Gender Gap in High School

Looking back over the last half century, can we say that any liberal enthusiasm has resulted in a good outcome?

For decades liberals have been saying that girls are shortchanged in school. And they have forced us to implement programs of various kinds to discriminate in favor of girls.

But Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters beg to differ. The problem in education is not girl proficiency but sub-par performance from boys. While

72 percent of female students graduate from high school, only 65 percent of male students earned a diploma.

Well, that’s not too bad, you say. But when you unpack the results by race, as all progressives like to do, the results become alarming.

The difference in graduation rates between females and males was about five-percentage points for white students and only 3 percentage points for Asian students. Among Hispanic and black female students the graduation rates are 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively, compared to 49 percent for Hispanic males and 48 percent for black males. Thus, the gender gap is twice as large for minority students as for white students.

So why is this, liberals? Institutional sexism? Institutional racism? How could this be? Schools in minority areas are run by and for liberals. How could there be racism and sexism there?

There is probably something dark and menacing here. But it probably isn’t racism or sexism. Understandably, liberals really don’t want to look at it too closely. It is beginning to look as thought liberals have been wrong about everything, and especially wrong about education.

Sooner or later we are going to have to admit that the progressive enthusiasm for helping the marginalized has had the opposite effect. People must not be coddled and pushed around. They must learn to make it on their own with minimal help from the helping professions and maximum effort of their own.

But that would be an America with a lot less jobs for liberals. And we can’t have that, can we?

Still, liberals can count one success. They set out to favor girls over boys in the education system, and the result is now in. Girls now do much better than boys in school. But isn’t that discriminatory?