Me, too. I wouldn’t have thought that there would be such a disparity at the high end of the SES scale. This seems like a more alarming outcome to me than the relatively slim difference in math scores.
@mom2twogirls My daughter has had similar experiences in college but has drawn a different conclusion. She was recently graded down on an assignment that was far better than others who scored higher. After speaking with the professor it became clear that he was pushing her harder because he saw more potential in her. He feels that she can truly excel in her field and wants to educate her to be the best she can be. She found it annoying but understands. I have seen some of that in high school as well. Some teachers want to push students to achieve their personal best. Its aggravating since so much rides on GPA, but I understand the impulse.
There could be many explanations for this. As others have said, it could simply be that kids from economically secure families feel more confident in choosing to follow their passions rather than the “safer” stem route.
It could also be that there are actual gender differences in math ability at the very high end. Higher SES families are more likely to give their children the support they need to go as far as possible – that could mean taking college courses in high school. Wealthier districts may have more high level offerings and so the differences at the top become evident.
Of course, it could also be bias.
I strongly believe that what matters to children begins in the home. If you tell your children ( male or female) that math AND English matter then they will. Yes, kids will leans towards particular subjects. But as a parent, you always have to be thinking of keeping ALL of the doors open. What if your non-math liking kid falls in love with physics in high school and they have been allowed to neglect math ( they’ll have a hard time). Or if your poetry loving kid is forced to join the math team each year and has no interest.
There are also many subtle signs that frame a kids choice of career. Many women I know went into helping professions ( teacher, nurse, social worker etc). The unspoken word can be more powerful than the spoken word. If a family values STEM, the arts, music, etc-the kids will absorb this and value that subject. And vice versa.
Some of it may be family structure, as well. Higher SES boys are more likely to have a Dad in the home, and many studies show that boys without Dads in the home fare worse than girls do.
My D hobbled her own math progression when she took a special test in 6th grade to determine advanced math placement for middle school. She qualified for 2 levels up (Alg 7th grade) but chose to go up only one level because she’d have been the only girl in the more advanced class - as a 6th grader apparently she found this to be a situation that called attention to her math ability in an unpleasant way. Had I been consulted I’d have encouraged her to go all the way up, but I wasn’t.
She’s a math major in college now, though.
In my experience in high SES 2 parent families Dad’s are rarely home and not very involved in the day-to-day child rearing (but that could be my experience only).
Absence of a father as a contributor to the family income and any childcare at all leads to more chaos, which seems to hit boys harder - not to mention the simple lack of a male role model.
There is an enormous difference between a father who works long hours to support the family and a family with no father in the home at all. There is no comparison.
At first I thought it showed two different graphs, one for English and one for math. It took a while for me to realize that girls are so much better at English than boys that there is no overlap.
We live in one of those districts pretty far out to the right. When hitting middle school, all kids are automatically placed in the one year ahead math track (headed for AB Calc, probably 70%) and can test into two year ahead track (BC Calc, roughly 30%). They drop down from there.
We do have many SAHM families, though there are also a whole bunch of techie moms. This shows up as boys being only slightly ahead of girls in math.
I wonder if part of the issue has to do with tracking. In my experience, tracking tends to be more common in math than in English. If you are taking Algebra 1 in 7th grade, that’s a really easy way to be 2 grade levels ahead of kids taking normal 7th grade math. But I have rarely heard of kids taking English 9 in middle school. Poor districts don’t seem to provide the same opportunities for tracking. I was talking to one teacher who was telling me that most middle schools in the district don’t offer Algebra 1 at all, even to 8th graders.
It is very interesting how consistently girls outperform boys in English, with far more of a gap then at any point in the math scores. Some of that is certainly related to reading as girls read more (and better) than boys. This study from Brookings Inst speaks to that. One interesting point is that scores have risen over the past few decades and that the gap has shrunk as boys have gained more than girls at every age level.
The other interesting thing in this study is that Finland, often touted as a top education country, has a huge gender gap in reading, with boys scoring 62 points less on the PISA. Finland’s top scores are all from girls, as the boys’ scores are about average.
Conversely, the fact that the gap is shrinking and that it largely disappears in adults argues against biology being the only explanation. It also discusses the fact that boys have higher levels of LDs.
@droppedit, in our house it’s just the opposite. I always know where north is, my husband does not. He’s apt to tell me that one place is on the way to another - when it takes two large sides of a triangle to make the detour. It’s why I’m the architect in this house not him!
I suspect that there is much more unconscious bias in the math numbers for girls than anyone realizes. I credit liking math to being in a one rooms school house with my mother teaching for fourth and fifth grade. We figured out New Math together. She got excited by it and so did I. Her Dad used to do math puzzles and tricks with her when she was young and she passed them on. (Stuff like this one: https://www.wikihow.com/Do-a-Number-Trick-to-Guess-Someone%27s-Age - then he explained to her how it was just simple algebra.)
I only had boys so I only know that one of my kids was figuring out math stuff at three or four - multiplication and fractions, while the other had zippo interest in it.
Actually, I would suspect that there is a conscious bias…
I’ve been on cc for many years and we still have posts that ask, ‘my kid does not like math, and will not be STEM in college, can they skip math senior year?’ The answer on cc is mostly, ‘yes’.
