What Can We Expect of Boys? A Strategy to Help Schools Hoping for VirtueMichael C. ReichertPeter Kuriloff Brett Stoudt In 2001, five U.S. independent schools came together to create a new consortium, the Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.
A sixth school was added in 2005. The mission of the new center was - to conduct research, encourage public discussion, and advocate on behalf of boys. Using research tools that give voice to boys’ lived experiences,
the center will strive to promote the widest sense of possibility and greatest hope for integrity in boys’ lives - (www.csbgl.org). Two of the member schools are day schools
for boys, one is a boys’ day school in a coordinate relationship with a contiguous girls’ school, one is a coed day school that converted from a girls’ school in the 1970’s and two are top-tier
boarding schools that became coeducational in the 1970s and 1980s after long careers as boys’ schools. Each of the schools, in short, has a considerable track record dedicated to boys’ education and reasonable
claim, on that basis, to success and expertise in that work. Yet, their support for the new center reflected their desire to put a finer point on that expertise. This group of schools was motivated by the recognition that despite their success with boys, not all was well with their charges. The coeducational schools had strong impressions that their girls were increasingly
outperforming their boys in most academic subjects. Awards of all kinds seemed to be strongly tilted towards girls as well. The all-boys’ schools were concerned that, despite continuous efforts to eradicate hazing
and bullying, those behaviors seemed enduring features of the schools’ landscapes. Further, all the schools were concerned that boys seemed to engage in high risk behaviors, both in and out of school, that sometimes put
them in real danger. Founding members of the Center for the Study of Boys lives recognized that despite their privileged position, and the privileged positions of many (though not all, as each school has made a significant investment in diversity)
of their boys, their historic curricula for educating boys might unwittingly feed both their students’ risk taking and whatever educational struggles they experience. More dimly, perhaps, but more courageously, at some level
they wished to be sure that their own gender curricula were not implicated in the problems boys were experiencing. By helping these schools to excavate their "hidden" masculinity curricula through a process
of school-based action research, The Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives hoped to help them address their concerns about their young men and to expand the recognitional offers made to them. In this chapter, we will develop the perspective that problems boys present in schools reflect schools’ more or less implicit gender regime. We describe what we perceive to be a tension between schools’
man-making commitments and their desire to cultivate boys’ character strengths. We then elucidate an alternative approach to school curricula for boys: an evidence-based approach, built upon school research employing
multiple methods, including quantitative and qualitative analysis, the training and support of teacher-based inquiry teams, the inclusion of boys as researchers, cross-school conversation and critique. To illustrate this
approach in action, we then briefly describe several examples of projects underway at member schools. As we hope to show, the effort to fill in gaps in our understanding of boys’ lives is at the heart of our work and
the basis for our hope that schools can become more adept at schooling boys in general and supporting the development of their virtue. Boys’ problems in school can be summarized briefly. Poor academic achievement, disciplinary problems, over-diagnosis and referral to special educational services, athletic over-injury, bullying, peer harassment and
school violence: these are some of the issues that raise concerns about the effectiveness of schooling for boys. These outcomes stand in stark contrast to girls’ successes in schools. This contrast has become news of
late, to the point that a recent front-page New York Times article (Lewin, 2006) detailed how, across every major ethnic group in the US and throughout most of the industrialized countries, girls now earn a growing percentage
of college degrees. The author is careful to say the “achievement gap - has not developed because boys’ performance has changed in any dramatic way. In fact, a report from a US-based educational think tank
argued persuasively that, "The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse; it’s good news about girls doing better" (Mead, 2006, p. 3). But the same report sadly acknowledged that college rates are relatively lower for males in large measure because of boys’ greater likelihood to drop out before graduation and the fact that fewer male students enroll
in college to begin with. College, in essence, represents the final chapter in a boys’ educational story going all the way back to primary grades. In a cover story for Newsweek magazine, Tyre (2006) wrote that
from elementary years all the way through graduate and professional training programs, patterns in boys’ achievement reveal that more boys than ever appear to be turning off to education. The article cites one
study indicating that the number of boys who said they "didn’t like school" has risen 71% over the last two decades (2006, p. 46). Many boys, in short, do not embrace educational aspiration. And, while they suffer through required schooling, they do not seem to be otherwise quiet and well-behaved. Research on boys’ behavior in school reveals even more
dramatic and perhaps more alarming gender contrasts. Some years ago, in one of the schools where the authors have worked, a gender audit showed remarkable though not uncommon disparities in discipline: demerits, the primary
response of school staff to students’ rule infractions, were skewed towards males at a rate of nearly 20,000 to 100! The 200 or so male students averaged 100 demerits each. Even granting that such disciplinary practices
as the use of demerits are gendered to begin with (i.e. that the system cues on behaviors more likely for males), many of the infractions were truly over any reasonable line for civil behavior. In one instance, for example,
a popular, well-respected and usually well-mannered boy one evening sent an email to all of his classmates graphically inventing a sexually explicit story about one of his female classmates, who had the misfortune to be the
sister of a buddy with whom he was arguing. Such conduct by boys in schools, in fact, reflects a greater problem of male incivility. Both in their impact on their own lives as well as on the lives of others around them, male behaviors are often troubling and hurtful.
Over the past several decades, as the influence of other socializing agencies has diminished, schools have become more a default choice to manage this problem. One popular response has been to add programming aimed at values.
