This trend isn’t an example of some peculiar American dysfunction. Boys’ lagging school outcomes show up everywhere, from the enlightened Nordics to the hidebound Gulf States. An OECD survey, based on a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measure of 64 countries, summarized the situation this way: boys “are less likely than girls to attain basic proficiency in core subjects, report investing less time and effort on schoolwork, and express more negative attitudes to school.” Boys get lower grades and attend university less often than girls across the developed world—and increasingly in developing countries, too: one 2019 survey cited studies confirming a gap in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, Qatar, and Oman, among other places. True, in parts of the Third World, girls often don’t complete elementary school, so it’s rare to see them eclipsing their brothers. But in every place where girls do have the opportunity, they’re doing exactly that.
The usual cultural and economic characteristics that once illuminated so many academic inequalities are of only limited help here. Yes, the size of the education gap varies by race and class. It is more than three times larger in the most disadvantaged families than it is among well-off girls and boys—in part, perhaps, because boys in higher-income communities see more highly educated successful men than boys in blue-collar and poor neighborhoods do. Low-income children, particularly blacks, more often grow up with a single mother. Studies repeatedly associate this arrangement with boys’ disruptive behavior, lower grades, and grade retention. Whether because of a missing role model, the emotional loss, money woes, the instability in the home that follows a breakup, or all of the above, fatherlessness takes a toll on boys’ school achievement, with lifelong repercussions.
Fatherlessness doesn’t seem to have the same impact on girls; the puzzling difference may help explain why the biggest gender gap of any demographic group is seen among black kids. Black boys’ school performance has lagged behind that of black girls for decades now; 66 percent of black college-degree recipients are women; they earn 70 percent of black master’s degrees and more than 60 percent of doctorates. So socioeconomic advantage improves boys’ performance relative to girls, just as disadvantage, whether racial or economic, does the opposite. But the puzzle remains: rich boys remain in the shadows of their female siblings the same way poor boys trail behind their poor sisters.
(via Joanne Jacobs)
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