The study’s final piece was a review of the granddaddy of all high school math tests, the SAT. The fact that boys score better on it than girls has been widely publicized, contributing to the public’s notion that boys truly are better at math. But Hyde and her co-authors think there’s another explanation: sampling artifact.

For one thing, because it’s administered only to college-bound seniors, the SAT is hardly a random sample of all students. What’s more, greater numbers of girls take the test now than boys, because more girls are going to college.

Hm. The ACT is similar to the SAT. But here in Illinois it’s administered to all H.S. students, as the State uses it to evaluate the schools. I wonder if it shows any gender disparities, both in average and in distribution?

Amp: while I agree with your premise that the effects from race and wealth overwhelm the effect from gender, your use of statistics is a little suspect to me.

You are correct. See my rebuttal.

I don’t know what data Kleinfeld is using…

Kleinfeld said, a snapshot of the performance of high school seniors on the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress still shows that, compared to girls, a larger percentage of boys scored in the lowest quartile, “below basic,” on reading and writing tests. And that trend was not isolated to low-income students or ethnic minorities. Even among the sons of white, college-educated parents, the girls fared markedly better than their male peers on reading and writing assessments. Within that group, about a quarter of boys scored below basic in reading and writing. Only 7 and 6 percent of girls, respectively, fell into that category.

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060718_illiterate_boys.html

Can I question whether the effects of race ‘overwhelm’ the effects of gender? I wouldn’t dispute that being black increases your risk of eductional disadvantage more than being male. But I think it’s an open question whether the effects of gender produce more educational disadvantage than the effects of race, after all more children are boys than are black. As an analogy: some pesticides are far more dangerous carcinogens than cigarettes, but cigarettes cause far more cancer because they are more widely distributed. It would be misleading to say the effects of these pesticides overwhelm the effects of cigarettes, it could also be misleading to say the effects of race overwhelms the effects of gender.

Good thing I never said that there’s “no gap.” (In this context, it’s misleading to put words I never said in quotation marks.)

My bad–I was trying to refer to the commonly used phrase “no gap” and should have realized it could easily be mistaken for an attribution. As you probably know, I always use italics or blockquotes when I mean to cite.

Let’s first check out Bridgeport, a town in which few families have much money, and the majority of students are either hispanic or black (or both). In Bridgeport, 45% of boys and 46% of girls are proficient in math, a basically identical result. But for reading, 45% of boys and 53% of girls are proficient. And in writing, 55% of boys and 75% of girls are proficient - a 20% difference. That’s pretty huge.

Another way of stating this is that the ratio of nonproficient boys to nonproficient girls in Bridgeport is 1.2 for reading, and 1.8 for writing.

In Westport, 97% of both boys and girls are proficient in math, 96% of boys and 97% of girls are proficient in reading, and 97% of boys and 99% of girls are proficient in writing. There is effectively no difference between Westport’s boys and girls, according to the Connecticut Mastery Test.

In Westport, the ratio is 1.3 for reading and 3.0 for writing. The difference hasn’t disappeared - it’s widened. (Though statistical significance probably drops because of the smaller overall numbers.)

I’m not saying that this makes it a crisis, though; compare these male/female ratios with the ratios between Bridgeport and Westport. A boy from Bridgeport is 18.3 times as likely to be nonproficient in math or reading as a boy from Westport, and 15.0 times as likely to be nonproficient in reading. A girl from Bridgeport is 18.0 times as likely to be nonproficient in math, 15.7 times as likely to be nonproficient in reading, and 25.0 times (!) as likely to be nonproficient in writing. There’s your crisis.

Why underprivileged boys are lagging behind underprivileged girls is hardly a mystery, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the curriculum: underprivileged boys are taught an opt-out coping mechanism. They’re encouraged to react to disappointment with disdain and an “it didn’t really matter anyway” attitude, as evidenced throughout the media forcefed to them. It’s what they self-report when they drop out of high school, decide not to pursue college, or become discouraged on the job hunt, everything the rest of us value and attribute our success to they will say is not worth it, even a kind of trick.

I agree with all of this, entirely.

In addition, I think the wage disparity between men and women also has something to do with the odds of pursuing college. Men with only a high-school education earn a lot more than women with only a high-school education. Ordinary economics should lead us to expect that boys will therefore be less likely to go on to college.

I’m not saying that’s the entire explanation for why women are more likely than men to go to pursue college - but unless we think that economic incentives don’t matter at all, it must be part of the explanation.

(I’m not assuming that you disagree with me on this, I’m just bouncing off your post.)