Since 1996, character education programs have become ubiquitous (Howard, et al., 2004). But, importantly for those looking to affect boys’ school troubles, when Berkowitz (1997; 2002) reviewed such programs
for "what works in schools", he concluded that the "primary influence on a child's character development is how people treat the child" (italics in original, 2002, p. 58). This finding, that students develop civic virtues and character strengths from their experiences, requires that schools ascertain, as a baseline, how students perceive their experiences. As they investigate
boys’ experiences, schools’ gender regimes - the "pattern of practices that constructs various kinds of masculinity and femininity among staff and students" (Kessler et al., 1985, p. 42) - will
be observed to play a critical role in shaping the pressures, relationships and experiences of boys in schools. At the broadest level, the concept of a gender regime teaches that schools are both active agents in
promoting particular ideas of masculinity ("masculinizing practices", according to Connell, 1996) as well as sites within which boys act out certain gender scripts in relation to each other. The various
identities available to boys within a particular school culture are almost always organized hierarchically (Reichert, 2000; 2001). The dominant identity is not necessarily the most common type of masculinity but will be
the most influential and is usually organized around qualities such as physical size and skill, affluence, emotional control, social confidence and latent, sometimes overt, violence (Stoudt, 2006; Reichert & Kuriloff,
2004; Kuriloff & Reichert, 2003). Spending so much time in their particular school, boys’ experiences of the school’s regime, while generally unconscious, is highly consequential: "It confronts them as
a social fact, which they have to come to terms with somehow" (Kessler et al., 1985, p. 42). Boys’ experience of schools’ gender curricula bears directly on their relationship to educational aspiration in the sense that, as they "do gender", students adapt themselves to the opportunities
afforded them by the pressures, inducements and punishments of the school community’s norms and gender possibilities (Swain, 2005). Some boys find room to care about academic achievement and establish positive
relationships with the reward and authority structures of schools. Others have more difficulty. Chu (2000) in a careful microstudy, closely accompanied a small group of boys through school and described the
"overcompromise" some of them made with this masculinity structure of their school and the attendant "psychological costs and social consequences" of this adaptation (Froschl and Sprung, 2005, p. 5). For the past several decades, concerns for equity and justice have properly focused on ensuring that schools’ gender curricula eliminate bias and barriers to equal rights, equal access and fairness for girls. This
work has "come a long way" but must now extend even further, researchers from the Wellesley Center for Women proposed, to "a conceptualization of gender as a set of social constructions and societal
assumptions about the possibilities and limits of male and female experience and behavior" (Spencer, Porche and Tolman, 2003, p. 2). In particular, among the societal assumptions still limiting girls’
educational experience is a "public-private dialectic in social life and schooling itself, and men’s and women’s assymetrical relations with that dialectic" (Foster, 1998, p. 1). Addressing such
myths and social constructions is necessary if societies are to continue to make schooling and its rewards fully accessible to girls, these writers argue. Even more crucially, in terms of the moral lessons students absorb
from school communities, Fine (1992) has argued for an expanded understanding of equality of opportunity: "With access to this moral community established as legitimate and universal, the issue of social justice has
shifted to the process of exclusion, that is, students’ differential experiences and outcomes once inside these communities" (p. 102). As Sizer and Sizer (1999) and others like Fine and Berkowitz have suggested, students absorb their moral instruction from what happens, or does not happen, for them in schools. In the case of boys, basically schools get
the men they grow. The close relationship between boys’ experience of their schools’ gender regimes, their moral relationships and civic behavior suggests the critical importance of ensuring that boys find
schools welcoming, safe, supportive and hopeful spaces in which they can see possibilities for, in terms of Young’s "enabling" theory of justice, "the development or exercise of capacities"
(1990, p. 39). Access to educational opportunity, in other words, must take account of social and school conditions that can either enable the exercise of boys’ capacities or create insurmountable barriers to
their educational investment. For the many boys who struggle to fit themselves to the structures, pedagogy and relationships of schools, are there biases and barriers impeding the exercise of their abilities, woven into
the practices, beliefs and very ways we "recognize" boys in our schools (Mann, 1994)? More practically, how well are we enabling boys to learn? To our minds, despite all the current buzz associated with the subject of boys’ education, it seems that much of what happens for boys in schools still largely escapes notice, much less good explanation. Over the past
several decades, social science has helped developmentalists and educators realize the key role of methods of inquiry for generating solutions to problems of inclusion and equity.Ý Gilligan (1982), for example, discovered her
insights into girls’ lives by cultivating a new sensitivity to their voices. Dynamics of power, she concluded, were woven into all social interactions, including research efforts to capture girls’ experience,
requiring methods that account for the impact of the research context itself on subjects’ ability to name and describe their experience. Fine (1992) said it well: "the only way to do activist research is to
be positioned explicitly with questions, but not answers; as mobile and multiple, not static and singular; within spaces of rich surprise" (p, 230). Or, as another feminist researcher put it, "If we want someone
to tell it like it is, you have to hear it like it is" (Reinharz, 1988, p. 16). To insure schools that can offer grounded solutions to problems of boys’ education, we must position ourselves more willingly with
our questions about their lives. The Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives hoped in its work to challenge common, taken-for-granted assumptions about boys, in order to help schools reevaluate their gender regimes and establish more evidence-based
programming. Thus, the Center encourages research strategies that can unearth the phenomenological experiences of boys and their school contexts, to "give voice" to their perspectives. Through collaborative,
action-oriented research, using multiple methodological strategies, CSBL helps schools discover a more grounded understanding to guide their work with boys. Although CSBL was founded within single sex and co-ed schools, the work avoids simplistic boy/girl dichotomies common in deterministic depictions of gender. In our view, collapsing within-group variation to calculate
an "average" for boys and girls forces generic interpretations of gender (James, 1997) and attempts to universalize experience by building on the assumption that gender differences are "a set of fixed,
stable, and enduring traits or qualities" (Shields, 2002, p.22). Such dichotomizing approaches fail to explain why the differences occurred, in particular overlooking the importance of driving forces such as
