The Ever Forward Club "We're all brothers"

Good, interesting... and rare... discussion about the problems facing boys and young men.

Is America's dominant "man up" ethos a hypermasculine cultural construct, a tenet rooted in biological gender difference or something in between?

Educator Ashanti Branch doesn't much care or, more accurately, doesn't have time to care.

He's too busy trying to make a difference in boys' lives.

Boys in American public schools are suspended from and drop out of school at higher rates than girls. Black and Latino boys are suspended the most. Boys make up half of the student population in American public schools. But among those who are suspended multiple times and expelled, 75 percent are boys.

Branch, now an assistant principal at Montera Middle School in Oakland, Calif., is working to change that. When he first became a teacher about a decade ago at a high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, Branch soon realized he had a problem with the boys: Nearly half of all black and Latino boys were failing his math class, and almost half were failing all their classes.

"That was not OK for me," he says. "I was not willing to sit back and watch that happen."