Dear ollie,

We thought you may be interested in reading the text of a speech that Senator Boxer delivered yesterday, laying out her opposition to the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Today, I am announcing my opposition to the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court of the United States.

According to Article II of the Constitution, justices of the Supreme Court may not be appointed by the president without the advice and consent of the United States Senate. So it is our solemn duty to consider each nomination carefully, keeping in mind the interests of the American people. And this nomination is particularly crucial because the stakes have rarely been so high.

First, consider the context in which this nomination comes before us. The seat that Judge Alito has been nominated for is now held by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who came to the Court in 1981.

For years, Justice O'Connor has provided the tie-breaking vote and a commonsense voice of reason in some of the most important cases to come before the Court, including a woman's right to choose, civil rights, and freedom of religion.

Second, consider the tumultuous political climate in our nation. President Bush understood that in 2000 when he promised to govern from the center, and be "a uniter, not a divider." Sadly, this nomination shows that he has forgotten that promise because it is notnfrom the center and it is not uniting the nation.

The right thing to do would have been to give us a justice in the mold of Justice O'Connor, and that is what the president should have done.

Let me be clear: I do not deny Judge Alito's judicial qualifications. He has been a government lawyer and judge for more than 20 years and the American Bar Association rated him well qualified. He is an intelligent and capable person. His family should be proud of him and all Americans should be proud that the American dream was there for the Alito family.

But after reviewing the hearing record and the record of his statements, writings and rulings over the past 24 years, I am convinced that Judge Alito is the wrong person for this job.

I am deeply concerned about how Justice Alito will impact the ability of other families to live the American dream -- to be assured of privacy in their homes and their personal lives, to be secure in their neighborhoods, to have fair treatment in the workplace, and to have confidence that the power of the executive branch will be checked.

As I reviewed Judge Alito's record, I asked whether he will vote to preserve fundamental American liberties and values --

Will Justice Alito vote to uphold Congress' constitutional power to pass laws to protect Americans' health, safety, and welfare? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In the 1996 Rybar case, Judge Alito voted to strike down the federal ban on the transfer or possession of machine guns because he believed it exceeded Congress' power under the Commerce Clause. His Third Circuit colleagues sharply criticized his dissent and said that it ran counter to "a basic tenet of the constitutional separation of powers." And Judge Alito's extremist view has been rejected by six other circuit courts and the Supreme Court. Judge Alito stood alone and failed to protect our families.

In a case concerning worker protection, Judge Alito was again in the minority when he said that federal mine health and safety standards did not apply to a coal processing site. He tried to explain it as just a "technical issue of interpretation." I fear for the safety of our workers if Judge Alito's narrow, technical reading of the law should ever prevail.

Will Justice Alito vote to protect the right to privacy, especially a woman's reproductive freedom? Judge Alito's record says NO.

We have all heard about Judge Alito's 1985 job application, in which he wrote that the constitution does not protect the right of a woman to choose. He was given the chance to disavow that position during the hearings -- and he refused to do so. He had the chance to say, as Judge Roberts did, that Roe v. Wade is settled law, and he refused.

He had the chance to explain his dissent in the Casey decision, in which he argued that the Pennsylvania spousal notification requirement was not an undue burden on a woman seeking an abortion because it would affect only a small number of women, but he refused to back away from his position. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, found the provision to be unconstitutional, and Justice O'Connor, co-writing for the Court, criticized the faulty analysis supported by Judge Alito, saying that "the analysis does not end with the one percent of women" affected... "it begins there."

To my mind, Judge Alito's ominous statements and narrow-minded reasoning clearly signal a hostility to women's rights, and portend a move back toward the dark days when abortion was illegal in many states, and many women died as a result. In the 21st century, it is astounding that a Supreme Court nominee would not view Roe v. Wade as settled law when its fundamental principle -- a woman's right to choose -- has been reaffirmed many times since it was decided.

