving physical activity and physical problem solving.
(5) Sports team eligibility should be contingent on high (not minimal) academic performance and progress.
By the time boys graduate from high school I want to see them having taken a challenging college preparatory curriculum, aware of the importance of a college education to the opportunities they will have in their adult lives, and learned and practiced study habits and skills necessary to succeed in college. I expect women--and especially young women headed for college--to endorse an agenda such as this.
Sorry for such a basic question to your insightful thoughts Tom, but what does 'Redshirt' mean in this context?
Red shirting means holding (some) boys back one year. Girls seem to more more mature and school ready than boys. Mothers seem to recognize this and many have decided this for their sons.
Thank you for the response!
Redshirting is discriminatory. Full stop. Boys are "less ready" because school is designed for girls and led by women. Holding boys back a year because the school system is made for them tofail is cruel.
"designed and led by women" is just not true. School requirements are created by state and local school boards, which are dominated by men. Most principals are men. The people who run for the BOE positions often come from the white upper middle class and therefore reinforce the glass floor discussed in the article. Principals are beholden to the requirements set by BOEs. They have to discipline, push curriculum, etc that supports the BOE or they are removed.
Much of the change in school (specifically HS) is a result of No Child Left Behind, which was pushed by GOP and business leaders. Again, glass floor. Teachers have been TRYING FOR YEARS to make changes that allow for flexibility in the way school is done to better accommodate ALL students. However, they are mostly women without power in the system. And if they don't uphold the "company line" set by the district, they get pushed out. This is part of why teachers are leaving.... They see a better way and they can't make positive changes because of the system.
Furthmore, the reason more men aren't in education as teachers, paras, etc is because of the pay. Period. Women were traditionally hired as teachers and they paid them pittance. The view that men once dominated K-12 teaching is ignoring all of the early years of education. The cultural ideal that women are better with children leads more women to go into education fields. It's complicated and takes a long time to change the cultural narrative.
Above all, the parents who want flexibility and change in school systems must VOTE FOR THAT CHANGE. It can be done.
Maybe read up on https://scitechdaily.com/wide-and-lasting-consequences-teachers-give-girls-higher-grades-than-boys/ But your response (presumably to "female-led) is still a) blindingly ignorant of leadership (it is not just the person with the title) and b) still dodging the central point here.
(some side quibbles:
Your hate rant about the GOP is a nonsequitur. (And if it is so bad, why is it still going strong after two dem administrations?)
Men are not in education for many reasons aside from pay. https://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/hidden-bias might be an interesting read for you, if you have an open mind.)
Anyway, to reiterate: holding back boys a year because the school system is designed for them to fail is sexist and cruel. It is likely due in no small part to schools (and especially elementary schools) female-led and dominated, but that isn't really the reason redshirting is sexist and cruel; it's just a large factor in the reason schools are so anti-male.)
Redshirting is a choice parents make, not determined by the school/district, which makes it a little bit fairer. In my "blue ribbon school" area, I had two parents in my small neighborhood hold their daughters back a year and it was not done out of need but, instead, for the advantages. Our "gifted and talented" public school program is overflowing with these "redshirted" children as the IQ testing is set by GRADE not age in months. SAT scores are significantly higher for older "children". While I do hope we can make schooling more useful for boys, especially in the early grades, understanding that "redshirting" is a choice, and most often a very carefully calculated and sometimes underhanded one, will help put it in perspective for everyone. No one, especially me as a parent of 3 boys would want boys labeled, binned or held back in any way but, instead, placed when and where they can best flourish.
Two comments:
1. What is not represented here is family wealth. For those in the top quintile, even if the kids end up lower in terms of income, they are likely to inherit significant wealth to offset their lower position income position. I know a lot of young adults who are not likely to ever make anything close to what their parents earned, but who don't have to because they will inherit substantial wealth.
2. How has the standard of living of those in the bottom two quintiles changed between the two cohorts? My guess is that a 27-year-old in the second quintile of the 1992 cohort has a much better standard of living compared with a peer from the 1978 cohort. Is that true?
People who consider consideration of men to be a narrative violation think too much about the men in the Fortune 500 and too little about the men in the Misfortune 5,000,000.
Correct. They also like to ignore the fact that for every man that sits on the corporate board of directors, there are countless men driving trucks or working in warehouses.
Well-stated
This data will perhaps allow people to see that poor white folks have an obstacles limiting their progress. It’s been hard to get people to wrap their heads around this. Data helps!
Now…let’s brainstorm how to float all boats in this rich and well resourced nation. Give every kid a shot at getting ahead.
Thank you Richard for this important essay. I find it amazing how often facts/data conflict with ideological narratives. Understanding and addressing our disparities requires bringing objective facts/reality to the forefront.
