Here’s a site that merits bookmarking…
Getting Boys to Read lays out the facts and offers practical advice to parents and teachers. The U.S. Department of Education should have started quarterbacking efforts such as this years ago. And yet, not a single effort to date. Considering the evidence, that’s pretty amazing.
Here’s how this group (which seems to have a contingent from Rochester, N.Y., where I once worked as a newspaper reporter) describe themselves:
Getting Boys to Read is a website dedicated to supporting parents, teachers and librarians help boys learn to love reading. (This blogger happens to contribute to the site. She thinks it’s a worthy cause. ) The site was founded by librarian Mike McQueen, who is a school librarian in the great state of Colorado. The site provides informative articles, interviews, and a forum for discussion about all topics related to boys, reading, writing and other literacy-related topics. The site tackles national issues, like the serious literacy gap between boys and girls in the United States, strategies to help get boys reading, information about children’s author Jon Scieszka’s Guys Read Group, informative books reviews, and a host of other interesting information, as well.
Boys Literacy Skills are Suffering
Compared with girls, boys’ literacy skills across the country are floundering. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, teen females have increasingly outperformed teen males on literacy assessments since 1971. In the wake of feminism, local and national programs have ignored this serious literacy gender gap. There is a pressing need for parents and educators to a) be informed of this literacy gap and b) to gain understanding and knowledge as to WHY this gap and exists and how we can fix it. GettingBoystoRead.com is a great resource that informs parents and educators how approaches to help getting boys to love reading should differ from approaches to getting girls to love reading.
Rochester Boys and Literacy Problems
Rochester, whose city schools have among the lowest graduation rates in the country, is not immune to this national problem. If you look at individual school districts in Monroe County, you will see that females have consistently higher ELA and English Regents scores than their male counterparts. Visit the New York State Department of Education’s report cards of each school district. No matter WHAT THE DISTRICT, females perform at a higher rate.
Tags: Literacy
