Danger, Will Robinson!!
In a June 27th article in the Huffington Post by Lori Day, Why Boys Are Failing in an Educational System Stacked Against Them, Day joins calls to attend to the concerning trends regarding males in the US educational system. She notes statistics from "experts", one of which is, Michael Gurian, that boys get worse grades, dominate the disciplinary incidents, are remarkably more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, and more. Michael Gurian has published numerous position articles and books where he takes research on gender differences related to learning, and brain development and advocates specific parenting and teaching methods based on his interpretation of the research; however, a cursory search turned up no empirical studies on the parenting and teaching methods he promotes. This doesn't mean Gurian should be disregarded, but it does throw up a cautionary flag.
Day also cites Richard Whitmore claiming that our educational system now forces earlier literacy development, and that boys develop literacy later than girls. However, that is not a consensus among educational researchers. To date, there is mixed evidence regarding gender difference in language development; some evidence suggests girls have a slight advantage, accounting for a very small 3% of the variance (Galworthy, et al., 2000), and other research shows no difference at all. Richard Whitmore has also written a number of works based on government statistics and such, and advocates for specific gender based education. Again, though, a cursory search found no empirical studies to support Whitmore's recommendations.
Day also comments that boys have certain gender-based learning styles and that education should compliment those styles. She is careful not to advocate for radical changes, but she does advocate for greater understanding and focus on the needs of boys. This is a valid concern, however her claim that boys have particular learning styles is not. There is no empirical evidence to support claims that people have different learning styles. Students have certainly developed different skills in different contexts, but teaching to specific learning styles does not consistently improve grades according to empirical research. There could be something there that accounts for the variance in performance, and maybe we are having difficulty identifying it from within our cultural and scientific lenses, but it doesn't appear to be learning styles per se.
Day then compares her own experiences as a parent of a daughter but a sister growing up with two brothers, and she does this quite humorously. She notes the behavioral tendencies of boys to engage large areas of space in their play and compared that to girls taking less (in general). She notes evolutionary psychology premises that this is due to male brains being wired for "hunting", which is premised on the fact that male brains show slightly more cortex devoted to spatial reasoning than females. It's easy to explain things in this way, because our interpretations are culturally bound and tend to support cultural notions already in place, and this is a noted criticism of evolutionary-based conclusions.
I comment on this because there is clearly something going on in terms of males performance and retention in the educational system, and I concur with Day that we definitely need to address it, but it doesn't do much good to hype methods, exemplars, and facts that are not supported by research. Indeed, that can do more harm than good.