Wonders never cease: Grad rate gender gap
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Late yesterday afternoon — yes, in the slowest hour of the calendar’s most languid news weekend– NY1 broke a story on gender gaps in high school graduation. Based on stats released on Sunday, the story says girls graduate ahead of boys by a margin of about 10 percent — a pattern that’s held for many years. The grad gap between races persists here, too, with 57 percent of African-American girls graduating (compared with 44 percent of their brothers and boy cousins), and 54 percent of Hispanic girls earning their diplomas, compared with 21 percent of Hispanic boys. (Overall, nearly three-quarters of all girls graduate high school in four years; fewer than two-thirds of boys can say the same.)
DOE has “convened a committee ” to investigate. (Incredible that no such committee has been created until now, as gender- and race-based gaps are fixtures of the graduation-rate conversation.) No comment yet from the NY State Education Department, who may be taking Labor Day off.
Above and beyond the glum news, can anyone speak to the timing of its release? Timing like this, poised for speedy burial in the last-summer-weekend news hole, does make one wonder.
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I hope the committee investigation will really look at psychosocial factors that have contributed to these gaps. I have had enough of the descriptive data! There are real underlying causes and concrete interventions that can be put in place if they would only allot the resources needed to identify them.
Comment by DR — September 2, 2008 @ 10:03 am