Will Justice Alito vote to protect Americans from unconstitutional searches? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In Doe v. Groody in 2004, he said a police strip search of a 10-year-old girl was lawful, even though their search warrant didn't name her. Judge Alito said that even if the warrant did not actually authorize the search of the girl, "a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so..." This casual attitude toward one of our most basic constitutional guarantees -- the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches -- is almost shocking. As Judge Alito's own Third Circuit Court said regarding warrants, "a particular description is the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment." We certainly do not need Supreme Court justices who do not understand this fundamental constitutional protection.

Will Justice Alito vote to let citizens stop companies from polluting their communities? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In the Magnesium Elektron case, Judge Alito voted to make it harder for citizens to sue for toxic emissions that violate the Clean Water Act. Fortunately, in another case several years later, the Supreme Court rejected the Third Circuit and Alito's narrow reading of the law. Judge Alito doesn't seem to care about a landmark environmental law.

Will Justice Alito vote to let working women and men have their day in court against employers who discriminate against them? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In 1997, in the Bray case, Judge Alito was the only judge on the Third Circuit to say that a hotel employee claiming racial discrimination could not take her case to a jury.

In the Sheridan case, a female employee sued for discrimination, alleging that after she complained about incidents of sexual harassment, she was demoted and marginalized to the point that she was forced to quit. By a vote of 10 to 1, the Third Circuit found for the plaintiff.

Guess who was the one? Only Judge Alito thought the employee should have to show that discrimination was the "determinative cause" of the employer's action. Using his standard would make it almost impossible for a woman claiming discrimination in the workplace to get to trial.

Finally, will Justice Alito be independent from the executive branch that appointed him, and be a vote against power grabs by the president? Judge Alito's record says NO.

As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, he authored a memo suggesting a new way for the president to encroach on Congress' lawmaking powers. He said that when the president signs a law, he should make a statement about the law, giving it his own interpretation, whether it was consistent with what Congress had written or not. He wrote that this would "get in the last word on questions of interpretation" of the law. In the hearings, Judge Alito refused to back away from this memo.

When asked whether he believed the president could invade another country, in the absence of an imminent threat, without first getting the approval of the American people, of Congress, Judge Alito refused to rule it out.

When asked if the president had the power to authorize someone to engage in torture, Alito refused to answer.

The Administration is now asserting vast powers, including spying on American citizens without seeking warrants -- in clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- violating international treaties, and ignoring laws that ban torture. We need justices who will put a check on such overreaching by the executive, not rubberstamp it. Judge Alito's record and his answers at the hearings raise very serious doubts about his commitment to being a strong check on an 'imperial president.'

In addition to these substantive matters, I remain concerned about Judge Alito's answers regarding his membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton and his failure to recuse himself from the Vanguard case, which he had promised to do.

During the hearings, we all felt great compassion for Mrs. Alito when she became emotional in reaction to the tough questions her husband faced in the Judiciary Committee. Everyone in politics knows how hard it is for families when a loved one is asked tough questions. It is part of a difficult process, and whoever said politics is not for the faint of heart was right.

Emotions have run high during this process. That's understandable. But I wish the press have focused more on the tears of those who will be affected if Judge Alito becomes Justice Alito and his out-of-the mainstream views prevail.

I worry about the tears of a worker who, having failed to get a promotion because of discrimination, is denied the opportunity to pursue her claim in court.

I worry about the tears of a mentally ill woman who is forced by law to tell her husband that she wants to terminate her pregnancy and is afraid that he will leave her or stop supporting her.

I worry about the tears of a young girl who is strip searched in her own home by police who have no valid warrant.

I worry about the tears of a mentally retarded man, who has been brutally assaulted in his workplace, when his claim of workplace harassment is dismissed by the court simply because his lawyer failed to file a well written brief on his behalf.

These are real cases in which Judge Alito has spoken.

Fortunately, he did not prevail in these cases. But if he goes to the Supreme Court, he will have a much more powerful voice -- a radical voice that will replace a voice of moderation and balance.

Perhaps the most important statement Judge Alito made during the entire hearing process was when he told the Judiciary Committee that he expects to be the same kind of justice on the Supreme Court as he has been a judge on the Circuit Court.

