Rumors of Boys' Demise Greatly Exaggerated

The idea that boys are having it harder educationally, as reported as some kind of crisis by the media, is, whaddya know, overblown and off-course. (Unless of course, the media was talking about black and Hispanic boys, who are actually underperforming compared with white boys. But of course, they weren't.)

According to a new study boys are doing better than ever at school. But girls are outstripping boys even as they do the best ever. But we'll give them an A for effort.

UPDATE: Judith Warner wrote about this study as a guest columnist for the New York Times:

According to "The Truth About Boys and Girls," a report from the nonpartisan group Education Sector, most boys aren't just not failing; they're doing better than ever on most measures of academic performance. The only boys who aren't — the boys who skew the scores because they're doing really, really badly — are Hispanic and black boys and those from low-income homes.

"But the predominant issues for them," wrote Sara Mead, who based her conclusions in the study on decades of government statistics, "are race and class, not gender." Mead's conclusions echo those of Prof. Caryl Rivers of Boston University and Prof. Rosalind Chait Barnett of Brandeis.

"White suburban boys," they wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year, "are not dropping out of school, avoiding college or lacking in verbal skills ... among whites, the gender composition of colleges is pretty balanced. ... In Ivy League colleges, men still outnumber women."