Falling Behind: Troublemakers

This is part two of our series "Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America's Boys."

'Boys will be boys.' How are perceptions about boys’ behavior in the classroom shaping their entire education? It’s part two of On Point’s weeklong series, "Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America's Boys."

Jayanti Owens, assistant professor of organizational behavior, Yale School of Management, Yale University. Author of the 2016 study, Early Childhood Behavior Problems and the Gender Gap in Educational Attainment in the United States.

Andrew Cooper, fifth grade teacher.

Elizabeth Perry, mother of three kids, two boys, all under 11 years old, in Richmond, Virginia.

Part I

ANDREW COOPER [Tape]:  Today's the day! Five out of five. Come on!

ANDREW COOPER: My name is Andrew Cooper. I'm a fifth-grade teacher in Salt Lake City Public Schools, Salt Lake City, Utah. I've been teaching in Salt Lake for 10 years.

COOPER: Come on!

COOPER: Fifth grade boys and girls present in generally two entirely different ways. The boys in that formalized classroom setting, they tend to be attention-seeking in ways that are far more kind of overt. So they're doing things like jumping out of their seats, they're shouting out answers. They're like, very energetic and like, they wanna be seen, both by their teacher and by their peers.

COOPER: Alright, let's go ahead and get started on your math spiral review!

COOPER: I mean, right now in my class, I have a boy who is — he's a force of nature. Sitting down for long periods of time and paying attention is like, not, it's not working. And what we've found that works is like, one-on-one, like me sitting next to him.

COOPER: How do we know if something's a polygon versus not a polygon?

STUDENT: If they have sides.

COOPER: Today, while another teacher was teaching the math lesson to the rest of the class, the math lesson took 25 minutes. And one-on-one with him, he mastered the entire lesson in literally three minutes.

COOPER: Let's do one at a time. What'd you say?

STUDENT: Uh, sides or closed...?

COOPER: It's like, "This is a regular polygon. You see it?" "Yeah, I see it."

COOPER [Tape]: How many sides it has...?

STUDENT: But if (INAUDIBLE), I would say corners.

COOPER: Corners. Vertices?

COOPER: "Okay. Equal sides, equal angles. This is no regular polygon. Not equal sides. Not equal angles. See it?" He's like, "yeah."

COOPER: What do the sides have to be in order for it to be a polygon?

STUDENT: Um --

COOPER: "Okay. Next one. Regular, irregular?" "Regular." "Okay. Good. Next one. Regular, irregular? You see it?" "Irregular." "There it is. Why?" "That one's not the same as that one." "Okay, good." Boom, boom, boom.

COOPER: Can you have a wavy side?

STUDENTS: No!

COOPER: So it has to be a —

STUDENTS: Straight side! Straight!

COOPER: It has to be a straight side.

COOPER: And then we're able to move on to something that he missed yesterday, which is getting a earthworm out of a worm farm and observing an earthworm. And seeing like, does it wanna go under the dark construction paper or does it wanna stay in the light. And just doing something that he's super invested in. That's like a small example of just being able to engage a student who's like, way far on the spectrum of "I am a boy, I have so much energy, I like, need to be doing things."

STUDENT: Bye-bye!

COOPER: Bye-bye! (LAUGHS)

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: You've heard it before. Seen it, even. "Boys have to move more. Boys can't sit still. Boys have a hard time paying attention. Boys misbehave." But as Mr. Cooper proves in his fifth-grade classroom, given the attention and opportunity, even the most energetic boys can shine.

COOPER: He can learn everything that the other kids can learn. When it's delivered or presented or like, the different abilities of the teacher and the student can match up and have these little moments.

CHAKRABARTI: Little moments like that, though, may be the exception. In most classrooms and school districts, behavior is cited as one of the top reasons why academically, boys are falling behind girls.

RICHARD REEVES: I think there's a reason why boys are three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. According to one survey, 23% of boys of K-12 age had been diagnosed at some point with some developmental disability. 

CHAKRABARTI: Richard Reeves, founding President of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

REEVES: I think if you're getting close to one in four having a disability, you have to ask yourself whether it isn't the system or the school that's disabling rather than the boy that's disabled.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. This is an On Point special series. "Falling behind: The miseducation of America's boys." Episode two: Troublemakers.

JAYANTI OWENS: My name is Jayanti Owens, and I'm an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Owens, what first got you interested in this question of behavior and boys, did you have some personal experience?