The economy of the United States has been restructured since World War II. Employment in goods producing industries (manufacturing, agriculture, etc, and male dominated) has declined from 48% of all jobs in 1948 to 15% by 2023. During this period employment in private service industries (education, health care, business and professional, leisure and hospitality, etc and female dominated) has grown from 41% to 71% of all employment. The confluence of emergent feminism, higher education opportunity, and female-friendly employment has been a blessing for young women over the last 50 years.
So the world has changed, and men have lagged ever farther behind the women in adapting to this new world. I grew up with many of these men. I saw and see them as honest, hard working, Christian, tax-paying , family men--who have been left behind and left out. The Democratic party shifted away from a blue collar focus to women and minorities, and even called them "deplorables". The abandoned left for Trump and his pathetic promise to turn the clock back. Ostensibly he cares for them and the Democrats don't any longer need them.
IF there is an answer to the male problem, it must include and probably be based on educating men for the world of work in which they will live as adults. That is mostly employment in service industries. And that involves retooling the entire education pipeline to treat boys as they are, and not as defective girls. Richard has explored this in the past and this agenda needs to be promoted in states, colleges of education and with school boards. I believe that women have as much at stake in this effort as men do and I welcome their engagement, support and advocacy.
What great observations and a great statement tying them together!
In terms of concrete steps, how would you recommend beginning to retool the entire education pipeline to treat boys as they are, and not as defective girls? Like if you were speaking to a candidate for your local school board or superintendent or principal, what would you ask them to do?
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the primary issue is not schools failing boys. If that were the case, then we would expect upper class boys to be floundering as much as lower class boys. The data does not seem to support that supposition.
As noted in the comment above, the world has changed, both socially and economically. The average male is physically bigger, stronger and faster than the average female and those advantages have served males well for tens of thousands of years. In a post-industrial landscape, those advantages will gradually disappear. In the past, lower class men could use their brawn to dig ditches, forge steel and build cars. Those tasks required strength and endurance but, minimal discipline. It is obvious that, in the environment we are currently living in, those tasks are increasingly done by machines that can do things both better and faster.
And competition for jobs is less gendered than it used to be. When I was growing up (50s and 60s) women did not fly planes, drive buses, pilot ships or serve as conductors on trains. Now they do.
In a world in which discipline and cooperative social skills are the coin of the realm, girls will currently have an advantage. Generally speaking, it’s because parents raise them that way. Upper class boys are raised that way too.
I suspect lower class parents are more prone to view gender thru a more traditional lens and that letting boys run around more during recess will fix the problem. It won’t. Human beings are the apex species on this planet because we are endowed with the ability to adapt to changing environments. Cultures need to rethink how they raise boys.
I think I would love it to be true that we could just raise lower class boys like girls and upper class boys and get the same results. But there’s pretty decent evidence that boys and men are evolved to be more aggressive than girls and women on average. And upper class men and boys are genetically different from lower class men and boys (The Genetic Lottery is a great read on this.)
If you buy the genetic lottery theory, then there is no solution to this problem short of some apocalyptic event that erases our current post-industrial environment.
Or you could, I suppose, create make work physical labor jobs for lower class males and gradually push women out of the workforce so that employment competition is less while letting genetically well-endowed elite males rule everything.
I like the idea of changing how we raise boys better.
The author makes the exact opposite point, actually.
Which author? Richard or the genetic lottery person?
And which point?
As an American it's easy to assume we are the norm and yet wealth inequality is higher in the United States than almost any developed country. No wonder less resourced boys & men are struggling when the top 10% of earners own almost 70% of US wealth while the bottom 50% own 2.5%. Our best zip codes have become gated communities while others rival apartheid townships (economically). Hoarding is a normal and adaptive human behavior often motivated by a desire to feel safer and more protected. It is also leading our nation to become less stable and less prosperous, let alone the tragic failure to thrive of those left behind. We are a country ripe for some form of wealth redistribution. You can see that in the marked increase in discussions of Universal Basic Income (UBI) which is no silver bullet. I am optimistic the future will be more fair but sober about what it will take to shift.
Studying the needs of boys and men goes beyond just having empathy for our fellow citizens and addressing cultural or political blind spots. It's also a life or death issue. Suicide and deaths of despair was mentioned. I'd also like to add school shootings and lone gun men in public places to that list of tragedies. The profile of a school shooter is almost always a young white male age 13-20years old. Why the heck are we not talking about that more and throwing everything we've got at figuring out what's going on with this specific demographic?! I have a child in school, if not out of empathy, I would want to help these struggling boys in the interest of my own safety and my child's safety. Of course it would need to be managed with sensitivity, but we can not continue to ignore the similarities between these shooters. This is slightly adjacent to the issue of poverty's effect on white men, but I imagine that there are overlapping themes. I also agree with the comment above that we need to be looking at this from an perspective of how do we support young boys' healthy development in school and in communities. Social emotional learning is great, but opportunities for experiences like free play, responsibility, confidence building by actually doing things and solving problems are crucial for healthy development. Thank you for this work and I hope more research continues to happen around this topic.