context, history, power and identities. CSBL has avoided this binary trap by devoting its efforts to understanding boys in particular, attempting to illuminate the questions, "for whom, when and under what
circumstances?", and examining the variability within and between subsets of boys. Pledged also to avoid merely reproducing traditional representations of gender, CSBL is committed to research methods adequate for the task. Thus, we have placed an emphasis on triangulation, coming at our study of boys
in schools from a number of angles. In this approach, we have found Alford (1998) helpful: "Developing coherent arguments that recognize historical processes, symbolic meanings, and multivariate relations is the best
way to construct an adequate explanation of a complex social phenomenon" (p. 19). To capture the effect of "historical processes" on boys’ experience within schools, we gather data from such sources
as archives, texts and narrative accounts. To appreciate boys’ "symbolic meanings", we employ qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, ethnographies, thematic coding), aiming to answer the generic
question, "How are meanings constructed in interaction and in social worlds? (Alford, 1998, p. 51). And using more quantitative tools (e.g. surveys, statistics), we can answer the generic question, "What
factors explain an outcome?" and take into account the multiple ways a phenomenon (like achievement) may vary in relation to other important factors in boys’ lives. The research model CSBL recommends to schools emphasizes participatory action research, as we feel that PAR can best mobilize a school’s commitment to evaluating its current curriculum and to developing best
practices. This model can help improve the validity and reliability of the conclusions as it enables school-based teams to examine change over time from multiple levels and helps these researchers to become better
acquainted with the students, faculty and the school. When it comes to the payoff – the action phase - recommendations are informed by a set of findings discovered in close interaction with boys. As a collaborative effort, our model strives to be democratic. CSBL does not impose a patented research protocol on schools nor does it steer findings toward a particular direction. Rather, we work within each school
to develop a research team made up of teachers, administrators and sometimes students. This team generates an area of inquiry, establish research questions, select unit of analyses and appropriate research methods, and
find outlets for distribution of results. The unfolding of the research protocol is school-driven. Qualitative analyses are conducted in a partnership between CSBL and the teacher research group. Quantitative analyses
are analyzed by CSBL and then discussed with the research group. Spending time on the ground in the school over an extended time provides all with an understanding of the educational environment: its rhythms, politics
and history. Using teacher’s institutional memory and historical knowledge further embeds the current work in a larger context. Schools’ action research projects create opportunities for within-school and between-school conversations. Interviews, focus groups and surveys are designed to privilege the voices of boys under the assumption that
an authentic understanding of boys’ experiences begins with their knowledge and interpretation. We think of this stage as the first conversation in the overall action research process. Analyses of the collected
data create the context for the second conversation. Engaging with evidence affords an opportunity for the research team to contrast their personal experiences with a collective experience. These conversations create a space
for the research team to critique and learn, to be surprised or vindicated. Most importantly, they create opportunities for dialogue about the selected topic, which was deemed important and immediately relevant to the
larger school community. The third space for conversation comes with the distribution of findings to the school. These presentations come in various forms: presentations at staff meetings or with school Trustees,
student assemblies and written summaries, as examples. This step in the research process takes the data beyond the research group into the school community in order to expand the dialogue and increase awareness.
A fourth occasion for conversation comes with the annual CSBL Roundtable, which provides a space for research teams from schools across the country to become aware of and to discuss each school’s projects.
Cross-school conversations, among schools historically quite unique, creates a learning community and a research support network, built upon the common commitment to evidence-based, teacher-driven
"best practices" for boys. In guiding schools through the "what, so what, now what" of their research, CSBL considers the last, "now what", intervention phase the most important. The entire research process was designed
to facilitate this last phase. The research questions were based on concerns close to the hearts of teachers and important to their school. The research team’s collection and analysis of the data created an ownership
and curiosity about the outcomes. The numerous spaces for dialogue created a critical meta-awareness and expertise. In these and other ways, the research enterprise within each school represented a two-tiered intervention.
At the first level, the act of research itself creates spaces within and between schools to discuss important issues that are otherwise not likely be discussed. And, at the second level, outcomes of the research process
produce evidence of best practices for boys that lead to changes within schools. The Problem of Peer Harassment Most notably, the teams discovered that peer harassment (particularly insults and ridicule) was pervasive, often subtle and helped to define, teach, (re)produce and discipline rigid boundaries of masculinity, as well as
other forms of privilege. From their survey, the team discovered that 84% of its sample reported having experienced ridiculing/teasing, 33% experienced bullying/intimidation, 9.6% reported hazing/initiations and 10%
experienced fighting/physical violence. Harassment and peer violence were embedded in the social fabric of the school and implicated in power relations between peers, teachers, and the institution. Data from both students and teachers complicated crude dichotomies such as aggressor/victim, described emotionally ambiguous experiences that were at the same time hurtful and bonding, and revealed peer harassment
as contextually dependent upon when, where and from whom it was received/given/observed. The results illuminated intersections of violence, privilege, and boys’ socio-emotional relationships with peers, coaches and
teachers. They validated the use of participatory research as a method to create dialogue, awareness and action about/for/with boys. Not surprisingly, the results of this process described clearly how the culture involved
pervasive peer policing to insure boys stayed within acceptable norms, which represented clear and prescriptive ideas about masculinity. Exclusion and censorship were the most potent instruments of peer policing evident in
these findings. The exclusion and censorship of "unacceptable" masculine displays were conveyed through the school’s tacit curriculum, in which boys learn to "suck it up, bear the pain, evince no
sweat while working". Beyond these tacit messages, the qualitative elements in the student peer interviews uncovered how a preferred form of masculinity was promulgated and policed through forms of teasing and ridiculing.