OWENS: I absolutely did. So I am the eldest of three children, and my two younger siblings are both boys.

And so when I was going through school, one of the big things that I noticed happening repeatedly was that I would be in a class and then I would leave that class. And a few years later, my youngest, my next younger sibling would enter the class and my parents and my brother would always say things like, "Oh, the teacher just seems so surprised by my presence in the class, relative to your presence in the class."

And there's this internal comparison happening within family and oftentimes the comparison was not in the favor of my brother. And this got me thinking about, why is that?

CHAKRABARTI: Can you give us an example?

OWENS: Of course. Yeah. So it would be things that were often small, in the sense that when we were much younger, it would be that, if they were bored in class, they would just kind of not listen. They would not pay attention. And for me, I was like, I must be missing something here. Let me try harder.

CHAKRABARTI: So I want to make the point, and we'll make this point in every one of these episodes, that of course we're not talking about all boys or all girls. There's variance in behavior amongst all human beings. But nevertheless, your 2016 study, when it came out, it made quite a splash, because there are patterns that you discovered that emerged.

So first of all, are there in general differences in behavior for school-aged boys and girls?

OWENS: So basically, what I did in this study is that I traced a cohort of children that were born in the early 1980s until they were in their late twenties.

And what I found is when you asked teachers and parents when the children were in preschool, to talk about the frequency with which their children exhibit certain behaviors, right? And these were things like following directions, staying on task, concentrating through an activity, sitting still. And then the more social things, like getting along with others, avoiding getting in fights, making up if fights occur, these sorts of social skills. That those parent and teacher reports were linked to, how many years of schooling those children completed 25 years later.

CHAKRABARTI: Aha.

OWENS: So it turns out that girls were on average earning about three quarters of a year more of schooling than boys, which by the way may not sound like a lot, but actually the population level is huge. It translates into pretty substantial gender gaps in not only high school completion, but also in college enrollment and college completion. So we see about a 10-percentage point gap on average in rates of college completion.

So these are very meaningful and substantial differences, even though when thought of as just simply three quarters of a year, it doesn't sound like that much. Of that three quarters of a year, about 15% of that three quarters of a year can be traced back to the association between these early differences in self-regulation and social skills at age four.

CHAKRABARTI: The long and the short of it is that you found ample evidence in this big body of data that there are, on average, pretty significant behavioral differences between boys and girls. So as we approach the end of this first segment here, professor, why do you think that matters in terms of the education of young boys today?

OWENS: Yeah, so I think the reason it matters is because we know that, you know, the way that you are first treated, and the way that you first behave when you step into the school environment at age four or five, in preschool or kindergarten, shapes the way that you are received and treated and perceived by teachers and peers. And that doesn't happen in a vacuum, right?

Those perceptions and the way you're treated, it impacts both you as the student, in terms of the way that you start to see yourself and form your own self-image around who you are as a student and how you are, and how well you fit in at school. And then also it shapes the ways that others in positions of authority within the school, and peers and other parents — including your own parents — but also your friends' parents, and so forth, see you.

So if you are seen as a troublemaker by your teacher, that impacts the way that you start to see yourself. "Oh, I'm a troublemaker. My role at school is to not do well or to not get along with other people, to not stay on task." And that starts to shape the way that you then behave in future years.

And that's, in fact, what we see in the data. That the boys that sort of are acting out more, self-regulating less well and so forth at age four, are the ones that continue to have behavior problems and demonstrate those types of problems as rated by their teachers and their parents into adolescence, and the ways that they do in terms of their achievement. And those are the two big sort of pathways through which we see these early behavior problems mattering for educational attainment, you know, 20 years later.

CHAKRABARTI: These perceptions seem so deeply embedded in all of us that even you who studies this for a living, I heard you just say boys who are self-regulating less well. Is that what's actually happening with them? Or is it that they're just demonstrating typical boy behavior that we perceive as less self-regulating?

OWENS: Absolutely. No, it's a fabulous question. So what the study found is that about two thirds of that relationship is associated with differences in the ways that boys are treated for the same behaviors as girls.

So there is also, and a really important piece of this that's about, as you said, perception. And the ways that boys displaying the same behaviors as rated by teachers and parents as their girl counterparts are being treated differently within the school system and in society more broadly in ways that also play a really important role in shaping these long-term educational outcomes.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: To show just how long we've perceived that boys and girls are different when it comes to impulse control and behavior, Professor Jayanti Owens points to one of the most famous tests ever published in psychology.