Yet, no one ever says that its ok to skip senior English (ignoring that some/many high schools requires four years of English to graduate).
I think we need to consider sociological explanations for why girls outperform boys in math in low SES districts. Places like Detroit, Flint, Gary, and East St. Louis are deeply distressed urban centers where many people live in grinding poverty. Large parts of those cities are brutal, violent places with active street gangs, robust trade in prohibited drugs, and extremely high rates of gun deaths, largely from gang-related feuds and turf wars. It’s a terrible environment for anyone to grow up in, but in important ways it’s worse for boys than for girls. Boys are far more likely to be targeted for recruitment by gangs, and punished by the gang if they rebuff the overture. They’re under tremendous pressure, and merely staying alive is a challenge. The gang offers them protection (albeit perhaps illusory), a certain kind of social status, and an income—the drug trade being the most lucrative business going in some neighborhoods. If they do get caught up in a gang, that becomes their primary loyalty and their primary focus. At the same time, they see many people around them being incarcerated, or dying early, violent deaths. Educational achievement might seem futile in that environment, or at least a lower priority than staying alive and in the gang’s good graces, and avoiding being caught by the police.
Athletically gifted boys might see sports as a possible way out. Only a tiny fraction will ever play professionally, of course, but many carry those dreams through their HS years and invest much more heavily in athletics than in academics.
Life is harsh for girls in impoverished neighborhoods, too, but in many cases girls are a little more protected by their families. Fewer end up incarcerated or dead—boys are nearly four times as likely as girls to be teenage homicide victims in the U.S., and boys are twice as likely to die of a drug overdose. Some studies have found that boys are 10 times as likely to be involved in gangs and gang-related crime, and boys are seven times as likely to be incarcerated as juveniles.
Boys in impoverished, high-crime communities are also more likely to be seen as a problem or a potential threat by teachers and school administrators—sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes not. Boys are punished earlier, more often, and more harshly. The relationship becomes more adversarial, ultimately leading in many cases to suspension or expulsion—lost days that become cumulatively harder to make up.
As a consequence of all this, girls are more likely than boys to see education as a possible way out of impoverished communities. Notice, however, that the study doesn’t say girls in low-SES districts are doing particularly well in math—only that they’re doing a little better than the boys in the same grade cohorts in those same districts.
As a balance, my cousins lived in one of the worst school districts in the US, in rural Virginia, close to 100% white. Education there was terrible.
@bclintonk I was wondering if the finding that boys from impoverished schools do not do better than girls in math was because those boys are “under-performing” relative to typical boys where they equal or exceed girls in math scores. The issues you point out, particularly the fact that boys are more likely to be punished and less likely to find support for being academic, is at least one part of the puzzle.
I wondered where the headline was wondering why girls outperform boys in english regardless of income.
It seems to me that it is important to know how many questions the “6 months ahead” or “3 months ahead” results actually represent, before becoming too concerned about this differential, on either test. I would guess that it is less than you might imagine just from reading the article.
I do understand that the standard deviation of the mean of a set of scores (say, for all of the boys in a school district, or all of the girls) is much smaller than the standard deviation of the individual scores of boys or girls within a school, so there might be some reason for concern.
However, if you were able to look at the specific questions, to see why a difference in the performance of boys and girls has arisen in the schools, you might see the reason “staring you in the face,” so to speak.
Here is an example: When my daughter was in second or third grade, she looked over one of the Stanford EPGY placement exams. She could not understand a question about a sports team that “won 2 out of 3 of their games,” and had won 8 games, so how many games did they play overall? Her difficulty with this was not with the concept of ratios per se, but rather when the question said that the team had won 2 out of 3 of their games, she thought that was information just about the specific outcome of 3 particular games, rather than the ratio over all games played. The familiarity of boys and girls with different expressions of this type may differ, without indicating any actual relative weakness of girls in math.
Another example of this kind of thing: There is a question that often appears on third-grade standardized tests, which looks something like 12 + 59 = 59 + [then an open square here], with the instruction to put a number in the box to make the number sentence valid. After taking this test, my daughter wanted to know, “What does ‘box’ mean?” Well, I use “box” for the d’Alembertian operator, which is a linear combination of second partial derivatives with respect to spatial coordinates and time, but that probably was not what she was asking about. In the context of the question, the box actually means nothing; it is just a blank spot to fill in an answer. There might be a difference in the likelihood that a girl or boy will try to assign a meaning to the box, rather than just powering through the question. My preferred answer is 2 times the square root of 3, taking “box” to mean “square the number inside the box.”
Am I the only one who hates the term “number sentence?” “Equation” was so much more descriptive. It told you exactly what was expected.
I think @Twoin18’s hypothesis is intriguing.
But also- the high SES areas are places where people have done well within the status quo, and thus may perpetuate it subconsciously. I find this fascinating: my high school senior is currently on a trip with 11 of his friends who are all near the top of their class. Of these 12 boys, only three of them have mothers who worked outside the home while the boys were growing up— and all three of us are teachers, a historically “female” profession. (I am the only one to earn more than my husband.)
So, in high SES areas this may be common: The dads earn the money in the prestige jobs. The moms take on historically female roles. Historically, STEM areas were for boys. So, the cultural expectation may live on in subtle ways… not for everyone, of course, but for enough people to result in statistics like those cited.