That is precisely the problem. As a judge, Samuel Alito seemed to approach his cases with an analytical coldness that reflected no concern for the human consequences of his reasoning.

Listen to what he said about a case involving an African-American man convicted of murder by an all white jury in a courtroom where the prosecutors had eliminated all African-American jurors in many previous murder trials as well.

Judge Alito dismissed this evidence of racial bias and said that the jury makeup was no more relevant than the fact that left-handers have won five of the last six presidential elections. When asked about this analogy during the hearings, he said it "went to the issue of statistics... (which) is a branch of mathematics, and there are ways to analyze statistics so that you draw sound conclusions from them..." That response would have been appropriate for a college math professor, but it is deeply troubling from a potential Supreme Court justice.

As the great jurist and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in 1881, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."

What Holmes meant is that the law is a living thing, that those who interpret it must do so with wisdom and humanity, and with an understanding of the consequences of their judgments for the lives of the people they affect.

It is with deep regret that I conclude that Judge Alito's judicial philosophy lacks this wisdom, humanity and moderation. He is simply too far out of the mainstream in his thinking. His opinions demonstrate neither the independence of mind nor the depth of heart that I believe we need in our Supreme Court justices, particularly at this crucial time in our nation's history.

That is why I will oppose this nomination.

This is probably a commentary on who we shouldn't be running for President in 2008, but for me it speaks to the larger issue of the DINO, excuse me, DLC Democrats.

Crossposted at the Daily Kos.

Just when you thought it was safe to answer your e-mail:

Here is the message:

A Principled Stand On Alito

When the president hastily nominated Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court last fall, with no visible bipartisan consultation, we commented that he had chosen to divide rather than unite the Senate and the country in his haste to placate conservatives unhappy with his earlier nomination of Harriet Miers. Nothing that's come to light since then has changed our opinion: Judge Alito is a decent and well qualified jurist, but represents a large step towards a conservative ideological reshaping of the Supreme Court at a time when it is teetering on the edge of a variety of decisions that could erode or overturn important constitutional rights.

Nobody can claim surprise that President Bush acted in this way; he has repeatedly promised to name justices in the mold of conservative judicial activists Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas (and perhaps Chief Justice Roberts, if his alignment with Scalia and Thomas on the landmark decision on Oregon's assisted-suicide statute is any indication).

And Samuel Alito appears to fill the bill. Despite his artfully expressed testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee, it's clear Judge Alito embraces an "originalist" view of constitutional interpretation, along with the recent, unbalanced conservative tendency to police congressional powers but not executive powers.

Fair enough so far...

Democrats in the Senate, and elsewhere, have no obligation to help Bush redeem this divisive campaign pledge. Given Judge Alito's long and consistent record of conservative activism on and off the bench, it is prudent to oppose this confirmation as a matter of principle, reflecting the gravity of a lifetime appointment to a closely divided Court.

But we stress this last point: in the Senate debate on this confirmation, Democrats should focus on Alito's judicial philosophy, and discard the personal attacks that figure so prominently in some of the interest-group campaigning against his confirmation. Such attacks at best distract from the principled case against Alito; at worst, they undermine it.

Ok, perhaps a bit wimpy, but yes, stick to the issues; I can see that.

For the same reason and others, we do not think Senate Democrats should try to filibuster this confirmation. A filibuster is certain to fail; indeed, the Senate is certain to respond to a filibuster by outlawing them permanently in judicial confirmations. Using this weapon now would stake Democrats to the implausible argument that Alito's inevitable confirmation is the most egregious act of the Bush administration and the Republican Senate, going into a critical midterm election.

Oh *^%$#@!!!!! Now they are acting like the DLC again!!!

The second-best way for Democrats to avoid still more Alitos on the Court is to make major gains in the Senate this November. And the best way is to win the White House in 2008.

ARGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=131&subid=192&contentid=253692

From Dependable Renegade: the promise of a Bush Speech is an exciting thing.

http://derenegade.blogspot.com/ is an excellent source of liberal "snark".

