Equality can be a slippery concept. It can also be a deceptive rhetorical device that takes people's eyes off of persistent inequalities with roots firmly in the everyday social and economic structures that determine where one lives, goes to school, and works. No where is this more evident than in the intellectually flawed hysteria promoted in some quarters about how girls and women are denying boys and men access to education.

There are serious issues we all need to attend to concerning our failure to educate men and boys of color. That is the focus of this issue of On Campus with Women. But the common framing of the discussion about boys is dominated by a series of fallacies.

Some of those fallacies go like this:

• Equality for girls means inequality for boys.
• Equal numbers, or even above equal numbers, means equality has been achieved.
• Success for girls and women deprives boys and men of the chance of success.
• Girls and boys have no race or socioeconomic location.
• The missing boys and men in schools are white and middle or upper class.

Misrepresenting the Facts

Each of these fallacies incorrectly frames the real dilemma the United States is facing. They pit boys against girls and women against men instead of demanding that the responsibility of a diverse democracy like ours is to ensure that every child in every school in the nation has a horizon-expanding, rigorous education. As W.E.B. DuBois has said, "The most important civil right is the right to learn."

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The New Gender Divide" (Wilson 2007) perpetuates some of these fallacies despite including the important corrective of Jacqueline King's research which clearly shows that the missing men in higher education are not white, nor from the middle and upper classes. When King compares the college going rates for those earning $70,000 or above, not only does the women's advantage in numbers evaporate, but it turns into an advantage in numbers for men.

The Chronicle's text was overshadowed by three large photographs. One photograph showed a class with one lone man surrounded by women. He appeared to be white. The other two photographs eclipsing the text on the second page of the article also both appeared to be white men. No clear image of men of color was visible, even though the text clearly stated that they are the people missing from the classrooms. There are, of course, also missing girls and women of color, especially among Latina and Native Americans. Clearly, any analysis of the problem of equality will be flawed if we don't examine how race and class intersect with gender to affect educational opportunity and success. And any flawed analysis will result in flawed remedies.

Inequalities by Zip Code

The question for higher education--and for the United States as a whole--is how can we contribute our intellectual, economic, and human resources to dismantle structural inequalities and replace them with social and economic conditions that enhance educational opportunities? Currently, such structural inequalities allow one to know whether a child will go to college by identifying her or his zip code.

For instance, in my church last week, an eager young Boy Scout was soliciting funds for his troop's effort to refurbish a defunct library in a local middle school in a multiracial neighborhood in Washington, DC where the majority of children qualify for free meals at school. What does it mean that a public school in a metropolitan area that boasts the highest percentage of people with professional degrees has no functioning library? In our nation's capital, in the richest democracy in the world, our schools should be our showcase. Instead, they are our shame.

Everyone deserves a right to a good education. It is a democratic right which women and people of color fought for across racial lines for centuries in this country. The resistance to equality was fierce. It remains so today, though now it is often draped in the disguise of civil rights initiatives that pretend race is no longer a category that determines one's parents' educational levels, where we live, or whether our schools have libraries with books in them.

Learning from Women's Successes

When women organized to acquire access to educational opportunities, they did not do so to push men out, but to allow women and girls in. As women flock to colleges today in increasing numbers, we are witnessing not a fight to get a piece of the same pie, but an expansion of the pie itself. The remarkable story of the twentieth century has been the dramatic democratization of higher education, a process that led by the end of the century to 75 percent of those who graduated from high school going on to college. Educational levels rose impressively for men and women alike.

The story of the twenty-first century could be about the progress made in increasing the college graduation completion rates for men and women across all racial and economic categories. It could also be the story of success in retaining students, primarily poor and from U.S. racial minorities, who now don't yet graduate from high school. It could even include the story of wooing back to college older students, especially men of color. We know for instance from Jacqueline King's research that one-third of African American women who eventually graduate from college come back when they are 25 or older. We don't have the same success in recruiting African American men in that age cohort.

Continuing education programs for women that first took off in the 1970s successfully targeted older women who had missed their chance for college. These initiatives developed creative programs, new policies, and proven support programs that resulted in a huge wave of women returning to college. These older women went against the grain of the age cohorts of 18-24 year olds, required different admissions processes to diagnose what they needed to succeed, and at first went to school at night or on weekends.Everyone benefited: the women, their families, their workplaces, and the country as a whole.

How can we learn from what worked for older women, including African American women, so that we can serve the missing men? We know such programs succeeded under the GI bill after the World War II and currently succeed for many of men of color who join the military and begin their college education while in the service. What else might work?

Our Banquet Table

Arguments about the dilemmas of boys and men are often entangled in a flawed metaphor as if success is a zero sum game. If girls are succeeding in schools, boys must be failing. Rather than this gender fallacy, we should work towards solutions. Equality for girls does not mean inequality for boys. Instead of looking at education success as a single pie that everyone fights over, we should think of a big dining room table laden with all kinds of food where everyone has a seat, and everyone has the nourishment they need. Equality should be an expansive term that enlarges possibilities; not one that diminishes them. It's time we all put our collective minds to making access to a quality education an everyday occurrence for everyone, whatever your zip code.