by James C. Sherlock

Girls significantly outperform boys in English Language Arts (ELA) (reading and writing) in public schools and perform about as well in math and science, both across the nation and in Virginia.

Virginia statewide SOL performance statistics give the details here.

Across the state, girl students are better readers and far better writers than boys. Those English language arts performances at the state level of course mask both smaller and greater gaps in individual divisions and schools.

The writing gaps exist in both high-performing Loudoun County and in poor-performing Richmond City schools.

Broken down to the next level of detail in writing performance statewide, it looks worse.

College and Career Readiness statistics offer confirmation of the outcome of boys’ ELA deficiencies.

To our credit, the Virginia Literacy Act starting in the 2024-25 school year will make major upgrades to literacy instruction.

But to my knowledge, Virginia does not have a single public school program that tries to educate boys differently from girls in ELA (except perhaps what IEP special service providers may do in individual instruction) to close the gap.

If readers know of one, I am sure they will let us all know.

Absenteeism.  It would be easy to consider educational gaps in boys to be an artifact of higher absenteeism than girls.  But that’s not it.

One of the artifacts of my research into chronic absenteeism in Virginia public schools statewide in 2023 was that male and female results by percentage were exactly the same: 19.5%.

That, on the surface at least, may confirm parental influence on absenteeism.

The science of learning in boys. The medical community has offered scientific observations of brain science and social development that matter here.

Those observations typically include, aggregated by Microsoft Bing AI search from three different sources:

• Boys’ brains secrete less serotonin, which is directly related to impulse control;

• Boys start out primarily as tactile and kinesthetic learners;

• Boys show more areas in the brain dedicated to spatial-mechanical strengths;

• Girls generally demonstrate a focus on verbal-emotive processing;

• Girls have more of their cerebral cortex defined for verbal function;

• The hippocampus, where memory and language live, does develop more rapidly and is larger in girls than in boys. This impacts vocabulary, reading, and writing skills.

We will consider those to be illustrative. They certainly seem to argue for different approaches to educating boys and girls.

Asian students.  The special case of Asian students in ELA and all other subjects must be taken into account when seeking solutions to the boy/girl gaps. They absolutely blow away all other demographics of students, despite the fact that English may not be the first language spoken at home.

That clearly represents a difference in learning style and effort, not in teaching style.

The data on Asian students are not broken out for public consumption by male and female results, but I will ask VDOE to provide and I will report it.

Educational evidence. Because boys and girls learn differently, one solution offered, but not in Virginia public schools except in juvenile detention facilities, is single-sex education.

Juvenile detention may not be the place to look for the efficacy of single-sex instruction.

In 2005, the Policy and Program Studies Service of the U.S. Department of Education published Single-Sex Versus Coeducational Schooling: A Systematic Review.  

The reviewers used What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) standards to sort through 2,221 studies.

The Executive Summary is here. I urge you to read it.

You will see that the bulk of the evidence at the time of that review favored learning in single-sex schools. But you will also see that the support for the conclusions is generally thin because of a dearth of scientific studies of important issues.

A current search of WWC on that topic yields no study that meets their standards.

The ed schools have moved on.

Public schools and schools of education. The progressive ed-school establishment is now consumed with the “inequity” of racial gaps in educational performance.

Their prescriptions, enshrined in Virginia law and policy since 2020, have not reduced the gaps.

Yes, Covid happened. But it instantly became a political project of the left to close schools and keep them closed.

The public schools, especially in majority Black school divisions like Richmond, were closed far too long at the loud insistence of the leadership of teachers unions, aided by a wildly false statement about Covid’s effects on kids by Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor.

Virginia’s Catholic schools opened for in-person learning in the fall of 2020. Richmond’s public schools did the same in the fall of 2021.

Richmond’s teachers, recoiling that fall at the evidence in front of them of what they had done, were given an unscheduled extended holiday in October of 2021 to recover from the stress.

But in Virginia those gaps also have worsened under laws adopting, contiguous with Covid, progressive ed-school prescriptions for policies that do not hold minority children accountable for their actions or, with new academic standards, for full-participation learning.

Covid was considered an “opportunity” to do that. Massive changes were executed under Democratic control of the state government in 2020 and 2021.

As for the education of boys of all races and heredities, much of the ed-school establishment does not like boys who act like boys.

They are concerned instead with “toxic masculinity,” a staple of gender politics.

The left, in its higher education headquarters, considers boys to be oppressors-in-training unless they are receiving various therapies. The term itself is, and is meant to be, insulting.

That surely does not apply to all of Virginia’s schools of education. But it is dogma at the “elite” ones with DEI overseers.

It would be interesting to know what Virginia’s ed-schools teach their students on these subjects at every level of degree attainment.

Bottom line. The educational gaps between boys and girls are too big for state government and citizens to continue to ignore in Virginia.

Indiana has not ignored them. See both sides of The Great Gender Debate: Should Boys And Girls Learn Separately? published by Indiana’s State Impact Project.

It is time to focus on the education of boys who, unsurprisingly, act and learn like boys.

It is possible to offer single-sex and co-ed classrooms together in co-ed public schools, subject to parental choice of classroom assignments. I know. Parental choice. What a concept.

But to my knowledge that has never been tried. And it would solve, if such a thing is achievable, the ACLU’s objections detailed in The Great Gender Debate to single-sex schools.

The Virginia Literacy Act is very promising. But it will be much harder to execute in chaotic school environments driven by the 2020 and 2021 laws.

But the Literacy Act does not say what will be done if “scientifically based reading research and evidence-based literacy instruction” shows that single-sex literacy instruction is best for boys. Which brain science and human development studies indicate it likely is.

Next time I will offer a concept for the voluntary implementation by school divisions of single-gender and co-ed classrooms in a number of co-ed public schools in Virginia as the basis for a definitive study to provide the evidence needed.

Updated Dec. 14 at 14:30 to add Asian SOL results.