The Other Achievement Gap

In today’s paper, I had the pleasure of writing a good-news story about the graduation rate of the state, and APS, reaching 70 percent. The story includes a table with the graduation rates of the 13 comprehensive high schools in APS. But not everyone goes to those schools, so here is the complete list of rates around the state, by district, school and subgroup.

I tried to highlight some interesting things in my story this morning, but there was a ton of information and not everything made it into the story. Like the fact that there’s a 10-point gap between boys and girls in New Mexico. Boys have a graduation rate of 65 percent, while girls have a rate of 75 percent. That’s just as wide as the gap between Hispanic (67 percent) and Anglo (77 percent) students, which has rightly been the subject of extensive concern in New Mexico.

There has been some noise nationally about the growing gap between boys and girls. Education Week has a whole blog on the subject (which is in remission while author Richard Whitmire finishes a book, but which has interesting archival stuff). The basic argument I read a lot is twofold: Firstly, the world has gotten more verbal, and girls tend to be more verbal than boys. The second argument is cultural, which is that it is no longer considered masculine to do well in school, especially for young men of color, while women are unabashed about being smart.

Some places, including here in Albuquerque, have dabbled in single-sex classrooms, with the idea that different teaching and learning strategies are more effective for boys than for girls. Research results on that are mixed thus far.

In any case, I don’t know the answer to any of this, but the gender gap in the graduation rates really jumped out at me, and probably merits further reporting and a future story. In part, this post is to hold me accountable and make sure I revisit this topic.