ADULT [Tape]: Ok.

CHILD: What is that?

ADULT: It’s a marshmallow. Do you like marshmallows?

CHILD: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: First published in 1970 by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel, the marshmallow test has become so famous there are videos all over YouTube of parents giving the test to their own kids and researchers trying to recreate it.

OWENS: Basically, what the study involved was a researcher calling students into the lab and putting up one marshmallow in front of them.

CHILD: I’m going to eat that marshmallow now.

ADULT: Well, just wait. Let me tell you what the deal is.

OWENS: And saying to them, "I'm gonna step out of the room for just a couple of minutes. If you can leave this marshmallow here until I come back, you can get two marshmallows."

ADULT: So you can either eat it now, or wait until we come back and you’ll get two.

CHILD: Um, I want two!

OWENS: And then they would leave the room and they would come back.

ADULT: When I come back, what am I going to have?

CHILD: Another marshmallow.

ADULT: Another marshmallow.

OWENS: And what they started noticing was that if it was a girl student, that the marshmallows tended to be there.

ADULT: Should I give you another marshmallow?

CHILD: Yeah!

ADULT: Absolutely because that was the deal! Okay! Very good!

CHILD: And I smelled the marshmallow. I thought I would eat it, but I didn’t!

OWENS: And if it was a boy student there, that the marshmallow tended to be gone. (LAUGHS)

ADULT (Tape): I’m not out of the door! (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: This is from another recreation of the marshmallow test by another famed Stanford psychologist, Philip Zimbardo. And he's commenting on a little boy who ate the candy as soon as Zimbardo got up from his chair.

ZIMBARDO: I love the little skull and crossbones. Total boy. And he’s just enjoying it, minding his own business, eating away.

OWENS: So it's this sort of difference in how do you control impulses and regulate your behavior to think about, "Okay, what are the long-term costs of my immediate decision?" So that ability to regulate one's behavior in that way is what we talk about, when we say self-regulation, that's really what we mean.

CHAKRABARTI: I have thoughts about marshmallows! As you well know, Professor Owens, in subsequent years, there have been researchers that have tried to replicate the outcomes that came out of the marshmallow test, and it's been challenging. Because they've found that well, actually some of the things that had a great impact on impulse control, or the ability to believe in delayed gratification were things like socioeconomic status, cultural factors.

OWENS: Mm-hmm.

CHAKRABARTI: There's a really interesting one done in Japan, kids in Japan versus kids in the United States. Turns out Japanese kids were amazing at waiting to eat. Because that's a culturally informed behavior there. Kids in the U.S. just dove in immediately. (LAUGHS)

OWENS: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: But then they recreated the test and had presents. They gave the Japanese children one small present, same thing with the American kids. And they said you can open it now, or if you wait, you can get two presents. And the results were entirely flipped, right? The American kids are really good at waiting. The Japanese kids, they opened the presents immediately.

OWENS: So I think this is precisely the point, right? I'm a sociologist, so I'm always thinking about how things like culture and context and resources shape these differences in the patterns of behavior that we observe.

And so for me as a sociologist, what you're saying is entirely the truth of the data that I analyze, right? Which is that even in schools when you're talking about differences across boys and girls, average behaviors, there's huge amounts of cultural expectations shaping these differences that we see.

So I think it's really really important to point out that when we talk and everything that I will be sharing about sort of these differences on average in behaviors, that this is not necessarily just a physiological, biological difference between boys and girls, right? I think there's some element of that there. But in general, what we're talking about is hugely socially conditioned differences.

But it can also be a really, at the level of an individual school and variation within that school and the types of families that children are coming from, right? Similarly, if you are conditioned in a way to believe that it's okay to act out, right? And so there's all these stereotypes. "Oh, boys will be boys," right? That kind of gives the subconscious message to children, starting at very young ages, that their misbehavior is acceptable, right?

That's not to say that they couldn't learn to control their behaviors, it's that they were not told that they needed to. And so that shapes the ways that boys and girls show up in the classroom in really consequential ways that is the result of social conditioning.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Owens, when you talked about the correlation between some of the perceptions, even culturally, that we have of boy behavior, it immediately brings to mind some pretty startling statistics about things like ADHD, right? I was looking at some numbers here. This is from the CDC, I know you're familiar with them.

That in the 1990s, late '80s, '90s, about one in 20 American children — this is boys and girls together — received an ADHD diagnosis. Today that's one in nine, so it's more than doubled or roughly doubled. And the majority of those diagnoses are given to young boys.

So I wanna ask you what's going on there, but I'm gonna ask a more pointed question instead. Are we pathologizing what is actually regular boy behavior?

OWENS: So I love this question, because actually most of the time, there's a ton of gray area involved in what constitutes a diagnosable condition. And I say that in large part because right within the diagnostic criteria for conditions like ADHD is built-in subjectivity based on the demands of the local environment.

So I'll give you an example. Let's say that you are a really active parent who believes in starting your kids down an academic path as early as possible. And this is something, by the way, that many high social class parents do, right? Is they say, "I wanna get my kids started on the right path academically. So when they're three, we're gonna start doing pre-training in academic skills," right?

And when doing this, oftentimes things that they'll see are that boys are less good at sitting still in classrooms, less good at developing the types of skills that at that really young age are the precursors to sort of academic skills. And this can lead parents to say, "Oh my goodness, Johnny's just not as good at sitting still as Isabel, what are we gonna do? Let's go take them to a doctor because maybe they just, maybe they have ADHD."

And they take them to the clinician and the clinician will evaluate them. And one of the first things the clinician will ask is, "What's going on with Johnny? Why do you think there's a problem here?" And the parent will say, "We're trying to get Johnny to sit still, and we're trying to get him to sit and listen and he's just really struggling to do so, whereas his sister, Isabelle is doing, when she was that age, she was doing a great job," right? So there must be something wrong.

So the point is that the behaviors themselves are going to be very sort of context dependent in how they're perceived. And for some parents that might be seen as a problem, and for other parents, those behaviors may not be seen as a problem at all. And so one of the big things that's changed since the 1980s and '90s, as you mentioned, in alongside this rise in diagnosis, we've also seen a really marked shift towards the early development of academic skills or an expectation of the early development of academic skills.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here, because you're bringing up a very, very important point. The shift towards greater academic expectations at ever-younger ages. You're absolutely right. I think that especially picks up in the early 2000's due to everything from No Child Left Behind, federal regulation, to the growing feeling amongst parents that, "unless I get my kid on that track to academic success early, I'll never get the kid on that track."

This is where the social and cultural expectations, versus what the range of boy behaviors are are really clashing in schools. So are boys then being doubly punished, whereas the skills that girls seem to naturally come by a little earlier, are those being rewarded in schools?

OWENS: Absolutely. And that's what this study from 2016 sort of shows, is that sort of two thirds pathway that I mentioned, that's about the ways in which the same behaviors or behaviors that are rated in the same way by teachers and parents, whether it's a boy or a girl, are being responded to differently in schools when they're demonstrated by boys, right?

So if a boy and a girl have the same level of self-regulation, part of what's going on is that the boy is more likely to be seen as a troublemaker for that level of, or low level of self-regulation, than the girl counterpart. And so that differential perception leads to differential treatment which has this sort of vicious cycle feedback of the boy then internalizing messages of, oh, they're not a good student, or school's not a place where they belong. And then that ratchets up bad behavior and then that ratchets up negative perceptions and negative treatment.

And you can see the sort of vicious cycle play out across many schooling years, including in the form of actual learning differences, right? Because now the boy is spending a lot of time thinking they don't belong in school and not on how do I learn the material? So there are actually feedbacks on cumulative learning over this time, as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, this brings to mind something that I heard another researcher say, I'm sure you're familiar with him. Dr. Sami Timimi, he wrote a book a while ago called Naughty Boys: Antisocial Behavior, ADHD, and the Role of Culture.

And essentially, I heard him in another podcast, and he said that this cultural piece is really important, because he asserts that in western cultures — because he does this sort of global analysis — that in western cultures, we have this conflicting set of values, one of which tends to encourage antisocial behavior in boys by not providing them with social structures that allow them to grow and flourish.

And then at the same time, it punishes boys for what it perceives as being naughtiness. It has completely changed our definition of what we mean or what we see as ordinary childhood behavior. And that got me thinking though, that there's another piece here, Professor Owens, and that is that I think many, many teachers would say, "But behavior is a problem in the classroom," right?

That is a big part of the picture here. What we're asking teachers to do in the classroom sometimes, does that in and of itself conflict with what we need to do to allow boys to flourish?

