by Heinz Sladek

Created on: July 23, 2008

I am fortunate to work for a school where Learning for All is not just preached it is an actively sought theory which presents itself as the overall vision of our campus. In making this statement, one particular area has concerned me with regard to equity between our male and female population. Our campus uses an in-school suspension room to address some behavior issues on campus. Over the time that I have been on this campus, I have noticed a trend in terms of gender disparity when it comes to write-ups and behavior referrals. When one visits the ISS room, most times, it is filled with young boys. Seldom do you see even one girl. We are an elementary school dealing with grades pre-kindergarten through 4th grade. On the kindergarten grade level alone, approximately 70% of our behavior referrals for 2005-2006, which resulted in time in ISS were boys.

This leads me to the hypothesize, I believe the reason there is a significant drop in the success of our male population in completing high school and going to college comes from a need to address how boys and girls learn differently, and focusing from an early age on keeping children in the classroom. In saying this, it is necessary to look at current statistics which include, student overall success according to core academic areas, overall discipline referral rates nationwide broken down according to gender, and current brain research regarding the differences in the development of males and females.

Over the past two years, I have become more aware of the differences in the way boys and girls learn. On many occasions, I have discussed with colleagues how I was concerned with the disparity in the quantity of boys being referred for discipline within our own school and the fact that so many of the children being identified for special education and other-health-issues (OHI) were from our male population. Many of the discipline referrals were due to the fact that the young males had a difficult time staying seated, quiet and on task. The result is often students being removed to an ISS situation where they do classroom work but lose valuable time which should be spent in the classroom environment I first started to become interested in brain research as it applies to differentiation of curriculum to address the differences between boys and girls when I attended a professional development session on classroom management and dealing with difficult behaviors in the classroom.

Why is there such disproportion in disciplinary

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