On the professional end, I am nearing a proof of the following: "f(x,y) is continuous at (a,b) if and only if the limit of f(x,y) = f(a, b) as (x,y) approaches (a,b) along any C1 (continuous first derivative) path." (I was able to show that this claim is false if one replaces "C1" by "real analytic").

So I have a bit more time to blog and some time to get in a few more miles prior to work.

I'll go ahead and share this article from The Nation called: "Eating Ourselves To Death" by Nicholas Von Hoffman.

If this sounds like more of "oh my goodness, don't liberals expect anyone to be responsible for themselves" think about this: who is getting the contracts to feed our kids at the public schools? In Peoria, we give them to companies that provide food that makes our kids sick! And, in the film "Supersize Me", there was a study which showed that when an alternative high school switched food delivery contractors to one that gave their kids better food for lunches, things like grades and attendance actually improved! Here is one source for this episode:
http://www.crisisprevention.com/whatsnew/CRNews/CRNews_Dec2005/CRN_12-4_NDenison.html

"

Flour Power
by Niki Denison

Nutrition can make a significant difference in more ways than you think.

In 1998, Wisconsin’s Appleton Central Alternative High School was dealing with worrisome discipline problems in the classrooms. Students were caught with drugs and weapons. They were hostile to each other and to their teachers, and behavior was out of control.

Did the school turn to a psychologist, a consultant or an education specialist? No – they contacted Paul Stitt, the owner and founder of Natural Ovens Bakery.

“When the Appleton school system came to us and said could you help us, we said we’d love to,” Stitt says. “And we said, “Certainly, we know how to correct the situation. Throw out the vending machines with all the high-sugar, high-fat foods; throw out the pop machines loaded with sugar; put in water coolers; and start educating kids about what they need to do to be good to their bodies.”

Stitt and his spouse, Barbara, underwrote a program that allowed the school to start serving a menu emphasizing fresh fruits and vegetables, whole-grain products, entrees free of chemicals and additives, and energy drinks.

The results were dramatic. Truancy rates took a nose dive. Grades shot up. Vandalism and littering went down. The alternative school went five years with no expulsions, no dropouts, no drugs on campus, no weapons, and no suicides. It was the only school in Appleton that had a perfect record during that period.

Although the food costs were higher, the school saved money because it no longer had to pay for a full-time police officer, and with better discipline, it was able to increase class size from eight to 15 students.[...]"

Now to The Nation article:

Eating Ourselves to Death

by NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN

[posted online on January 23, 2006]

Bill Clinton has been flashing his charm on TV lately, talking about cheaper drug prices for African AIDS sufferers. It is a most worthwhile cause but a remote one. In New York City, where Mr. Clinton maintains his rather grand, publicly paid-for headquarters, an even more lethal and more neglected epidemic pleads for his good offices.

Eight hundred thousand New Yorkers are suffering from diabetes. All told, 21 million Americans have the disease. Doctors estimate that another 45 million are prediabetic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention anticipates that one out of every three children born in the United States will contract this fatal malady.

Diabetes causes heart attacks, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, loss of circulation leading to gangrene and amputation of feet, legs and hands. It destroys the nervous system, leaving people in continuous, excruciating pain, and it robs them of the power to fight off infectious disease. As a public health problem, it dwarfs diseases like AIDS by orders of magnitude but gets scant attention. Did you know that the color of the diabetes ribbon is gray? Have you ever seen one?

Five to 10 percent of diabetics inherit the disease. For everybody else who has it--and that is, to repeat, tens of millions--this killer is preventable. No drugs are needed to protect people from diabetes, which is unfortunate since in the free-market world there is no money to be made in keeping people healthy. Fortunes are to be made, however, by letting people contract diabetes and then tethering them to a dialysis machine. Profit aplenty is to be found chopping off feet and selling drugs for heart disease.

Where are the big bucks in diabetes prevention when all that is involved is teaching people to eat right and exercise? Where is the money in that unless you own a gymnasium?