OWENS: Absolutely. So a lot of my work is on teachers. And one of the big things that we know about teachers is that they are, like all people, responsive to the constraints of their environment.

And so if they are told, look, "You have to raise test scores by this much, and you have to graduate students up to the next level in order to keep your job or to advance in your own career," one of the things that teachers are gonna do, like any human in this position, would be to say, "Okay, how can I accomplish that goal?" And one of the best ways that they can accomplish that goal is to get people who they perceive as, or who actually are, problems in terms of their behavior, out of the classroom.

So I think it's absolutely the case that the structural environment around learning in schools and the ways that teachers are being incentivized to meet certain goals and certain achievement metrics is shaping the way that they are perpetuating this sort of vicious cycle of the negative stereotyping and labeling and the negative treatment of boys.

CHAKRABARTI: But this seems to be a really perfect place to bring in a parent perspective, if I can, professor?

OWENS: Terrific.

CHAKRABARTI: We've spoken with a lot in the course of doing our research for this series, and one of them is Elizabeth Perry. She's a mom of four and she lives in Richmond, Virginia. She now has a kind of hybrid setup for three of her kids. She homeschools them most of the time and sends them to a co-op for the rest of the time. And Elizabeth tells us that she made this choice, particularly for both of her boys.

ELIZABERH PERRY [Tape]: We specifically moved to a neighborhood with good school systems where we felt that they could get the support that they would need, and they would be with a good group of peers and have a community, all that good stuff that most people want for their kids. But I've been shocked at the ways that the public school has let me down.

CHAKRABARTI: Elizabeth's boys are 10 and six.

PERRY: My one child, my third grader, was able to hold it together all day, but came home completely wound up. And there's no ADHD in the picture there. My kindergartner, he was way too active. And it's a lot of screens, but there just is not one recess for either boy, regardless of age. And then my third grader's recess was at the end of the day, which is mind boggling. So physically speaking, it was not working for either child.

CHAKRABARTI: Elizabeth says it wasn't just that her boys needed to move their bodies more, they also needed more chances to mature socially, to work things out between their friends on their own, before adults intervened.

PERRY: The teachers micromanaged their social behavior to a large extent, and I saw that come into play more in third grade. My son really wanted to play soccer at recess, and all the boys wanted to play soccer. Because he said this was the thing he looked forward to most in his day. The teachers would come in and mediate arguments and then they would tell them they couldn't play soccer, because they weren't getting along.

The kids need time to work through their problems and discussions and not always have adults hovering, mediating, managing, and affecting the outcome of every single interaction that the children were having.

CHAKRABARTI: But of course, I'll make the point that schools are responsible for the social, emotional, and physical wellbeing of every child in their care. And striking the right balance can be extremely challenging.

And Virginia schools are also required to administer state standardized tests, called the Virginia Standards of Learning Tests.

PERRY: In the case of my son, he was not interested in those tests at all. In fact, he was angry that he had to constantly take them, so he just would flunk them on purpose. He didn't care.

That culture of testing is much more suited to girls. They are just, by and large, maybe a little bit more interested in maybe doing well, maybe getting a certain grade, maybe doing well on a test. I find that boys don't see a means to an end with a lot of those tests, they don't understand. I would try to explain to my son that the fifth-grade advanced math was on the line if he didn't start testing better, and he just looked at me like, who cares?

CHAKRABARTI: Elizabeth pulled her sons out of school at the end of the last academic year, and they're homeschooled part-time, as I mentioned, and in a co-op learning environment the other part. And she says her now fourth grader is getting great grades in the co-op and is now at a fifth-grade testing level for math.

But even with all of that in mind, Elizabeth has not given up on the Richmond, Virginia public schools entirely. She does believe that as her boys grow, public schools will be better able to serve her sons than she can homeschooling them, and she expects them to return to public schools when they are older.

Well, Professor Owens, I imagine you have some responses to what you hear in Elizabeth's story there. I'd love to hear them.

OWENS: There's two parts to this. There's the behaviors themselves that they bring to school, and then there's the ways that those behaviors are met.

So I think there's a lot of sort of things going on that are contributing to this set of circumstances that led Elizabeth and other parents to make the decision to pull their boys out of the public school system until they're old enough to be able to sort of subscribe to the rules and expectations for behavior.

That said, I will also point out that while what Elizabeth makes a ton of sense for her family, and I can absolutely see the reasoning behind it, not all families are able to do that, right? So I think that there is a really, really important part of this process that has to do with resources and social class and race.

