PDF: Gender Gap Results for Press August 3 2009

It's ladies first in Hamilton County Schools.

Academically, girls are outperforming boys in subjects from kindergarten through high school, a four-year review of test scores shows. In some subjects, girls have the boys beat by at least 10 percentage points.

"We recognize this is an issue ... but the answers we're looking for don't just jump out at us," said schools Superintendent Jim Scales. "What we have seen is not disastrous, but it's enough to be concerned about. Right now, we don't have any prescription for trying to overcome it."

And though the problem starts in elementary school, statistics show that there is a domino effect as fewer young men graduate from high school and college.

"Males become less and less represented the farther up the degree chain you go," said David L. Wright, chief policy officer for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. "And if that's true, it puts Tennessee in an even tougher spot in competing for those higher knowledge jobs."

The gender-achievement gap is apparent in Georgia, too, where girls are scoring higher than boys in Dade, Walker, Whitfield and Catoosa counties, in many academic subjects, test data show.

Researchers and policymakers are taking notice, said Alan Richard, spokesman for the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit organization that helps government and education leaders in its 16 member states work together on education.

"Tennessee and Georgia are not alone in this. This is very much a national phenomenon," he said. "It may just now be reaching schools and school boards at the local levels. Gender should now be a part of local schools' discussions about improving student achievement."

Dr. Scales said district officials have "a long list of questions" they must ask themselves about why male achievement is lagging.

"Maybe we'll find research that shows what we're doing doesn't capture the interest of males. Maybe the delivery of our instruction is geared more toward females," he said. "The classroom materials that we use, do they have more of a feminine slant?"

One avenue to pursue, he said, is recruiting more male role models into schools.

The vast majority of teachers and administrators, especially in elementary school, are women, he said. Often the only man in the building is the principal or maybe a gym teacher.

"That's sometimes referred to as "heartfelt data," he said. "In our hearts we think we need (more male educators), but does it really make a difference? We don't have any data that empirically shows that."

Kirk Kelly, the school system's director of testing and accountability, said what disturbs him most is the gender achievement gap exists across all socioeconomic levels.

Educators working to close the achievement gap among students of different income levels and races understand poor students may be at a disadvantage in school, Dr. Kelly said. But in the recent analysis, the only variable is gender.

Hamilton County Schools administrators are experimenting with same-gender classes to see if separating boys and girls in the classroom will improve achievement.

A handful of schools, including East Side, Harrison, Spring Creek, Red Bank and Rivermont elementary schools, plan to offer single-gender classes this year. Some had to abandon the effort because of an uneven number of boys and girls - for example, most principals can't afford to hire an additional teacher when a grade level has only 10 girls but 40 boys.

EXPOSING GENDER DISPARITIES

By far, the largest achievement gap between boys and girls in Hamilton County Schools is in writing.

Overall, 89.1 percent of girls scored a four or higher (scores considered proficient or advanced) on standardized writing assessments, while only 78.7 percent of boys earned a four, according to 2008 test data. That 11-point percentage gap is evident from elementary through high school grades, the data show.

Girls also outscored boys by about 5 percentage points in reading-language arts, and almost 4 percentile points in math on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program test for grades three through eight.

In math, girls in grades three through eight did slightly better on tests, with 91.8 percent scoring proficient or advanced, and 88 percent of boys scoring proficient or advanced. The achievement gap begins to emerge after third grade when about 86 percent of boys and girls score proficient or advanced. Test results show that in fourth grade, girls begin to outperform boys, and by eighth grade, 91 percent of girls score proficient or advanced compared with 85.5 percent of boys.

The only category in which boys edged out the girls is in ACT scores, where they posted a composite score of 20.2 in 2008, compared with the girls' score of 19.3.

Dr. Kelly attributed the edge to the nearly 200 more girls who took the test than boys.

The achievement gap continues through high school as Hamilton County recorded a 76.9 percent graduation rate for girls, and a 68.4 percent rate for boys in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available.

Although the test score data for 2009 has not yet been released publicly, Dr. Kelly said male achievement continues to lag.

CLASSROOM EXPERIMENT

In one fifth-grade reading class at Spring Creek Elementary School, the students sit cross-legged on top of their desks. When the teacher throws them a ball, they are called on to read aloud.

There are no girls in this class. Spring Creek is in the second year of a single-gender classroom experiment.

"We just had been looking at a lot of research that showed that boys did better academically and behaviorally in classes when there were no girls," said principal Paula Burgner.

In addition to splitting up the fifth-grade boys and girls, she also has an all-boys third-grade class.

The moves seem to have worked. The boys in all-boys classes now are scoring higher than the girls, and all of the single-gender classes are reporting about 50 percent fewer discipline referrals, said Ms. Burgner, who also credited teacher training for the improvements.

"When you have predominantly white middle class women teaching low-income boys, some of them don't know how to relate to those kids," she said. "My staff had to be trained to relate to people that are not just like them."

Hardy Elementary assistant principal Ashley Aldridge also uncovered promising outcomes on single-gender classrooms as part of her doctoral dissertation. She studied the effects of single-gender fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms in seven high-poverty elementary schools in Hamilton County.

Dr. Aldridge looked at four groups: girls in all-girls classrooms, girls in coed classes, boys in all-boys classrooms and boys in coed classes.

She found that boys who moved to single-gender classes outscored the other three test groups.

"I'm not making generalizations ... but for me, this was about giving school leaders a snapshot of one way in which they could make improvements in their students' gains," Dr. Aldridge said.

Lekesha Swafford's son, Charles Eaton Jr., is in an all-boys fifth-grade classroom at Harrison Elementary School. After the first week of school, Charles seems to be enjoying himself, Ms. Swafford said, but she's still waiting to pass judgment.

"I'm willing to see if it works," she said. "He deserves a good education."

Dr. Kelly said the federal No Child Left Behind Act has forced school systems to scrutinize all data more closely, enabling them to spot achievement gaps, such as the gender gap uncovered by local school leaders.

Although the law requires that states break out test score data on various racial groups and students' socio-economic status, it does not mandate gender-based analysis.

Tennessee's state report card does not include test scores by gender, but Georgia's does.

Rachel Woods, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education, said the state report card shows only the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

"At the district level, you could run any kind of report you want," she said.