In the land of the free, the brave and the sick, the more money you have, the greater the odds are that you eat right and exercise enough to have no worries about diabetes. This is a disease of low- and middle-income people. They are the ones who live off factory-made food loaded with the grease and sugar from which American people are sickening at an ever younger age.

At home and at school children are habituated to eating what will kill them. There is profit in poisoning the population, and lethal food peddling, unlike lethal drug peddling, is legal. A go-getting, job-creating ad agency entrepreneur can make a hell of a lot of money teaching children how to grow fat and kill themselves.

In Australia, Canada and England they censor advertising. In the United States free speech is interpreted to mean you may drench toddlers in thousands of cunning ads to inculcate in them toxic eating habits. The lawyers--bless their liberty-loving selves--tell us that the Founding Fathers put it in the Constitution that corporations may jackhammer us night and day with upbeat messages to buy and eat what will kill us.

Nothing is more difficult than changing the food preferences we were taught as children. Get the kids hooked on snack food early in life and you've got them even after they have grown up and the doctor tells them they have diabetes. Krispy Kreme, now and forever.

In a time of single-parent and three-job families, a decent diet and a minimum amount of exercise does not happen. People do not know how to cook. Millions of them would not know what to do with an uncooked vegetable if it were to jump, uninvited, into their shopping carts. They only know how to microwave factory-prepared comestibles. Even if they could cook, shopping for wholesome ingredients and putting them together costs more than franchise food takeout. It's cheaper, quicker and easier to heat up something factory fresh from a box that says, "Just Like Mother Made From Scratch."

Anyone foolhardy enough to object to the 100 or so grocery manufacturers, fast food franchisers and soft drink companies knocking off a third of the population should be prepared for a long and arduous slog. Such people will be ignored, and if by chance they do capture public attention for a brief second, the food, drug and beverage industry's propaganda apparatus will take care of them in short order. They will be ridiculed, denounced and run out of public life as socialists, ideologues, out of the main stream, collectivists, members the Nader conspiracy, people with an agenda, etc.

Failing that, the toxic food industry has its armies of Jack Abramoffs to buy as many government officials and members of Congress as it takes. Eat a carrot, take a jog and forget about it. We have become a nation of pâté de foie gras geese, held by our throats, stuffed to the bursting and unable to do anything but flap an occasional wing.

All of the above without comment.

So, what about boys and reading? A few days ago I posted a Pollitt article which discussed the gap between men and women that qualified for college. She more or less snarked and said "get over it". Pollett might have had a point had the point been that women were just doing so well. But alas, the case isn't that the women are performing so well; it is that the men are performing very poorly.

BOYS AND BOOKS.

Boy Trouble
by Richard Whitmire
Post date: 01.18.06
Issue date: 01.23.06

t's been a year since Harvard President Larry Summers uttered some unfortunate speculations about why so few women hold elite professorships in the sciences. During Summers's speech, a biologist, overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, nearly collapsed with what George F. Will unkindly described as the vapors. Since that odd January day, Summers has been rebuked with a faculty no-confidence vote, untold talk-show hosts have weighed in, and 936 stories about the controversy have appeared in newspapers and magazines (according to LexisNexis). Impressive response, especially considering the modest number of these professorships available.

Compare that with what happened after the U.S. Department of Education, also about a year ago, released a 100-plus-page report weighing academic progress by gender. The results were bracing. Nearly every chart told the same story. Boys are over 50 percent more likely than girls to repeat grades in elementary school, one-third more likely to drop out of high school, and twice as likely to be identified with a learning disability. The response? Near-total silence.

What's most worrisome are not long-standing gender differences but recent plunges in boys' relative performance. Between 1992 and 2002, the gap by which high school girls outperformed boys on tests in both reading and writing--especially writing--widened significantly. Given the reading and writing demands of today's college curriculum, that means a lot of boys out there are falling well short of being considered "college material." Which is why women now significantly outnumber men on college campuses, a phenomenon familiar enough to any sorority sister seeking a date to the next formal. This June, nearly six out of ten bachelor's degrees awarded will go to women. If the Department of Education's report is any indication, in coming years, this gender gap will grow even larger.