Girls in the same bracket may be outperforming boys, but why are we paying more attention to the maximum 20% gap between underprivileged boys and girls than the nearly 50% gap between classes?

I’m not “paying more attention” to it, i’m just frustrated if someone claims it doesn’t exist.

Now, that really is a strawman argument. I never claimed that the 20% gap between underprivileged boys and girls “doesn’t exist”; on the contrary, I specifically pointed the gap out.

Kindly take a step back and review what she’s actually saying: that the crisis is primarily socio-economic rather than strictly gendered

She’s not. ““Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds”, not “boys are taking a worse hit than girls from socioeconomic disadvantages”.

I think the “she” Glimmering was referring to is me (Ampersand), not the expert quoted in the newspaper article. (If I’m correct about that, then Glimmering doesn’t realize that I’m male, but that’s a pretty common error.)

I guess it’s possible that the “boy discouragement effect” you’re talking about exists, Sam. But I’d like to see some empirical evidence of it.

Sailorman writes:

If you see (as we apparently do) a significant drop in male reading skills when there is no high-level education (measured by money), and when that drop is erased by a high level of educatio spending, the correct conclusion is NOT that there is “no gap.”

Good thing I never said that there’s “no gap.” (In this context, it’s misleading to put words I never said in quotation marks.)

I did say that the “boy crisis” doesn’t exist among boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group, and that’s true.

I also said “As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. But it’s not a ‘boy crisis,’ and there’s nothing deficient in boy’s brains that makes them biologically incapable of doing as well as girls, or of reading fiction.” The link leads to a fuller discussion of this question, and these two sentences alone were not meant as a complete discussion.

But I don’t think “incapable” is a strawman - on the contrary, I think plenty of people have been arguing that boy’s brains are organized in a different way, which makes boys as a class incapable of achieving the same as girls as a class if taught in the same way. To quote Michael Guriun, a leading advocate of the “boy crisis” theory:

Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them — they don’t, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents and others how differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT scan of a boy’s brain and a girl’s brain, showing the different ways these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me, “Wow, no wonder we’re having so many problems with boys.”

Maybe I used slightly hyperbolic language, but the claim that I made a “strawman” argument - that is, that I made up an argument that “boy crisis” theorists don’t actually make - is unfair and untrue.

It is possible that boy’s brains really are different and boy’s aren’t capable (on average) of learning as much as girls do when taught the same way. The data I provided here can’t eliminate that possibility (as I acknowledged in the earlier post I linked to).

You write:

Well, unless you plan to argue that boys and girls get unequal treatment in impoverished school systems (I haven’t seen much to support this) there IS a gap in the attainments by each sex. And this implies that boys ARE a “step behind,” so to speak.

Now, the data also show that this “step behind” can be compensated for in the face of an excellent school system. […] But this doesn’t mean the gap isn’t there.

The data doesn’t show that this “step behind” exists and is compensated for in excellent schools systems. (By the way, the “boy crisis” also doesn’t seem to exist among middle income kids in some ethnic groups, as I’ve pointed out in past posts.) That data is consistent with the story you’re telling, but (as I wrote in my post) it’s also “consistent with my belief that without racism and poverty holding them back, boys do just as well as girls.”

In other words, the data doesn’t prove either of our theories. It’s consistent with either theory. (But it’s not consistent with the belief that the “boy crisis” exists among all socioeconomic and ethnic groups.)

As it happens, I do think boys and girls - especially black, hispanic and indian, non-middle-class boys and girls - get unequal treatment in school (and at home). I think that there’s a “soft bigotry of low expectations” effect, in which parents, teachers and administrators see boys (especially non-white and/or lower class boys) as less capable of classroom learning than their female peers (”boys will be boys”), and less likely to go to college, and are thus more likely to allow non-white boys to slide. (The same effect used to exist for girls in math, but decades of feminism has changed expectations for how girls do at math, especially at middle school levels).

I don’t think it’s true that in school systems like Westport, boys are systematically given different educations than girls, or are given more remedial education than girls. Instead, I think Westport boys are treated pretty much the same as Westport girls - including being expected to sit in classrooms, to do homework, to attend first grade at the usual age, and to read novels, all things that “boy crisis” theorists have claimed hold boys back - and similar treatment leads to similar results.

(I also think this is why there’s basically no “boy crisis” among Asian and Jewish boys - in terms of academic achievement, there is no expectation among these groups that boys will not do as well at reading, or will be any less likely to go on to college.)

However, I do have to admit that the data is consistent with both your explanation and with my explanation.

She’s not. ““Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds”, not “boys are taking a worse hit than girls from socioeconomic disadvantages”. And the line about Tom Sawyer–you get the impression she’s never actually read the book.

