BIGGER PROBLEM IS RICH-POOR GAP

By Valerie Strauss

Washington Post

05/20/2008

A new study to be released today on gender equity in education concludes that a "boys crisis" in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade.

The report by the American Association of University Women, which promotes education and equity for women, reviewed nearly 40 years of data on achievement from fourth grade to college and for the first time analyzed gender differences within economic and ethnic categories.

The most important conclusion of "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education" is academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender, its authors said.

"A lot of people think it is the boys that need the help," co-author Christianne Corbett said. "The point of the report is to highlight the fact that that is not exclusively true. There is no crisis with boys. If there is a crisis, it is with African-American and Hispanic students and low-income students, girls and boys."

The report is the latest of several over the past two decades by groups alleging crises - first among girls, then boys.

"We just have a variety of indicators that should cause us to be alarmed and to recognize that there is a real gap," said Paul Reville, a supporter of the boys-crisis argument and president of the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy, an organization dedicated to improving public education.

The AAUW report looks at many indicators of educational achievement, including dropout and disciplinary rates. It analyzes data from SAT and ACT college entrance exams and the National Assessment of Education Progress as well as federal statistics about college attendance, earned degrees and other measures.

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Where the Girls Are (2008)

Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education presents a comprehensive look at girls’ educational achievement during the past 35 years, paying special attention to the relationship between girls’ and boys’ progress. Analyses of results from national standardized tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the SAT and ACT college entrance examinations, as well as other measures of educational achievement, provide an overall picture of trends in gender equity from elementary school to college and beyond.

Executive summary and full report available at http://www.aauw.org/research/WhereGirlsAre.cfm

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