The report illustrates a dramatic and unsolved mystery: At some point in the early '80s, boys' relative academic records and aspirations took a downward turn. So far, no one has come up with a good explanation for this trend, but it's a story that affects millions of boys and their families. And yet, according to LexisNexis, the report was cited by name in only five newspaper and magazine articles.

Not only has there been little media attention to this crisis in boys' education, but there has been surprisingly little research. And the conventional wisdom offered up to explain the problem--boys play too many video games and listen to too much hip-hop music--can't explain a gender slide that's affecting not just the United States but much of the developed West. It also can't explain why boys in a few schools manage to duck the gender gap. But promising new answers have begun to surface--and from some very unlikely places.

hat we know for certain about this mostly ignored gender trend comes from surveys that measure the academic attitudes of teen students. In the early '80s, boys and girls were almost evenly matched in their college ambitions. A decade later, everything had changed. Academic aspirations for girls soared as those of boys pretty much flatlined. And the trend has continued, with girls who say they plan to go to college or graduate school now far outnumbering boys. Among female high school seniors, 62.4 percent said they definitely planned to graduate from a four-year college program, compared with 51.1 percent of male high school seniors, according to a 2001 survey by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

A few things about this mystery are known. The gender gap between boys' and girls' academic achievement has long existed in the black community. Nearly twice as many black women as black men attend college, according to the latest numbers from the Department of Education. But, in recent years, the slippage broadened to the white middle class. American Council on Education researcher Jacqueline King has produced data showing startling shifts among middle-class white college students. Only eight years ago, the campus gender balance for this group (incomes $30,000 to $70,000) was an even 50-50. As of last year, the proportion of white men had dropped to 43 percent. In middle-class suburbs, it's common to hear parents wondering out loud why their daughters go to the colleges of their choice while their sons struggle to get into second-tier schools.

What's happening in those homes is itself something of a puzzle. Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., offered the outside world a glimpse in a piece he wrote for The Washington Post in 2003. Welsh described his bafflement over privileged white boys who felt obligated to party too much and study too little. Their most obvious role models for how seriously to take life appeared to be popular rap artists.

But, as Welsh pointed out, even these underperforming boys nearly always landed a spot in some college. That's due to one of the best-kept secrets in college admissions today: the affirmative action campaign to recruit men. Most admissions directors sifting through stacks of applications from men and women can only sigh at the contrast. The average male applicant has far lower grades, writes a sloppy essay, and sports few impressive extracurriculars. Those admissions directors face a choice: Either admit less-qualified men or see the campus gender balance slip below 40 percent male, a point at which female applicants begin to look elsewhere.

What little research has been done on this shift in the gender gap falls roughly into two camps--the feminists and the pragmatists. The feminist viewpoint is summarized in "Raising and Educating Healthy Boys: A Report on the Growing Crisis in Boys' Education." This study, performed by the Educational Equity Center at the Academy for Educational Development and published last March, effectively asks: Why can't boys be more like girls? Boys are locked into a masculinity box, the feminist researchers say. Most boys stay inside that box, living by a macho boy code that precludes developing the "language of feelings" needed to express themselves or relate to teachers. Boys who break out of this box are doomed to a life of teasing and being bullied. In other words, young boys never get sufficiently acquainted with their feelings to write A-rated essays.

Expecting boys to become more like girls, however, will strike parents of boys as a bit odd--especially liberal parents who swore they'd never give their children violent toys, only to watch their sons mold clumps of clay into submachine guns.

The pragmatists, mostly male researchers, peer inside the school door and see a feminized world that needs tweaking. Professor Jeffrey Wilhelm, co-author of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys, decries the dearth of boy-friendly reading material. Most literature classes demand that students explore their emotions (not a strong point for boys).

Other pragmatists point to the simple things: Basing grades on turning in homework on time guarantees lower grades for boys. Studies consistently show boys have more trouble than girls turning in homework on time. Some educators and parents explain this by saying that many boys simply forget or decline to turn in completed homework. Here's the boy-thinking: If I answered the homework question to my satisfaction, the task is done. Why turn it in? If you're the parent of a girl, that may sound bizarre. It isn't. Parents of slumping boys know differently.

he problem with these theories is that they can't explain the rare cases in which schools have managed to keep boys' learning on par with that of girls. The Education Trust, a Washington-based education reform group that looks after the education interests of less privileged students, scoured the nation for gender success stories and turned up Indian River School District in rural Delaware. Indian River's Frankford Elementary appears to be an unlikely candidate for achieving any sort of academic success, let alone overcoming the gap between boys' and girls' achievement: 76 percent of the students qualify for subsidized lunches, 22 percent land in special education, and 64 percent are either Latino or black. Most of the Latinos are sons and daughters of Mexican agricultural workers who have limited English skills.

And, yet, here's Frankford's 2004 state report card for fifth-graders: 100 percent of boys and 95 percent of girls meet state reading standards. When I contacted them, school leaders expressed pride at their success in educating poor and minority students but appeared bewildered when told they had conquered the gender gap. Turns out their education strategy had nothing to do with getting boys in touch with their feelings or eliminating late-homework penalties. Rather, the strategy was a roll-up-your-sleeves effort initially sparked by a state campaign to improve literacy skills. Students whose problems were identified early received extra help from teachers. A special eye was kept on black boys. Most important, no excuses were accepted--when boys fell behind, teachers weren't allowed to consider that the norm.

While the national research into this issue is dismal, a handful of individual researchers have turned up some important discoveries. The culprit they identify has little to do with the influence of anti-academic hip-hop music, too many video games, or the sometimes exasperating tendency of boys to be boys. The key appears to be literacy skills.

Ken Hilton is an unlikely pioneer in gender-gap research. Hilton is a statistician who works out of a small cinderblock office in the administration building of the Rush-Henrietta schools in the suburbs of Rochester, New York. Six years ago, then-school board member Dirk Hightower showed up to see his son inducted into the National Honor Society. What he saw was a long line of girls moving across the stage: "I heard nothing but heels clicking," Hightower recalls. Concerned about the obvious gender gap, Hightower asked Hilton what was going on. Hilton couldn't answer Hightower's question, but vowed to get to the bottom of it. Hilton is a pocket-protector kind of guy who arrives at his half-basement office every Sunday to catch up on work. When he promises results, he delivers. Now, six years later, Hilton has some of the best research into the gender gap available anywhere. (Though it hasn't been published or peer-reviewed.) And he seems barely aware of this. I'm the first national reporter even to inquire.

Hilton conducted a series of studies, culminating in the summer of 2004 with a large survey of 21 school districts across New York state. Twelve were blue-collar and middle-class districts just like Rush-Henrietta. Another nine were among the wealthiest school districts in the state. Here is what Hilton found: In the first group, the blue-collar and middle-class schools, girls not only excelled in verbal skills but each year put a little more academic distance between themselves and the boys. Even in math, long thought to be a male stronghold, girls did better. But the real leap for girls was in reading. Another significant find: In these districts, the big hit boys take in reading happens in middle school, as they hit puberty. That's when a modest gap in verbal skills evident in elementary school doubles in size. As for the wealthy schools, more on them later.

Combine Hilton's local research with national neuroscience research, and you arrive at this: The brains of men and women are very different. Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain associated with verbal skills. Now we've reached the heart of the mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers, especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills. Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.

Increasingly, teachers ask students to keep written journals, even as early as kindergarten. What gets written isn't polished prose, but it is important training, say teachers, some of whom rely on the book Kid Writing, which advocates the use of writing to teach children basic skills in a host of subjects. The teachers are only doing their jobs, preparing their students for a work world that has moved rapidly away from manufacturing and agriculture and into information-based work. It's not that schools have changed their ways to favor girls; it's that they haven't changed their ways to help boys adjust to this new world.