Girls in the same bracket may be outperforming boys, but why are we paying more attention to the maximum 20% gap between underprivileged boys and girls than the nearly 50% gap between classes?

I’m not “paying more attention” to it, i’m just frustrated if someone claims it doesn’t exist.

I think you probably can answer your own question, though, if you phrase it differently: “Why aren’t we spending much more money on schools?” Because it would cost a buttload of money. Personally, I’m all for higher taxes and better schools. But I’m probably in the minority in this country (though not on this blog, of course.)

And if you have the “reality” discussion rather than the “ideal” discussion, then your parameters change a bit: Even with all the research, and push towards schooling, and NCLB talk… we’re doing a piss-poor job educating non-rich students. This is a bad, bad thing for many reasons. I don’t think it’s going to change much, though–and I”m sorry about that.

This is the “reality” part: If we take away the deus ex machina “let them all attend school systems like Westport!” option, then you’re faced with a 20% gender gap in a lot of schools between girls and boys. That’s too large a gap to let slide without at least discussing it, don’t you think?

The fact that the boys’ score gap may be due to social factors (instead of biological) affects HOW you treat it. But it doesn’t affect WHETHER you treat the problem: We talk about social effects on girls all the time.

Privileged boys are doing a bangup job on reading and writing, why change the program that works for them when that isn’t the root cause of the problem? Apparently these boys don’t mind reading literature, so where is this absurdly limiting stereotype that boys can’t cope with fiction coming from? Worse still, why are activisit men defending such a narrow role for boys? If we want to make a difference, it sees logical to start trying to make the underprivileged scholastic experience more like the privileged one along with appropriate encouragement. If we succeed, the gap between boys and girls shrinks to a few points which is a lot easier to overcome then trying a social engineering experiment that presumes boys are innately inferior in certain skills.

If the Connecticut Mastery Test is like Virginia’s SOL’s, “proficient” is not the best measure in Westport. Proficient is a measure of basic competence (a “proficient” 12-th grader can read a newspaper reasonably well); in Westport, you would probably want to look at the equivalent of “exceeding expectations” (which means, can read Dickens or Austen comfortably).

My own experience of elementary school (there were two students in my class; the girl’s name was Lois): Lois was way ahead of me in first grade, somewhat ahead through 4th grade, about even through 6th grade, and behind by 8th grade. This was largely because she had learned to read in before 1st grade, and I had not. I was able to catch up, but it’s easy for me to see that in a larger school, I might not have. If boys develop later, but faster, than girls (which seems plausible), then starting too soon could well mean they become discouraged. (I see that with math students frequently; they weren’t ready for fractions, and most of their peers understood fractions but they didn’t; 5 years later, I’m tutoring them in algebra and the main reason they are struggling is that they never got fractions and assume they can’t do them.) This problem is fixable–but fixable doesn’t mean non-existent.

I don’t actually think there’s a “boy crisis” worth making an enormous fuss about. But OTOH your analysis seems a bit flawed, which makes me uncomfortable.

If you see (as we apparently do) a significant drop in male reading skills when there is no high-level education (measured by money), and when that drop is erased by a high level of educatio spending, the correct conclusion is NOT that there is “no gap.”

Why? Well, unless you plan to argue that boys and girls get unequal treatment in impoverished school systems (I haven’t seen much to support this) there IS a gap in the attainments by each sex. And this implies that boys ARE a “step behind,” so to speak.

Now, the data also show that this “step behind” can be compensated for in the face of an excellent school system. It is probably reasonable to assume that Westport is excellent at spotting, and helping, all students who are lagging behind their same-grade peers. Great! That is a good thing.

But this doesn’t mean the gap isn’t there. Think of it in reverse: Most people agree that women face significant discrimination in higher education. But can you make a school where that is less of an issue? Sure–one easy way is to have a school like Smith, but you’ll also see much less discrimination at school which openly concern themselves with such things. And (just like the “boy gap,”) the fact that is is possible to counterbalance the problem doesn’t mean that the problem is nonexistent.

So when you say:
…it’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. But it’s not a “boy crisis,”
this is not really supported by the data. You haven’t really provided an explanation for the significant sex-based difference in many schools.

I agree that your statement and there’s nothing deficient in boy’s brains that makes them biologically incapable of doing as well as girls, or of reading fiction. is true. But “incapable” is a straw man and you know it. There’s a lot of room between “different” and “incapable.” After all, “there’s nothing in society that makes it impossible for women to succeed” is also a true statement. And just like the “incapable” comparison, it hides the reality of the problem.