Girls are out-performing boys in school

A friend recently sent me this New York Times article which confirmed what I've suspected for a while now - in many developed countries, girls are performing better in school than boys.

I won't reproduce the whole article here but here are some of the statistics quoted (this is in the US):

• The average high school grade point average is 3.09 for girls and 2.86 for boys. Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to repeat a grade.
  

• In elementary schools, about 79% of girls could read at a level deemed “proficient,” compared with 72% of boys.
  
  
• In federal writing tests, 32% of girls are considered “proficient” or better. For boys, the figure is 16%.
  

The only exception to this trend is that boys still beat out girls at the very top of the curve, especially in math.

The finding seems to be paralleled in Singapore. If you look at the cut-off points for secondary schools, the girls' schools have been edging out the boys' schools. At the O levels, again the girls' schools have been churning out better results. I don't have any official numbers but anecdotally, I've found that the girls seem to be thrive in our primary school system much better than the boys.

So what's the reason for this? Just last month, I wrote a post about how the Singapore school system seems to be designed for girls but since this problem is not limited to Singapore, that can't be the only reason. I often hear parents say that boys mature later. I guess if you take "mature" to mean being able to sit still and focus for longer periods, that would be one possible explanation.

The NY Times article quoted Richard Whitmire, author of the book "Why Boys Fail" as saying that schools have increasingly emphasised verbal skills which do not play to the strengths of boys. “The world has gotten more verbal,” he writes. “Boys haven’t.” This is in line with findings on how boys' brains process language differently (and less efficiently) than girls.

The article didn't give any definite answers but one thing seems clear - poor reading habits exacerbates the problem. "Poor reading skills snowball through the grades,” writes Whitmire. “By fifth grade, a child at the bottom of the class reads only about 60,000 words a year in and out of school, compared to a child in the middle of the class who reads about 800,000 words a year.”

If that's the case, then cultivating good reading habits is even more critical than ever. If you have boys like Andre, where reading is not an activity they gravitate towards naturally, then finding books that interest them needs to take priority. As the article suggests, if it takes books with gross bits, wild adventures and explosions to get the boys to read, then so be it. As long as it gets the job done, why not?