Much of the teasing/ridiculing established either in-or-out, us-and-them distinctions that had the effect of elevating the preferred standard. One boy described a typical experience this way: Take chemistry, there is such a low level of white noise of bullying when he is a little too late for class. They say, "Is your train late?", pointing out that he has to take the train, while they get driven
from [affluent neighborhood] but he came from another neighborhood…There are all these ways that you never quite cut it, the way you dress, where you live, the way you live…all these ways you’re not
quite good enough. As another student explained, homophobic remarks were common to the point that they were taken for granted: Students subconsciously put pressures on other students: pressures that include making sure your tie is not considered a gay tie because of its coloring, or that the car you are getting out of is up to the standards of
[our rich] community. On a dress down day there is the added pressure of wearing a certain pair of jeans because they won’t be considered tough enough, or the saying on your sweatshirt is as gay as the pink tie
you wore two days ago. Many of the students both acknowledged the stressful environment this creates and, yet, still appreciated the masculine curriculum it reflects: This school is riddled with insults and fierce competition, yet, in my mind, I think that most of it is good. The reasons for this are that male interaction is founded upon a system of hierarchy…a hierarchical
system of respect and popularity built from these interactions. Another student agreed, writing: "Beneficial teasing has aided in development of friendships. It may sound funny, but I am honored when others pick on me." There appeared to be "hot-spots" for harassment in the school, generally away from the carefully monitored academic spaces of the school. In locker rooms and areas in the gym, in fact, coaches gave boys
the impression, perhaps simply by their absence, that forms of hierarchy and harassment were permissible. One boy, a student-athlete, admitted that he and his teammates were generally reluctant to interfere with locker
room fights, for a host reasons: the appropriateness of disciplining others who "deserve it", the masculine understanding that each boy is independent and responsible for himself, the wish not to get anyone
in trouble (ie. to "narc"), the desire to fit in, and the very real fear of having the bullying turned on you. But it was not just coaches and students who used verbal put-downs, insults, ridicule and even bullying to control boys. The research team was surprised and quite affected by evidence that suggested faculty
collusion, encouragement and even participation in forms of harassment. In the team’s interviews with other faculty members, some teachers confessed to the belief that "boys respect the teachers who are
quick…and it is hard to turn it off on the weekend with our own families… people who haven’t developed that end up leaving." Another female teacher added: I’m a very small and petite women - if you are a big athletic looking man you can, in this school, walk into a classroom and have a presence… the only way that those kids weren’t going to run me over
was if I found a way to be quick and clever…I have to say things to these boys that I would have never considered saying to girls…they would have been in tears…parents would be in school saying this
is a horrible teacher. Even a senior administrator acknowledged the school’s tacit sanctioning of harassment within the school’s regime: There’s a real premium on appropriately sarcastic teasing, finding a weakness and playing on it without exploiting it. That’s a skill I think the kids relish. The kids who really struggle here are those
who are not verbal. Since there is such a clear line of nothing physical allowed at school, since they cannot push each other around physically, they do push each other around verbally. The research team concluded the first phase of its intervention by presenting their research at the CSBL Roundtable, at a school Trustees meeting and at a faculty meeting. It became very clear to both groups on the
research team - students and teachers - that phase two of their intervention must begin with the faculty. The team concluded that if their work helps teachers and coaches become aware of their collusive reinforcement of
the culture, they can undermine unconscious support for these practices within the school culture. It might also increase the school’s sense of responsibility for the hot-spots for peer policing within the school.
Consequently, the team has begun a project in which they will ask their fellow faculty members to interrogate their own practices and to work toward alternative ways of managing their students. After that, the team
envisions peer-run projects with students to reduce reliance on these forms of self-policing. Boys at the Bottom The gender audit found consistent gendered patterns over the entire 34 years. When overall grade point average was broken into quartiles, boys outnumbered girls in the lowest quartile while girls outnumbered boys
in the highest quartile. Further, the number of girls grew as the quartiles rose while the number of boys decreased. This "V" shaped pattern is expressed in Table 1 and repeated itself for every subject except
math and science, but even in those subjects there were significantly more boys than girls in the bottom quartile. Table 1 Overall GPA by Class Year Given these findings, the school’s research team wanted to know what the boys experienced of their life at the school: How did they feel about the workload, their efforts to "make it" and their efforts
to establish themselves among their fellow students and faculty? Using a blocked random selection process, the team interviewed boys from high- and low- achieving groups. While these interviews with boys told a very
nuanced story about their struggles to satisfy the academic requirements of their schooling, making a place for themselves socially at the same time, two themes in particular emerged that shed light on this lower
performing group. One insight that emerged was that, while many came to school wanting to get "straight A’s", those who did poorly initially attributed it to a rocky start, as this boy described: I haven’t quite made it. I got off on a rocky start. I was having trouble jumping in - This was a new experience, managing my own schedule and all the stuff you have to do. But I think I am better off this term
than I was last term. Despite this generally optimistic spin, in fact, once they landed in the bottom quartile, boys were 6 times more likely to graduate in the lowest quartile than others in their cohort. One result for the school was that
there was a group of boys in the lowest quartile who could not maintain their initial optimism and hopefulness, and who came to express a general sense of disappointment in themselves. Jason captured the defeated quality
of these boys when he said: "I don’t really see myself excelling right now in anything." Not experiencing rewards of recognition or mastery, the boys in this bottom group ultimately come to accept
their relatively poor achievement, giving up on their initial aspirations. Yet it wasn’t just the boys at the bottom who felt disappointed. A second major theme to emerge from the data was that for many boys, regardless of quartile, the struggle to keep their heads above water and to
succeed was never over. Not one boy, at any age or achievement level, expressed a sense of mastery over the work. Indeed, even academically accomplished boys felt that they regularly sacrificed learning in order to keep
up: "it’s like when you have so much work, it doesn’t matter - getting it done instead of learning it or something." Undercutting the inspiration of outstanding teachers and a highly motivated
peer group, an overwork drill that seemed to rob students of their ability to enjoy the intellectual experience. The drill was so demanding, it seemed, that where some boys may achieve mastery at the expense of their
engagement in their schooling, boys at the bottom seemed unable or unwilling to make those particular sacrifices. These interview and audit findings were sobering for the school, adding a new dimension of compassion and appreciation for the group of underperforming students. Perhaps, faculty wondered, some of the boys at the bottom,
