Gender gaps and gender gaps in proportion

Richard Whitmire argues, in  Why Boys Fail, that "The world has gotten more verbal; boys haven't" and follows up with good thinking about how to better prepare male students for adult success.  It's a serious issue, but before I discuss it, I want to put the gender gaps into context with the other gaps I blog about more often.

Eighth grade NAEP reading scale scores do show definite gender gaps.  2009 Kentucky male students' results are behind the female students' results by:

• 8 points (on 0-500 scale) for white students.
• 8 points for African American students.
• 10 points for students who participate in the federal free and reduced lunch program.
• 8 points for students who do not participate in that program.
• 13 points for students whose parents are not high school graduates.
• 13 points for students whose parents finished high school.
• 6 points for students whose parents have some college education.
• 8 points for students whose parents graduated from college.

Those gaps are all bad news, all worth attention, and all reasons that I read the Whitmire book in two quick sittings.

The thing is, those gaps are also smaller than some others that also need our attention and concern.

Thus, among Kentucky male students, the 2009 eighth grade reading result show gaps of:

• 20 points between white and African-American students.
• 20 points between students in and out of the free-and-reduced-lunch program.
• 29 points between students whose parents dropped out of high school and students whose parents finished college.

And among Kentucky female students, the equivalent gaps were:

• 20 points between white and African-American students.
• 18 points between students in and out of the free-and-reduced-lunch program.
• 24 points between students whose parents dropped out of high school and students whose parents finished college.

In short, gender gaps, though real, are not in the same league as the other gaps we need to address.

Two source notes:  all results are from the NAEP Data Explorer, and the Kentucky eighth grade NAEP sample included so few female students with disabilities that NAEP does not publish those results.