What that means is that the boys who are able to have alternate access to learning opportunities, such as Elizabeth's sons, that other boys are not. And that might be because their parents are working full-time jobs or sometimes multiple jobs, and can't take time to homeschool or don't have the ability to provide that type of resource for other reasons, and that those are the boys that then get even further left behind.

Because now they're in an environment where many of the boys that would've been there providing additional support and even pressure from parents to push on the school, make more time for recess, provide these opportunities for the natural resolution of conflicts and those sorts of things, those voices are now being removed from the school, which means that schools have less and less incentive to respond to the needs of the boys that are left behind. And then we see this sort of process escalate and the disparities grow even larger along lines of social class and race.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI:  At the top of today's episode, we peeked into Andrew Cooper's classroom. Mr. Cooper is a fifth-grade teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah, and he showed us how he keeps some of his most high energy boys engaged and learning.

He spends one-on-one time with them when he can, and like many teachers across the country, Mr. Cooper gives the kids a lot of movement breaks.

COOPER: For a 10-year-old, if my math block is 60 minutes long, if they have sat in their seat and they have not moved for 60 minutes straight, I have lost them. And they are not doing the best work that they can if they've sat there for 60 minutes.

I think part of excellent instructional design and part of what experienced teachers can do really well is you can gauge and you can build stamina with the boys.

CHAKRABARTI: So how do you do that? Cooper likes to get the kids to partner up. It means they've gotta move around the classroom to their partners. And there's the important added bonus of satisfying boys' need for social interaction — plus extra practice learning how to collaborate.

COOPER: You find a partner in the classroom.

So we're walking around and we're getting movement, and then they meet a partner, and they do a problem together. We super-quick go over that problem so that they can check their understanding, and then boom, we're doing the next problem. They rotate around the classroom; they find another partner. Boom.

And so we're doing the guided practice part that we do while the kids are up and moving and getting some physical movement. But we're learning at the same time, and they're getting that sort of social gratification of getting to work with friends, getting choice over who they're doing their learning with.

CHAKRABARTI: Another technique that works with all students, but particularly the boys, is predictability. Cooper says he's found that the boys stay calmer when there's a stable routine in the classroom.

COOPER: They know exactly what I'm gonna say all the time. And so they're not wondering, and they're not like, "Oh my God, what's gonna happen now?" They know exactly what's gonna happen.

And the same thing is true if we're talking about like, a step-by-step sort of math skill sometimes. It's like we try to teach multiplication in a way that's consistent all the time. So because it's not something that can be mastered in a day.

If the instructional routine is consistent and it's always the same, then they have those anchor points. And they can just relax and focus on the new information, or focus on the lesson for that day, rather than wondering what's gonna happen in the environment around them.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Mr. Cooper acknowledges that nothing is perfect. Classroom management is an art and not an easy one. There are good days and there are bad days. And the boys' behavior and level of engagement can vary enormously.

COOPER: I should also say, my current class this year is one of the most stark like — it's a class that provides like most, some of the starkest contrast I've ever had. I have a group of boys that just absolutely dominates the class because they're so external and their like, "boy culture," like, rules the classroom.

CHAKRABARTI: But Mr. Cooper's building his toolkit. He also does things to vary his own tone while teaching. That's something he does specifically to capture the boys' attention and to build stronger relationships with them.

COOPER: I'm not the most strict teacher that you'll find. I'm certainly not permissive. I create a structure in the classroom that is safe and I'm in charge. And I think that boys see that kind of in a way that, maybe biologically they're responsive to that, because it's like the alpha of the pack. Sort of like, "I'm gonna respond to this guy, 'cause this is the person who's leading me here. He's the teacher. He's in charge."

And then I think within that, like there's that sort of like respect that's established. I do very intentionally create this environment where students are listened to, their opinions do matter, their voices do matter. And so it creates a relationship where they feel valued, they feel safe, they feel successful because they're able to learn in that environment also.

CHAKRABARTI: Andrew Cooper teaches fifth grade in Salt Lake City. Professor Owens, what I hear there in Mr. Cooper's story is here's a teacher, like many out there, but here's one teacher who is really trying to pay close attention to different things that he can do to help the boys in his classroom. But I understand that in your ongoing research you've found that this whole world of unconscious bias, that it also can be applied to boys.

