Experts worry that coed classrooms geared to girls put their counterparts at a disadvantage

For more than a decade, the conventional wisdom has been that schools have shortchanged girls, who were ignored in the classroom as they lagged behind in math and science.

But now a growing chorus of educators and advocates for boys is turning that notion upside down.

Boys are the ones in trouble, they say. They are trailing girls in reading and writing, are more likely to get in trouble or be labeled as learning disabled, and are less likely to go to college.

The educators, citing emerging brain research, say that the two sexes learn differently and that schools are more geared to girls than to their ants-in-the-pants counterparts. But they are adopting strategies to help boys succeed, from playing multiplication baseball to handing out stress balls and setting up boys-only schools. click here for article

Online resources

For more information about boys' and girls' learning styles and single-sex classrooms, go to:

www.gurianinstitute.com

www.singlesexschools.org

links.sfgate.com/ZHK

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BY THE NUMBERS

2.5: The number of times boys are more likely than girls to be suspended from school.

3.4: The number of times boys are more likely than girls to be expelled from school.

66: Roughly the percentage of special education students who are male.

10: Roughly the percentage of boys who have learning disabilities, compared with 6 percent of girls.

2.5: The number of times boys are more likely than girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

3: The number of times faster that women's undergraduate enrollment in college has risen compared with men since 1970.

57: The percentage of college students who are women.

E-mail Janine DeFao at jdefao@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle