Problem is, I get the impression none of them has ever reported from an actual elementary school, where these gender gaps start.

This week, New York Times writer Thomas Edsall into an issue, this time the “boy troubles.” The theories from the academics appeared to reflect their personal areas of research: fatherless families, jobs offshoring, a constant need to act macho and the slowly maturing male brain.

One example, from Frances Elizabeth Jensen, chair of the department of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, responding to Edsall’s query:

Teens go through a period of increased emotional fluctuation and are like a Ferrari with weak brakes. The emotional center of the brain, the limbic system, which controls emotions, is fully connected, but the frontal lobe that sharpens critical thinking isn’t well-connected. That means the part of the brain that makes them pause and say to themselves, “Bad idea. Don’t post that on Facebook because it might hurt my chances of getting a job in the future” or “Don’t jump in the lake, there may be a rock,” isn’t mature.

I get that, especially after watching over my grandsons. How do they ever survive through high school?

The issue I have with all their theories is that most don’t explain the recent decline. Boys have always had slower-maturing brains. And none of them appear to dive into elementary school classrooms where, as best as I could determine while researching my 2011 book, many of these recent gender problems originate.

First: the recent news about men: A about the slipping numbers of men enrolling and graduating from college expertly laid out the dilemma. Soon, there will be two females earning bachelor’s degrees for every one male.

Is that a problem? Veteran higher education columnist Kevin Carey doesn’t think so, and he made his case in a recent New York Times . Carey’s argument is familiar: Just because women are doing better doesn’t mean men are doing worse.

But the bulk of the recent reporting seems to favor the we-have-a-problem side of the argument, and When you weigh the considerable societal impacts that are part of this trend, an increase in single parenting and a rise in political polarization between the educated and less-educated, we have a problem.

So, what to do about it? The issue I have with explanations such as excessive machismo is not only have these factors been around forever, and thus can’t explain recent declines, but they are also immutable. What, exactly, is going to turn around machismo or male brain-maturation time?

As a result, these observations don’t lead to solutions. And there are solutions that can turn around at least some of the problems we’re seeing with boys and men.

In my book, I sifted through multiple explanations offered for boys falling behind, and settled on one that can both explain the recent boys-failing phenomenon and is not immutable: literacy shortfalls.

Yes, boys do mature slower, especially in the acquisition of literacy skills. In the book, I describe my shock when visiting our oldest daughter’s first-grade class. While the girls were sketching out graceful letters, the boys were tearing holes in the paper with deathgrip clutches on pencils.

At the time, I recall innocently wondering: Did our daughter just happen to land in a class full of boy dunces? Eventually, of course, the boys caught up in reading, at least by fourth or fifth grade, and all was good.

But those were the days before education “reform” changed elementary school. Starting with the 1989 governors education summit in Charlottesville, nearly all states ramped up their curriculum to prepare students for a world where college was the new high school.

The governors’ logic was prescient, but the follow-through by school systems was lacking. Schools pushed their reading demands up by roughly two grades, meaning even some kindergarteners are expected to keep journals. But most teachers failed to shift strategies so that boys would not fall behind.

In short, girls adapted to an early push on literacy skills, but boys couldn’t. Soon, non-reading boys were seen by teachers as aggressive and in need of discipline, while the boys themselves concluded that school was for girls. Suddenly, video games became far more appealing.

Does this explain everything behind the sinking fortunes of boys in school? Of course not, but it explains enough that reversing these harmful practices could make a dent in the dismaying trend we saw in the Wall Street Journal data.

How? There’s a long list, starting with better literacy instruction for elementary school teachers so they all follow research-based methods that embrace extensive instruction in phonics. And don’t fear comic books and graphic novels — many boys get their reading launched that way.

For parents, it’s a matter of watching your son’s literacy growth and being aware of online resources such as . If your elementary teachers aren’t assigning reading that appeals to your son, find it yourself. And dads — and moms — stop reading with your daughters and throwing footballs with your sons.

In K-12 schools, there’s been a successful push to catch girls up on math and science, but a resistance to doing the same for boys around reading. Why?

After my book was published, I had many with representatives from advocacy groups such as the American Association of University Women, which is closely tied to the female-dominated teachers unions. The AAUW is a key skeptic of boys falling behind in school and the primary advocate for . My bottom line from many interactions: Groups such as AAUW downplay the boys’ problems in K-12 schools and ignore the rising gender gaps in college for a simple reason. They see this as a zero sum game: Doing something for boys on literacy would subtract from what’s being done for girls in math and science. This has to cease.

Again, boy-friendly literacy instruction can’t solve the entire problem. The special burden that fatherless families place on young boys, for example, can’t be solved with graphic novels.

But if we know there’s a problem out there, and we also know of a solution that addresses a good chunk of the problem, what’s holding us back?

Education writer Richard Whitmire is the author of six books. His first was “Why Boys Fail: Saving our Sons From an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind.”

The bombshell federal indictment of a well-known educator will delay the planned opening of a new experimental college he helped design for low-income, first-generation students. But it won’t stop it, the project’s new CEO said recently.

“We will be opening in fall 2022, for sure,” said Chandell Stone.

In the meantime, she and others at Degrees of Freedom, as it’s called, are doing what they can to delicately sever ties to both the suspect in the criminal case and the non-profit he created.

The “social venture incubator” Democracy Builders last year announced it was buying the southern Vermont campus of Marlboro College to create a two-year, hybrid high school and early college program. Organizers last month told supporters that the program would welcome its first students this September.

On April 27, everything changed: The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced that the non-profit’s founder, Seth Andrew, with wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution. If convicted, he faces up to 70 years in prison.

A founder of the well-known Democracy Prep charter school network and a one-time to Pres. Obama, Andrew, 42, allegedly stole $218,005 from a network account in 2019 in order to secure a lower interest rate on a mortgage for a nearly $2.4 million Manhattan apartment, prosecutors said. He was expected to plead not guilty and declined to comment for this article.

After news of Andrews’ indictment spread, Democracy Builders held an emergency meeting to remove him as board chair.

Last week, Stone said efforts to separate the new college from the alleged crime are going even further: When Degrees of Freedom incorporates this month, it will have no formal association with Andrew. She and members of the Democracy Builders board “are working amicably towards separating the entities, as to allow for formal incorporation without Seth Andrew.”

The first problem: Degrees of Freedom doesn’t actually own the Marlboro campus — Democracy Builders does. That has complicated the college’s efforts to open as planned, Stone said.

“We’d love to be in Marlboro, but the reality is this just happened last week — and we were in the middle of telling kids, ‘Come to campus.’ And I just didn’t feel comfortable with all of the dust-up.”

The developments mean it’ll be at least another year until more than just a handful of students can take part in what many observers see as a promising experiment.

When he announced the new college in 2020, Andrew told that the venture represented “a new model for higher education that doesn’t exist for most kids.”

To that end, Democracy Builders spent $1.7 million to buy the 500-acre campus of Marlboro, a small liberal arts college that, like many of its kind, faced declining enrollment. In 2019, it merged with Boston’s Emerson College, sending students and faculty packing.

Degrees of Freedom last fall ran what it called a successful small pilot of its model with 20 students.It plans to offer a low-residency hybrid program that would require students to be on campus for just two weeks per trimester, or six weeks per year. For the rest of the academic year, they’d be expected to study online, with apprenticeships tied to their majors.

The program’s website actually lays out two separate programs: a three-trimester “,” for high schoolers, summer included, priced at $9,000, that provides SAT and ACT prep, college application support, and an option for international travel, among other offerings. It’s open to high school seniors with 2.5 GPAs, as well as GED holders who aren’t enrolled in college.

For $18,000, high school graduates and GED holders can enroll in a two-year “” designed to help them “gain entrance to competitive colleges.”

Stone said the program will also allow alumni to find full-time employment in their area of concentration or access to tech-focused boot camps that many low-income students don’t typically attend.

“What we want to do is figure out: How do we get low-income students, first-generation college students, to gain access to well-paid careers, and do so with zero dollars in student debt?” she said. Because Degrees of Freedom is “reverse-engineering the program from the Pell Grant,” basing its costs on the federal grant’s maximum allowance to students, she said, low-income students should expect to graduate debt-free.

Kevin Carey, who directs the Education Policy program at , the left-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank, said that’s a laudable — and unusual — goal for a tech-focused college.

“You only do this if you begin from the point of view of, ‘How do I build a college that’s good at serving low income students?’ No one does that. Everyone’s approach to technology is, ‘How do I make money?’”

Richard Saudek, a Montpelier, Vt., attorney who chairs Marlboro’s board of trustees, said the board chose Degrees of Freedom because “the people involved were quite experienced starting up schools that served underserved populations.”

Marlboro officials, he said, “felt that their plans seemed to make sense — and that it would be a good thing to do, basically, to have them purchase the campus at a low price. And we had a lot of hopes.”

Saudek said the sale of the campus won’t be affected by Andrew’s legal troubles. The transaction had no “clawback” or reversal provisions. “They had it to do what they could with it,” he said.

Nevertheless, he admitted that trustees “are watching this situation unfold and were alarmed when they learned about the indictment.”

New America’s Carey had a similar response when he read the news: “Part of my reaction to the whole thing, beyond ‘What the hell?’ was ‘Too bad. This is just going to kill this thing.’”

He recalled hearing Andrew’s pitch as the program was taking shape: Rather than forcing students to borrow $20,000 to attend “some shady for-profit college” or take on even more debt to attend a four-year college without graduating, Carey said, he was intrigued by the notion of using hybrid learning to bring costs down so low that a student could cover them entirely with a Pell Grant.

“At its most basic level, that’s a good idea,” Carey said.

At the moment, the effort is relying largely on funding from the Silicon Valley investor , as well as a group of wealthy donors, to help keep it afloat. In an April 8 email to supporters prior to his indictment, Andrew urged them to “Help us identify funders for our work.” The plea linked to a direct donation site for the college. Andrew noted, “Our entire cost for tuition-room-and-board costs less than a Pell grant. However, we need philanthropy until we break-even at ~500 students, which we hope to achieve in 2022.”

Stone said recent developments have affected fund-raising, and that a few donors have backed out. “We are now working to recover grants for which Seth was the lead point of contact,” she said.

It’s significant that the idea for Degrees of Freedom emerged from the world of K-12 charter schools, Carey said. Unlike most new online universities, which are typically for-profit, charter schools have historically offered educators ways to create mission-driven, non-profit schools that help low-income students.

“There’s no comparable mechanism in higher education for that,” he said.

The irony is that Stone and others now find themselves working to both listen to the needs of these students and separate themselves from Andrew, whose work has long been synonymous with the very charter schools that serve them.

“My goal is to stay laser-focused on ‘How do we continue to uplift their voices?’” she said. “‘How do we make sure that their voices don’t get drowned out by a personal matter that doesn’t really have anything to do with them, and with this project?’”