Boys Are Not Keeping Up

 This story from The Spectator - Why Boys Fall Behind - has a plethora of fairly disturbing info/stats.

• Finland is a good place to look at gender gaps in education because it is such a high-performing nation (indeed, one could say that other countries suffer from a bout of Finn envy every time the Pisa results are published). But although Finnish students rank very high for overall performance on Pisa, there is a massive gender gap: 20 per cent of Finnish girls score at the highest reading levels in the test, compared to just 9 per cent of boys. The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls. 

• Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in maths. Boys are 50 per cent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, reading, and science. 

•  In the U.S, girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be 'school ready' at age five, for example, controlling for parental characteristics. This is a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor children, or black and white children, or between those who attend pre-school and those who do not.

•  Of course, national trends disguise huge variations by geography, so it is useful to zoom in and look at specific places. Take Chicago, where students from the most affluent neighbourhoods are much more likely to have an A or B average in ninth grade (47 per cent), compared to those from the poorest (32 per cent). That is a big class gap, which, given that Chicago is the most segregated big city in the country, means a big race gap too. But strikingly, the difference in the proportion of girls versus boys getting high grades is the same: 47 per cent to 32 per cent. 

• States are required by federal law to report high school graduation rates by race and ethnicity, proficiency in English, economic disadvantage, homelessness, and foster status. These kinds of data are invaluable for assessing trends for the groups at greatest risk of dropping out. But oddly, states do not have to report their results by sex. Getting the numbers cited above required scouring the data for each state.

• Some scholars link the relative underperformance of boys in school to their lower expectations of post-secondary education, surely the very definition of a vicious circle. Others worry that the strong skew toward female teachers – three out of four and rising – could be putting boys at a disadvantage. This matters, for sure. But I think there is a bigger, simpler explanation staring us in the face. Boys’ brains develop more slowly, especially during the most critical years of secondary education. When almost one in four boys (23 per cent) is categorised as having a 'developmental disability,' it is fair to wonder if it is educational institutions, rather than the boys, that are not functioning properly.

• In every country in the OECD, there are now more young women than young men with a bachelor’s degree. Almost every college in the US now has mostly female students. The last bastions of male dominance to fall were the Ivy League colleges, but every one has now swung majority female. 'Standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.'