Suddenly, the anecdotal evidence becomes obvious. Open the door of any ninth-grade "academy" that some school districts run--the clump of students predicted to sink in high school--and you'll see a potential football team. Nearly all guys. Ninth grade is where boys' verbal deficit becomes an albatross that stymies further male academic achievement. That's the year guys run into the fruits of the school-reform movement that date back to the 1989 governors' summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Democrats and Republicans vowed to shake up schools. One outcome of the summit is that, starting in ninth grade, every student now gets a verbally drenched curriculum that is supposed to better prepare them for college. Good goal, but it's leaving boys in the dust.

The findings of the other researchers all play roles here. The feminists are right to finger macho, anti-reading attitudes of boys, especially in blue-collar districts. Patrick Welsh isn't wrong to cite the influence of hip-hop music. It's just that these are lesser players within a larger landscape.

Those who continue to argue that toxic American culture is to blame may be unaware that this is a phenomenon that afflicts many post-industrial Western countries. A 2002 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found low academic performance to be more of a problem among boys than girls in 19 of 27 countries. Special problems were found in Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. In 21 of the 27 countries, the number of women graduating from university exceeded the number of men.

But why are some boys faring better than others and a few schools managing to level the gender playing field? Hilton's research on the wealthiest schools is revealing. Girls still do better in verbal skills in those districts. But Hilton discovered an important distinction. When the wealthy boys enter middle school, they don't lose ground. And that holds steady through high school.

Why the smaller verbal gender gaps in upper-income families? Hilton can only feel his way on this one, in part by drawing lessons from his own family, which teems with educators. At nights and on weekends, Hilton saw his father reading, just as the boys hitting puberty in the wealthiest districts see their well-educated fathers reading. If your father reads, it's not viewed as a sissy thing, as it's seen by many blue-collar students. Not only would that explain why the verbal gap doesn't widen for boys in the wealthiest districts, but it would also explain why the Harvards and Princetons and Stanfords have no trouble drawing talented men. Those schools run close to a 50-50 gender balance among undergraduates.

eversing the academic underachievement among most boys may require an old-fashioned assault on poor reading skills. Frankford Elementary managed that, but even Indian River boys begin to lose ground in middle school, the black hole of U.S. education. Maybe Maryland has a partial answer. The state has been breaking out its test-score data by gender since 1992, which is why Maryland Superintendent of Schools Nancy Grasmick is dismayed by the gender gaps she sees--72 percent of girls read at a proficient or advanced level by eighth grade, compared with 61 percent of boys.

Here's part of the Grasmick plan: Take existing comic books and graphic novels deemed to cover academic disciplines and sprinkle them around classrooms. Let the boys believe they're pulling a fast one on the teachers by grabbing a quick read. Sounds bizarre, but it's based on good hunches: Boys who become successful readers in high school often attribute that success to making a transition from comic books to school books in late elementary school. Why not offer curriculum-as-comic books? It just might work. It also might not. But at least Maryland is trying, which is better than most states.

Another solution lies with teachers' colleges, which, to date, have been part of the problem. Michael Gurian, author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently!, says his survey of education classes reveals that 99 percent fail to offer courses on biological learning differences. There is decent research on this, but it is rarely passed along to teachers.

Any solution to the problem must begin by acknowledging that it exists. And, unfortunately, the crisis in boys' education is woefully underexposed. Partly, that is understandable. Reporters look around their world and see men dominant in academics, business, and politics. What's to worry about? Plenty, as it turns out. Nearly all those male leaders now at the top of their field earned at least a bachelor's degree. And, in today's information world, a bachelor's degree is just a starting point. But, each year, fewer and fewer men make it to that starting line. That's a problem that merits attention--at least more than five articles.

Richard Whitmire , a USA Today editorial writer, researched this issue while a fellow with the Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy at the University of Maryland.

Cross posted in the Peoria County Democrats Blog:

One of our own is in the National News The Nation magazine.

Jan Schakowsky Thu Jan 19, 2:28 PM ET