who told stories of coming to feel dispirited and even personally disparaging, were simply unwilling to traffic with the unreasonable nature of these pressures. As a next step, the team planned to present the data to the
entire faculty and begin to focus on how to address profound issues given voice to by the boys in the study. How can the school help boys adjust more successfully so they do not experience such rocky starts? How can they
help all boys develop more of a feeling of mastery and satisfaction? And finally, and most importantly for such a successful school, does it make sense that boys feel like they must give up learning to "get it
done"? A School’s Moral Mission The team responded by exploring these questions with students, conducting several focus groups with a carefully selected sample. In these focus groups, the team tried to map the school’s moral territory by asking
about bullying or scapegoating they had observed, about cheating, petty misconduct and about risk-taking. Findings from these exploratory conversations suggested indicated the important role peer groups played in
boys’ out-of-school lives, especially prominent for the group of weekend partiers. In school, the boys indicated that they saw a significant amount of cheating on tests and they acknowledged that there was an ongoing
but small amount of petty misconduct and vandalism in the school. To deepen these insights into boys’ moral behavior, the team next conducted in-depth individual interviews with a random sample of senior boys. Overall - and not surprisingly - these interviews revealed that
families played a big part in the boys’ experiences in school and in their social lives. Their relationships with their families flavored, and sometimes determined, how boys viewed, and "did", school,
how they made decisions about what was important, what they could and should do, who they should hang out and what they valued. They affected under what circumstances boys cheated, how they would and would not
take responsibility and in general, what principles they lived by. But the interviews also revealed that by the time boys reached the high school division, their peers had begun to play a bigger part in their on-going construction of their selves than their families. The interviews
helped the school appreciate the developmental impact of Ýboys’ experience of its gender regime, manifested both in school policies as well as within peer group play. The following insights added critical
dimension, grounded in boys’ actual experience, to the school’s understanding of its moral curriculum. The nature of cheating. Boys in the focus groups and interviews talked about cheating in ways that went beyond concerns that had been expressed by teachers on the research team. While some merely said, "It
happens sometimes" others said, "It happens a lot". Caleb summarized the types of cheating that occur: "Oh, cheat sheets, people sitting next to each other, people talking to each other.
Um, that’s pretty much it, like, people will write the answers down on a piece of paper, hide the paper." Other boys described people writing notes on the inside of their ties, sleeves and casts, holding
cheat sheets between their knees, looking over looking over their classmates shoulders and looking things up when teachers left the room. By and large, while boys agreed that cheating takes place, some expressed how they hate
it when it happens and others said it doesn’t bother them as it only puts the cheater at risk. Hamilton expressed the common sentiment: "The problem is if you are in class with them, you’re surrounded by kids
that don’t think it is that big a deal." The nature of petty misconduct. Boys described the same kinds of misconduct as their teachers. They talked about observing other boys writing graffiti on public surfaces in the school, littering, and engaging in small acts
of defiance. However, they attributed these behaviors to a variety of causes, more innocent than immoral: playfulness with each other, boredom or passing time, defiance stemming from a macho resistance and the desire to be
cool and finally to a kind of consumerism. Oren, for example, characterized it this way: "Some kids are just like sometimes it’s a joke. They write something about somebody else on a bathroom stall or on a table,
or something like this. I don’t know, some kids are just disrespectful and vandalize things… "Other boys were quite clear that much of the petty misconduct at the school arose from being bored, not
having much to do and passing time. Alan said: "I think it is just boredom. Like, if you have free time or something and you’re bored." But aspects of this kind of behavior were also understood by boys
to reflect resistance to authority. Oren captured this view: I guess you could say it is defiant because it is sort of like, not hate, but along those lines between the students and the teachers. Like some students just don't like teachers - You're rebelling against the people you
don’t really like - If you don't like a teacher, you are going to write on the desk or something like that. And you piss them off and I guess that is sort of like your sense of accomplishment that you made their life
a little worse for that period of time. The significance of boys’ peer groups. Boys lived within a variety of somewhat fluid, often overlapping, peer groups, which were key to their identities. For example, members of the football team defined themselves
as football players and hung out together while subgroups defined themselves as African Americans football players, "smart" football players, recruits, weekend warriors or jocks. Boys derived support, comfort,
and solace from each other as they chilled, hung out, partied and otherwise found ways to have good times with each other. Most of the most popular boys were on major sports teams and being a member of these meant that the
party culture was easily passed on to first year students by older team members. Besides being jocks, the most popular boys were the "the guys who get called to hang out every Friday and Saturday". They were the "weekend warriors" whose partying was notorious. These parties
took place at the homes of parents who were out of town or in the nearby woods, and involved heavy drinking. The weekend warriors were perceived as affecting a cool, unruffled manner, as having serious family money, as
not working hard, and as expressing much bravado. They had a rebellious streak and showed they were not "pansies" by playing games of hurting each other, mildly resisting authority and bending school rules. The peer group performances of the most popular group of boys involved both heavy drinking and in "getting girls". Getting the girls meant having sex with them in "hook-ups" at parties, where
boys would "get lucky" and "go off to a bedroom with a girl". Seldom would these hook-ups reflect anything more than one night stands. Their girls came from a core group of about 10 to 12 from
the coordinate school who partied with the boys. Our informants said they were the "cutest" and "most popular" girls who "respected the macho boys". Over the course of their tenure at
the school, the weekend warriors would have sex with many of them. Within the peer status system, girls became trophies. Indeed, some of our informants saw the "video incident" (what came to be a very public
incident in which a female student was connived into having sex with a male student, filmed by a hidden crew, who then showed the video around the school) as an extreme expression of macho scoring. They made it clear that
they believed some boys on the football team had planned the event, announcing it at lunch the day before. The idea was to video the boy and girl having sex and then show it to the team. The boys described this as done with
much hilarity, joking and cheering. The event was planned for a wider audience apparently to demonstrate the ring leader’s prowess to the rest of the school while enshrining the team’s masculine hegemony. The school’s conscious effect on boys’ behavior. By the time boys reached middle school, their ethics were determined more by family values and the pressures and circumstances of their peer group situations.
