Kristoff: The Boys Have Fallen Behind

Nicholas Kristoff opines in NYT article "The Boys Have Fallen Behind" that girls "have roughly achieved parity with boys in math. Meanwhile, girls are well ahead of boys in verbal skills, and they just seem to try harder." He references Richard Whitmire's book "Why Boys Fail." Key reading quote from Whitmire: "Poor reading skills snowball through the grades. By fifth grade, a child at the bottom of the class reads only about 60,000 words a year in and out of school, compared to a child in the middle of the class who reads about 800,000 words a year." Kristoff suggests that educators encourage boys to read "lowbrow, adventure of even gross-out books" and references guysread.com.