Closing the Math Gap for Boys

The New York Times:

ON a recent afternoon, the banter of boisterous adolescents at Edwin G. Foreman High School, in a poor, racially and ethnically mixed Chicago neighborhood, echoed off the corridor walls. But Room 214 was as silent as a meditation retreat. Inside, 16 ninth- and 10th-grade African-American and Latino boys were working, two-on-one, with a tutor. They’re among 1,326 boys in 12 public schools in this city who are sweating over math for an hour every day.

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A colleague of Mr. Levitt’s, the Nobel laureate James J. Heckman, presents a similar argument on the science of early brain development: “Skill begets skill, and early skill makes later skill acquisition easier. Remedial programs in the adolescent and young adult years are much more costly in producing the same level of skill attainment in adulthood. Most are economically inefficient.”

But these economists are selling teenagers short. As the Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg points out in his path-breaking new book“Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence,” during the past decade neuroscientists have realized that adolescence, like early childhood, is a “period of tremendous ‘neuroplasticity,’ ” during which the brain has solid potential to change through experience. During the past generation, educators have focused on the growth between birth and age 3, but the teen years may be just as important for shaping a person’s future.

Read the whole story: The New York Times