Gamel expressed the limited impact of the school’s moral instruction: "I don’t think people go around the school saying I shouldn’t do this because the school code says not to. I don't think
it affects the decisions that the kids make that much." As another student put it, "The five Jersey Stripes, if you will - courage, honesty, integrity, loyalty and sportsmanship - to me they don’t exist
in the school." Boys tended cynically to believe that the schools values were much less for the boys and much more for the outside world. Bob explained: "The Stripes are really, I think, something that the
school likes to bring up in functions where they’re speaking to parents and stuff, to try to make the school seem like totally abiding by these rules and stuff." While they did not see school’s values program as central to their moral choices, strong connections with teachers, together with teachers’ supportiveness and availability to help, their creation of safe
places to talk, and their capacity to talk about moral questions honestly, made a real difference to boys. Boys described the value of the small school in knowing their teachers, being known by them and being able to find
them when they wanted to talk. They appreciated how teachers were available to speak with whenever they needed them. And, they emphasized that they could find ones to talk with about very difficult subjects. Hamilton
captured these thoughts well: "Kids have such close interaction with the teachers here. That is one of the strengths. I mean you can go to teachers after classes and kids are talking to teachers in the
hallways." The school’s less conscious influence on boys’ behavior. Students also recognized that the school sometimes both created problems that compounded students’ dilemmas and missed opportunities to use
events to help boys with these choices. In particular, they pointed to inconsistency in the application of rules, favoritism towards elite athletes and policies and structures that encouraged misconduct. Boys complained when the school was inconsistent. For example, as did many others, Sam noted that during the "video incident", the school had not followed its own due process: The school kind of violated its own policy to me. And I was like: How can you say you uphold all these morals and you want to protect the girl and you want to throw him out automatically?" But yet we are supposed
to have students on the disciplinary committee. Boys also complained about hypocrisy. Caleb pointed out, "There’s alcohol at every party - that’s just a given." He went on to say that if the school didn’t realize that, there was
something wrong: "I mean the teachers aren’t dumb, they’re not blind. The teachers know who the kids are that do what." Perhaps the informants’ most vociferous complaints involved their perceptions of unfairness. They said that teacher-coaches and some disciplinarians held ordinary boys to different standards than boys who played
elite sports. Matt made this observation about the privilege of certain athletes: I honestly didn’t see one - football player ever - in a detention. Like dress code violations - I specifically remember one time, my best friend, he’s a pretty good baseball player
(he’s playing baseball in college), and he was walking in the hallway and he had a hooded sweatshirt on and there was probably three or four football players next to him had the same exact hooded sweatshirt things
on, and [a teacher-coach] just walked up to my friend and told him to take it off. In a variety of ways boys told us that the elite sports, especially football, occupy a special place in the life of the school. They noted that the best athletes became team leaders, often school leaders and certainly
leaders of the hegemonic party crowd. The informants’ perceived that such teachers can be more lenient when enforcing the disciplinary and dress codes, when holding students to deadlines and when looking the other
way if students leave campus without proper authority. Boys also noticed that some teachers form special relationships with these students, joke around with them more and give them more academic help. In addition to the negative lessons boys seem to draw from the privilege accorded to athletes, the school’s academic tracking system, creating a pervasive "smart-boy, dumb-boy" discourse, also appeared
to fuel student misbehavior. All of the informants attributed other boys’ places in the academic order of things to a combination of hard work, brains, parental expectations, and personal choices about how to spend
one’s time or to their status as (athletic) recruits. But, in a fascinating way, they differentiated according to how they explained their own success. Boys who were very successful attributed their achievement not
only to brains, but to having Ivy League parents and implied—though they didn’t use this term - that they were the recipients of considerable cultural capital. Some of the less successful boys, however, seemed
acutely aware that early tracking had cost them opportunities. They complained about the fact that because they had not taken school seriously as middle-schoolers, their capacity to take advanced courses as high-schoolers
was severely limited. These boys regretted the school’s failure to take into account their development and their potential. Overall, what these qualitative research processes uncovered was a much more complex moral calculus influencing students’ behavior. Quite clearly, the team felt, there were implications for the
school’s moral programming. These themes were presented, in a more detailed and elaborate way, to the school’s administrative team at the end of the year and to a full faculty meeting the following Fall.
