An article in the New Republic describes an increasing gap in performance as boys lag behind girls. The information in the article is largely anecdotal although it seems plausible. I can recall attending programs to honor academic achievement in majority black MPS schools and wondering where the boys were.
There has been surprisingly little attention to this issue. School districts such as MPS break out student achievement by ethnicity, but I have not seen any statistics organized by gender. When I analyzed some MPS achievement data, I looked at the effects of ethnicity, poverty (measured by free lunch), mobility, and other factors, but it did not occur to me to look at the effects of gender.
The article questions why this gap has suddenly widened in the last few years. One plausible explanation is that educational materials become more verbal, playing to the strength of girls. Certainly the math texts used in middle school have lots of words and very few numbers and symbols, especially compared to the books I remember.
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