HS Gender Gap Studied

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2006

Females graduate high school at a substantially higher rate than males, but the gender gap is twice as large for blacks and Hispanics, according to a new report by the conservative Manhattan Institute.

“It’s a fairly large difference, particularly when you consider that unlike differences across racial and ethnic groups, boys and girls are raised in the same households, so it’s not so easy to explain the differences by their community, or their income level,” says Jay Greene, an author of the report, “Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduates Rates.”

About 72 percent of white girls, compared to just 65 percent of white boys from the class of 2003, earned their high school diplomas. But among Hispanic and black female students, the graduation rates were 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively, compared to 49 percent for Hispanic males and 48 percent for black males, according to the report. For Asian students, the difference in graduation rates between females and males was only three percentage points.

Why are graduation rates among the sexes so different? Greene says the data indicates that the disparity might be linked to the way educators, including school librarians, have focused their instruction on female students to the detriment of males. “Because librarians are part of the whole education team, they have to think how they contribute to the success or failure of girls and boys,” he says.

The report, which is based on information culled from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data, only offers hypotheses and not concrete answers. “Future research is necessary to provide a full explanation for why the gender graduation gap exists and why this disparity is particularly large for minority students,” Greene wrote in an article on the Manhattan Institute’s Web site (www.manhattan-institute.org).