In the faculty discussions that followed, the school concluded that it was too often unaware of and disconnected from the realities of these moral development processes. One result was the commitment to put together a
two-year grant proposal to develop a comprehensive, community-based character education program for the high school division, which began at the start of the next school year. The project has included students,
parents, teachers and alumni working together on research teams to conduct a more thorough baseline understanding of the school culture and to develop a multidimensional curriculum for a pilot program, which will also
be carefully evaluated. One of the member schools received a good bit of public attention for their work with CSBL. In response to press about their new approach to boys, a widely-read local columnist made sport of their willingness to
rethink things. He mocked the fact that the school " - is out to liberate boys from the awful bonds of gender. Boys shouldn’t have to be brave. They shouldn’t have to be competitive.
They shouldn’t have to "strive to produce". Boys should be allowed to be more like - well, girls, I guess" (Spencer, 1997). A mother of three boys at the school took issue with the column,
writing in a letter to the editor of the paper, Was what I saw in print for real? In a country where violence among young men is at a record high? Where young men kill each other as weekend entertainment? Were you actually writing an article criticizing a school
for teaching young men that fighting is not a natural instinct? Were you really stating - (the school’s) program was something to be ashamed of?" Smelling blood, the columnist printed her letter in a follow-up column and added, "Gee, Ann, OUCH! You might really have hurt me if I were a girl." going on to further mock the school’s approach
and offering, finally, to make lunch for the program’s leaders: "How’s a spinach quiche and a tofu salad sound?" More poignantly, at the same school respondents to an alumni survey sent back questionnaire forms with very substantial and often passionate comments scribbled in the margins, clearly indicating that the school had
struck a nerve. One man wrote: My own experience at (school) started out very badly…I’d been pulled from the comfortable womb of a coed public school where I seemed to do well enough, socially and academically, without much effort,
and was thrown into the totally uncaring, all-male, stiff-upper-lip, cold-showers-in-the-morning, violent, almost brutal world of the British upper-class public school. As a 12 year old, I was dismal at sports and
(school) required us to do sports. I am proud of this project that my dear old school has taken on. If it results in insights that will relieve just a little of the suffering of some future bewildered 12 year old wondering
why they are making him play football, it will have been worth many times its cost. But not all welcomed the school’s new exploration and many, with the columnist, reacted with attack and upset. They were especially upset that the school should inquire about aspects of their lives—ideas
about themselves as men, relations with women—they viewed as distinctly separate from the school’s realm, off limits, private. These pointed lessons about the politics of inquiry into boys’ lives are an important part of the story of schools’ investing in efforts to improve boys’ experience and the moral lessons they draw
from that experience. In fact, in many ways the upset the project has created at more than one school is more immediately instructive than its successes. What we have come to appreciate is the considerable
investment individuals and institutions make in their ideas about boyhood. The landscape of ideas about masculinity and manhood boys encounter in schools is not neutral, not open to imagination or tampering.
Challenging these dominant codes, which have been systematically and historically woven into school curricula - into subject area, personnel practices, school rules, rituals and reward systems - even if just to examine
their actual impact on boys, is not perceived as an innocent activity. However persuasive the link between virtue and experience may be, we have found that there are many barriers to schools’ discovering a grounded theory
for boys’ education. As Dale (1982) cautioned: "Hegemony is not so much about winning approval for the status quo, winning consent for it or even acceptance of it. Rather, what seems to be involved is
the prevention of rejection, opposition or alternatives to the status quo through denying the use of the school for such purposes (156-7)." From being "too busy" to reflect on their curricula for boys
to becoming entangled in internal politics, schools can generate lots of avoidance and take many missteps. And, while usually there is no single individual opposing progress for boys, the overall effect of all of
these systemic reactions can be to tie up or diminish the threat of change. Creating a school community that offers boys more experience of encouragement and fairness has required courage, persistence and confidence on
the part of schools. Here is a beginning list of reactions schools have evinced, as they set out to do this work, offered to normalize and to prepare others for what may follow. Disparaging the Messenger. As the reaction of the newspaper columnist illustrated, a first reaction to the disturbance created by the challenge of new ideas has been to discredit or attack whoever may be importing
the ideas. There are many ways that this has happenned, all having the effect of isolating and extruding the disturbance, to keep the infection of new perspectives from being implanted into the mainstream of the school
community. At one very school, widely regarded for its expertise with boys, the recent launch of a survey of faculty attitudes toward boys occasioned numerous comments by colleagues about the point person himself: his
masculinity, trustworthiness, his "switching to the other side". Although this person was a trusted member of the faculty, coached boys, is raising a son himself, his new leadership of a project aimed
at illuminating dark recesses of thought and practice at this venerable school left him vulnerable to "Othering", as if he were suddenly, somehow, different. This phenomenon of attack reminds us how
carefully protected knowledge about boyhood can be, boundaried by clear lines of taboo and threat. "Ideologies", Fine (1991) wrote upon completing her study of New York City high schools, "pull our attention to particular representations of social conditions, even as they deflect from others -
Ideology pervades what happens and what doesn’t, what is said and not, what is noticed and obscured" (p. 180). By leading a team to examine the school’s tacit curriculum for boys, individuals such as
this research team leader become, as Giroux (1997) puts it, "boundary crossers" or "border pedagogues", who come "to recognize that schooling is really an introduction to how culture
is organized, a demonstration of who is authorized to speak about particular forms of culture, what culture is considered worthy of valorization, and what forms of culture are considered invalid and unworthy of public
esteem" (p. 239). In an instinctual, often visceral way, violations of long-established taboos and carefully observed boundaries has frequently generated reaction, usually aimed at the individual perceived to be
leading the effort. Reverting to the familiar. Given the considerable institutional investment schools make in their gender curricula, they may be leery of proposals for self-examination and change. One result of such leeriness in