So are there anything — or what are the things that you would recommend that teachers can do to overcome that unconscious bias about boys?

OWENS: So I love this question, and if it's okay with you, I'm gonna expand out and actually say that I think there's individual things that teachers can do, but there's also a broader set of things that schools can do.

So the first set of things is encompassing what I call like human capital strategies. So that has to do with things about who the teachers are that we're bringing into schools. And so this has to do with things like, are we hiring enough male teachers? Are we hiring enough teachers of color?

The second sort of big set of things has to do with policies. So you mentioned earlier suspensions and the sort of gender gap in suspensions that's a huge driver of differences in educational attainment between boys and girls. That results in part from the policies in place at schools.

So for example, if you have a school that has a zero tolerance policy that says, "Look, the third time that a boy acts out, they're being sent to the principal's office." And then you combine that with a bunch of teachers who are not doing the types of things that Mr. Cooper is doing to accommodate the learning styles and needs of male students, that you are using policies in a way that perpetuate pre-existing differences between boys and girls to the detriment of boys being able to stay in class and stay in school to learn.

And then the third has to do with norms. And the reason I say norms is because organizations — and schools included in them — have differences in the ways that they implement policies, right? So oftentimes you'll see there's a set of policies that are on the books. But you could have two schools that have the exact same policies on the books and then you go into those schools and you realize the climate of the schools is completely different even though they have the same policies. Why is that? It's because the ways that those policies are being implemented can vary tremendously from school to school. So I think about those as kind of norms.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me just use an example. I'm a big example person, learning by example. I was at a birthday party once, not that long ago, and there was a little time that the kids had to wait before they could start their little structured activity. And the group of boys, of which my son was a part of, they just spontaneously invented a game where they picked one of one in the group and they all just tackled him, that was literally the game. (LAUGHS)

OWENS: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: And then they'd switch to who got tackled next. And I will admit, I got a little nervous and definitely the other moms around me were like, "Oh my God, is this okay?" And one mom asked her son, "Do you wanna play like this? Is this okay?" And he said, with the biggest smile on his face, "Oh yeah! This is great!"

Now, that exact behavior, I know for a fact if it happened on the playground, it would've been broken up immediately, perceived as dangerous, possibly even bullying, et cetera, because that's outside the norm of what's expected today. Can we change those kinds of norms and expectations?

OWENS: So this is, the example you gave is one of a lot of fun, right? Everyone's involved in this and they're really happy about it. But I could imagine that situation at the party takes a turn for the worst. And that what starts out as everyone having a great time suddenly becomes a little bit too rough. And that suddenly it becomes an escalated negative event, right?

So one way that we could respond is to say, "Okay, you, whoever started this, or whoever I perceived to have been the one that started this" — as the teacher or whoever the monitor was on the school grounds at the time, says — "You're gonna get sent to the principal's office and the principal's gonna suspend you."

Another way could be that the person says, "We're just gonna all separate. We're gonna stop. We're gonna take a deep breath and we're gonna collect ourselves, and either now or in the future, not too distant in the future, we're gonna come back together and we're just gonna break down what happened," right? We're just gonna like replay and we're gonna identify the point at which this switched from being a fun thing to a not-so-fun thing, and we're gonna have different people share their experiences as being part of this exchange. And we're gonna come to a resolution. Hopefully on the spot, but certainly over multiple conversations if needed.

And there's been studies done about this. And some of them indicate that this approach is extremely productive in terms of resolving conflict, repairing relationships, rebuilding trust, and most importantly, or equally importantly, keeping students in school. So it's this sort of ironic approach that we have, which is when you do something bad, we're gonna kick you out. You've violated a norm or a rule in a way that's irreparable. And the only way for you to do penance is to be gone. And actually, in some ways you could argue that's completely contrary to what we want.

CHAKRABARTI: But I do wanna ask you, I mean, when we think about public schools in the United States in general, I imagine there's immediate pushback to some of what you're saying. Because A, do these new techniques or this sort of tripartite plan that you have, does it cost a lot for resource-strapped schools? Or maybe something even more elemental like, who has the time?

The techniques you're talking about, in order to be sticky, it can't just be done once, right? Like they really have to become part of the culture of the school. And meanwhile, there's all these other pressures that we talked about earlier that are unrelenting.

OWENS: So certainly, the approaches that I'm talking about can take time, some of them. But others are actually very readily accessible and essentially cost free.

