WaPo: Study Casts Doubt On the ‘Boy Crisis’

Yes those are scare quotes, and this time around they’re appropriate.
A study released yesterday by Washington think tank Education Sector shows that the media frenzy over the educational ‘boy crisis’ (god, I love these scare quotes!) is pretty much for naught.
From The Washington Post:

…over the past three decades, boys’ test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college and more are getting bachelor’s degrees.
Although low-income boys, like low-income girls, are lagging behind middle-class students, boys are scoring significant gains in elementary and middle school and are much better prepared for college, the report says. It concludes that much of the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that although the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him.
“The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse,” the report says, “it’s good news about girls doing better. (Emphasis added)

I’m not one to say I told you so. But yeah, I did.
The report points out that the real educational concerns are over race and class issues for both boys and girls.
What I love about the article is that not only debunks the ‘boy crisis’ myth, but it also suggests that this whole thing is just a backlash to all the gains that women have made. Duh.

The “boy crisis,” the report says, has been used by conservative authors who accuse “misguided feminists” of lavishing resources on female students at the expense of males and by liberal authors who say schools are “forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys’ interests and learning styles…Yet there is not sufficient evidence — or the right kind of evidence — available to draw firm conclusions,” the report says. “As a result, there is a sort of free market for theories about why boys are underperforming girls in school, with parents, educators, media, and the public choosing to give credence to the explanations that are the best marketed and that most appeal to their pre-existing preferences.”

Yeah, like “the feminists did it!� Silly conservatives.