our experience has been a search for non-controversial explanations of boys’ school behavior, the “mirror construction’: ways of thinking that merely reflect popular assumptions. One such popular
assumption currently enjoying wide play is that of biological sex differences. Where sociologists of gender see masculinities as "the ways bodies are drawn into a historical process" (Connell, 2000, p. 206),
essentialists interpret brain difference findings to conclude that, "Girls and boys behave differently because their brains are wired differently" (Sax, 2005, p. 28). Schools may feel more comfortable with
such interpretations because they validate commonly held, comfortable practices, as if they are based in "boys" natural learning style"(Gurian and Stevens, 2005, p, 38, italics in original). CSBL is often asked, simply, to prescribe "boy friendly" programming, an impulse at once promising and short-sighted. Our work has taught us that the only way for schools to arrive at a clear picture of
what their boys need is to allow themselves to listen and to see, to be "surprised". By contrast with the over-generalized prescriptions offered on the basis of an essentialist read of
boys’ (or girls’) biology, a pedagogy based upon careful examination of boys’ actual experience of, say, literacy education may present, in the words of Smith and Wilhelm (2002), "a profound
challenge to American schooling and the traditional teaching of English’ (p. xxii). Where prescriptions based upon biological characteristics have the satisfying certainty of pseudo-scientific fact, our
epistemological approach asks schools to venture into uncharted territories. A commitment to evidence-based programming for boys requires that schools agree, in advance, to surrender a measure of control over their
historic curricula to a research process that is unpredictable, democratic and, therefore, threatening. As our schools created inquiry teams and invited these teams to explore pedagogical questions of their own,
with an expectation of recommendations for change, they opened their gendering practice to conscious inspection and likely reform. This is the conundrum that faces schools embarking on evidence-based programming for boys: data about boys’ actual experiences must be discovered and evaluated as a basis for educational practice, yet these
very data may reveal aspects of a curriculum that is "hidden" from conscious view and not necessarily flattering. Schools’ phenomenological commitment to CSBL begins with discovering their actual
impact of schools’ curricula upon their male students. It is the power of these curricula to dominate the minds and hearts of boys seeking to set trajectories for their lives that compels schools to achieve more
conscious control over these curricula. There are lots of good questions for schools to pursue about their boys. One school recently conducted a faculty inventory of questions about the boys in their care – What did they
want to understand better about their boys? - and came up with a list several pages long! From how they read and manage time, to their relationships on every level, to their grasp of the lives of females, to
their participation in the cyber world, and so on, schools could inform their pedagogy with knowledge discovered systematically, in actual contact with boys. But to do so requires openness and an investment of
resources, necessitates an institutional willingness to be moved by the stories of young men. Chasing Comfort. Writing in a chapter on "The Politics of Change in Masculinity", Connell (2000) warned against a desire for gender change to be pleasant or comfortable: "I do not think men
seeking progressive reforms of masculinity can expect to be comfortable, while we live in a world marked by gender violence and inequality. Masculinity therapy, of the kind promoted by pop psychologists who are currently
the best-selling authors about men and masculinity, offers personal comfort as a substitute for social change” (p. 204). Some changes schools must make on behalf of boys will not be without some degree of pain.
Sports programs are an example. By contrast with the hazing, bullying and various other forms of abuse common among sports programs (Sabo, 1986; Messner & Sabo, 1994; Messner, 2005), Marx (2003) describes the
altogether different approach taken by the football program at a school in Maryland - the Building Men for Life program at the Gilman School - which emphasizes service, compassion and love as key traits. In many schools,
this approach would be a radical departure. Sports and the curricular space dedicated to its pursuit was usually a "hot spot" for peer problems and boys’ experience of mixed, often confusing,
moral messages. In his classic on school change, Sarason (1971) cautioned about the prospects for the widespread embrace of such school reforms: "Near impossible" for most school people, he wrote, "because it
confronts them with the necessity of changing their thinking, then changing their actions, and finally, changing the overall structure of the setting" (p. 13). At one of the coed schools, initial research on
an attrition problem with younger boys led to the disturbing awareness that older boys each year inherited rituals and the historic rationale for the systematic and at times brutal harassment of younger students.
Despite the fact that many alumni, Board and current parents supported these "traditions", a faculty survey led to the realization that there was widespread support across all groups of faculty that the
practice was malignant and counter to the values of the school. Over the next several years, a concerted effort was made to end the practice, by separating and protecting younger students in horizontally organized
dormitories, with hand-picked staff and student leaders and a host of new supports. Eventually, new boys reported only the infrequent instance of hazing. This school’s example reveals the uncontrollable nature of
an inquiry process that asks boys about their lives and commits itself to discovering theory from a phenomenological process. Not all that will be unearthed will be pretty or flattering. Boys’ lives, in fact, can
be quite gritty and schools can expect to turn out stories and practices that reflect a seamier side to their man-making curriculum. But, we argue, if it is a goal to invite boys to justice and the cultivation of other
social virtues, exposing the spaces and practices within our schools in which boys are learning to fear and to abuse is a necessary first step. Beyond these examples of some more common temptations, however, our work encourages us that despite significant barriers the claims of virtue can motivate schools to invest in discovering the realities of
boys’ lives. We - and they - have been encouraged by the goodness, the remarkable compassion and care exhibited among boys whose experience encourages healthy ways for being male. There are actually countless
examples, in all of our schools. Enough examples, we feel, that we can promise schools that if they can address themselves to aspects of their curricula which produce injustice, violence, selfishness and
self-destructiveness, they will be rewarded with boys who can evidence, from their own lives, a reliable concern for caring and fairness. Connell, speculating on the future of change in masculinity, argues for
"prefigurative politics": "at least samples of paradise, at least little bits of justice, here and now" (2000, p. 211). The glimpses of boys’ lives we have seen in these schools, as fleeting
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