So I'll give you an example. A recent study done by some of my colleagues found that actually one of the big misunderstandings that people have about human capital approaches to hiring is that to get the best people you need the most people to apply. So one of the things that hiring managers in schools and other organizations put a lot of emphasis on is let me get as many people to apply as possible.

And it turns out that the research actually suggests that you don't really want many people to apply. You just want the right people to apply. And what they found is that the earlier that you post job ads, the more likely you are to get a more robust and qualified set of applicants. And so something as simple as posting your job ad earlier than you were originally, can make a really big difference in terms of getting the best applicants, which mean people like Mr. Cooper, into the school in the first place.

I can give you another example in terms of restorative justice. Actually, one of the big things that schools can do and that they do quite readily is change their discipline policies or their discipline codes. That doesn't really require a lot of money. In fact, they're doing it already. Because you have to have some policy in place. So this is just a question of what policy.

And then yes, you're absolutely right to say, when it comes to implementing that, what kind of resources does it require? Well, I'll mention right now. For a lot of school districts, they spend a tremendous budget on things like school resource officers, which are essentially police officers that are on school grounds. And increasingly, districts are spending more and more money on school resource officers.

It turns out the evidence actually suggests that school resource officers are not that effective in actually reducing violence on school campuses. And so what they could be doing instead is taking that same money that they're investing in school resource officers, instead investing it in things like restorative justice counselors, people who are able to, and trained in how to resolve conflicts when it occurs on school grounds.

So I think there's a lot of approaches within each of these buckets that districts can take that actually would make dramatic effects on both the policies and the culture and also the people who are present in the school system, that would not require extra cost beyond what they're already spending.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. As we approach the close of this episode, Professor Owens, I do wanna say that again, I definitely understand that teachers across the country, 'cause they have reported to us directly that behavior issues not just with boys, but girls have become significantly more problematic ever since COVID, ever since those long shutdowns of school. So I do not wanna minimize that. But more broadly, I'm coming away with the conclusion that this is all quite simple, Professor Owens, and correct me if I'm wrong.

Richard Reeves summarizes it like this. He says that he thinks that boys too often in schools are simply treated like malfunctioning girls. And I wonder if what your research shows comports with that? That the problem isn't the boys, the problem is us?

OWENS: I think that has a lot of weight. The research and the evidence shows that at least half of the problem, if not more, has to do with the ways that schools and teachers are responding to the same behavior in boys and girls.

CHAKRABARTI: I feel like maybe I'm just, maybe there's something I'm missing, but this actually all seems simple. Not simplistic, but simple. In terms of once you think about it and now that you've gathered the evidence, if we reframe our mindset to say, "Most boys and the way they naturally behave is not out of the norm," then that's just a huge step forward in and of itself in terms of changing those perceptions and thereby naturally, after that, better outcomes should follow. I mean, am I missing something?

OWENS: I don't think you're missing something. I think that sometimes the simple approach is harder to implement than it seems. There's actually one study that has come out in the last number of years that suggests that one of the biggest things that teachers can do to better serve their students is to adopt an empathetic mindset.

And so this is research by Jason Okonofua and his colleagues. And basically what they find is that when it comes to school discipline, that when you ask teachers to come up with reasons that students would misbehave that don't have anything to do with a lack of school attachment, a lack of interest in learning, a desire to be disrespectful to their teacher, but really other factors that are outside the student's control — in other words, to be empathetic towards the student.

That that sort of intervention, that mindset shift can reduce discipline rates by about half. And this is a tremendously important and impactful finding, right? Because it suggests that simply by encouraging teachers to be more empathetic, we can cut suspension rates in half, right?

So it's not that it's impossible. I think there are approaches that we are seeing pop up that work, but there's a whole body of research that it suggests that it's actually very hard to change bias. So when people have stereotypes about particular groups, in this case about boys as troublemakers or misbehaving, that when we have those stereotypes that are so culturally ingrained, it's really hard to step out of those in any sort of long-term, sustained way.

And so in some ways, the best thing that we can do is change the structures around us in terms of the policies and the norms that shape the way that we intervene when this inevitable misbehavior occurs. Because then we're not reliant on the empathy of individual teachers which absolutely am supportive of that being an approach that we take, but I don't think that we can rely on that in isolation, because it is so hard to change people's biases.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Jayanti Owens, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. Professor Owens, thank you so much for joining us.

OWENS: It's been my absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.