New Gender Gap for Boys Education

Raising awareness about the steady decline in boys’ performance in schools across the nation.

Los Altos School District CAT/6 Results by Gender

The Los Altos School District is a fantastic district with extremely dedicated teachers. The goal of presenting these statistics is NOT to send a message that the Los Altos School District has a problem.

These statistics are presented because they show some evidence of the reported trend. For example, fourth-grade girls significantly outperformed boys in every G8 country that participated in the 2001 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The district statistics presented here show a similar issue in reading at the fourth grade level. The good news is that this reading gap is reduced if not eliminated by the 6th grade level in our schools.

This is simply one data point. The key message is that we should use all tools available to monitor performance by gender, so that we ensure that both girls and boys are excelling equally in school.

Comparison of Los Altos School District CAT/6 75th NPR By Gender

Above is a link to a PDF document that provides a comparison of Los Altos School District CAT/6 Results by gender at the elementary school level. These statistics were optained from the California Department of Education Star Results Web Page.

The CAT/6 results were highlighted, because they provide a comparison of our students' performance at the national level. Since the Los Altos School District is a wealthy, well-educated district with predominantly English speaking students, the comparison focuses on the percentage of students scoring above the 75th National Percentile Ranking. This reflects what percentage of students scored in the top 25 percent at the national level.

The first page provides an overall comparison of the Los Altos School District to the Cupertino and Palo Alto School Districts. The subsequent pages provide details on each of the elementary schools within the Los Altos School District.

The 2004 results are presented first, because the state released scores for each grade level (by gender) in 2004. The state only released 3rd and 7th grade results for 2005.