- The plight of boys in school, and particularly boys from underprivileged backgrounds, is a story we’ve all gotten used to hearing about. Whether in our home state of Ohio or in international educational utopias like Finland, young men are lagging behind their female classmates in testing performance, high school graduation, college attendance, and a slew of disciplinary issues. The New York Times’s Upshot blog has an article on the academic gender gap that delves into the existing research to reach a distressing conclusion: The cumulative stress of all social hindrances, from domestic violence to parental absence to poverty, impose a greater toll on boys than girls. Although girls in every setting are more likely than boys to be adequately prepared for kindergarten (and less likely to rack up absences once they begin), their comparative edge grows much wider within deprived populations like immigrant and low-income families. With forces like this arrayed against them, perhaps it’s no wonder that these boys are underrepresented in selective high schools and colleges.
- Let’s take a moment to lavish some praise on a state whose merits are too seldom celebrated: Delaware. Last week, the First State became just the sixth state (wait, what?) to release detailed report cards on the quality of its teacher preparation programs. The assessments, which grew out of a comprehensive 2013 overhaul of Delaware’s teacher preparation sector, rate education schools on a 1–4 scale based on diversity and selectivity, how long program graduates spend teaching in the state, and how well those teachers’ students perform academically. The mighty Wilmington University and the University of Delaware earned top scores this year, although many smaller schools produced too few graduates to be fully assessed. The programs themselves aren’t too happy to be publicly grouped in tiers (imagine that), but teacher quality is way too important to go without vital data like these.