Agree. On an even larger, more systemic scale, this is why J.D. Vance is directing hate at immigrants and childless cat ladies. There's a cohort of angry, dumb white men who are genuinely worse off, and it serves those in power to scapegoat the outgroups for their plight. We've seen how this ends.
Well written, Richard!
I am simultaneously thankful for this piece and frustrated by how it must sculpt its arguments.
These data and analyses deserve to stand alone - the plight and people described deserve the dignity of being seen *as themselves* instead of *as compared to*.
I understand the reasons this does not happen. Context allows the ‘controversy’ to pass political and academic muster.
I look forward to the day when we no longer need to mention one group’s needs to justify discussing another’s.
I believe that day will come, and I am thankful for what AIBM does to bring it to fruition!
Very well written!
It would be worthwhile to the discussion for you to write a more accessible version of this (i.e., less dense) for a wider audience publication!
Essentially, things have gotten better in the past 20 years for people at the top (in terms of income). They're more likely than ever to stay in the top half.
But when you look at people in the bottom half, things have changed.
Economic opportunity is slightly better for Black men raised in a bottom-half family. So we're talking about the average Black man whose family earns less than area median income. And we're talking about his likelihood of being employed and earning more money than his family did once he becomes an adult.
Looking at the same data for white men, the picture is much worse. A white man whose family of origin earned less than area median income (a bottom-half family) is much less likely, today, to be employed and earn top-half wages.
Hopefully that's helpful! It was helpful to me to write, haha.
Working as pediatric behavioral health nurse I've become extremely disappointed in they way our education system treats boys. Often, with a greater need for physical activity and physical play, they are diagnosed with ADHD or otherwise labelled aggressive, inattentive, or hyperactive.
Appropriately or not, there seems to be virtual no effort or resources available to give these boys "reasonable accomodations." Instead, their normal behaviors are punished which contributes to Development of anxiety, depression, and further behavioral and mood issues. It becomes a feedback loop that spirals into an inpatient admission in my psychiatric unit where they fall further behind in school.
I think, honestly, we need to rethink the purpose of "school."
For most of human history, most boys did not go to school. And if they did, it usually wasn't for very long. As you point out, most boys are not cut out to sit still and follow directions for hours and hours every day.
Some boys are cut out for school. But for the rest, wouldn't vocational training be a much better fit?
If you were speaking to a candidate for your local school board or superintendent or principal, what would you ask them to do to change in terms of concrete steps?
The political response to any politicians recommending more vocational education is to look up where the children of the politician attend school and went to college. The problem with claiming that boys are not cut out for school is that the male children of the elite seem capable of doing it.l
I study primarily inner city boys, and I disagree, K-12 and college really only works for boys, if they have strong family and financial support, and a upper middle class social network to draw inspiration and professional connections, which poor boys don’t have, yes a vocational tracking system will lead to some boys who could have been doctors, becoming electricians, but it will also lead triple that amount becoming electricians instead of convicts. No system is perfect, but that’s a good trade off
All of the men who got through college under the GI bill from the 1940's to the 1970's would disagree with one's thesis.
And if one wants to learn about the different pathways through college and the influence of parents, one should review "Parenting to a Degree" by Hamilton. She explains the workings of the modern public university much better than anyone else.
The GI bill was a diffeent time when high housing prices did not stratify neighborhoods so those boys had way better social networks,to the extent they do today. There is a seperate alternative of maybe using financial incentives to get boys through highschool and college, but the system they have in Germany and Switzelrland seems to mitigate the worst of inner city and rural poverty.
I feel strongly that education("school") is a large factor in the success and earning potential of people, both men and women. Vocational training is often unfairly offered to boys in an attempt to remove them from schools that are not helpful places for their learning. People are quick to say plumbers make a nice salary but what they do not tell you is that the journeyman/apprenticeship involves about 7 years of low pay, where they buy their own tools and none of the 4 years at a vocational high school count towards this. Parking challenging boys in votech doesn't help bright, energetic boys reach their potential. When 4 years of votech make you a plumber, electrician, certified automechanic or LPN, I will suggest boys and girls avail of the excellent opportunity. Meanwhile, it is time to make sure the free, equitable public education guaranteed to all Americans in K-12 is just that.
And it's widely preached to them in schools, the media, etc., that they and their innate male nature are the problem...
Why do boys and men receive less empathy? The research has been done and very few know about it: https://menaregood.substack.com/p/understanding-men-10-moral-typecasting
Men also face an implicit bias that is not faced by women. So many research driven ideas that never see the media. ugh