New Gender Gap for Boys Education

This webpage is dedicated to raising awareness about the New Gender Gap, a term used to describe the steady decline in boys’ performance in schools across the nation. This trend has been reported by the Department of Education for over a decade and as recently as 2004 in the DOE report: Trends in Equity of Girls and Women.

The articles and reports provided on this site give details on how this trend is affecting boys from elementary school to college level.

This web site is NOT advocating that any school district pursue teaching methods that would favor boys. We want to see boys AND girls excel in all subjects equally.

The goals of this web site are to:

1. Raise awareness of the New Gender Gap amongst all teachers, so that they can communicate with parents who have concerns about this trend.

2. Advocate that schools monitor students’ performance by gender to identify potential “hot spots” where either gender is significantly falling behind the other.

3. Advocate that school districts seek a combination of teaching methods that work for both genders by:

Investigating techniques used by other schools to help both genders excel equally and

Leveraging the excellent teachers in our schools by 1) using STAR results at the classroom level to identify those teachers who have particularly high scores for their boys and/or girls in identified “hot spots”, 2) interviewing them to identify their successful teaching methods and 3) sharing these findings with the other teachers in the district.

4. Raise awareness about the effects of colorblindness on boys - 8-10% of males in this country have colorblindness. Information is presented so that parents and teachers understand how this condition impacts learning and development.