Well, Actually + Told You So

A WSJ article about math gender gaps panders and misleads

I suppose it was inevitable. After a good year of coverage about how behind boys are in school and struggling nearly everywhere, we were bound to start seeing stories telling us, well, actually, it’s the girls who are behind.

Recently the Wall Street Journal published “Long the Star Pupils, Girls are Losing Ground to Boys,” claiming that, since 2019, according to “15 nationally representative exams,” girls’ scores in reading and math have decreased more than boys’ scores.

And it’s all boys’ fault. And it started during the pandemic with school closures.

At least this is what the story tells its readers. The first possible reason for this reemerging achievement gap is that boys’ behavior in school has been so bad since the pandemic that teachers haven’t been able to give girls the attention they need.

The second possible reason is that school closures disproportionately hurt girls.

The third possible reason is that because girls shouldered more household responsibilities during the pandemic, they lost ground academically and haven’t been able to catch up.

The article cites no evidence to support these claims other than couple sensational quotes from indignant moms (“If my child was wild and throwing desks around the room, somebody would pay attention to them,” one says, understatedly) and a single quote from a professor who studies gender gaps in education. (“Girls have a comparative advantage in school and you take schools away, they’ll suffer more,” he said.)

The article doesn’t even consider the other likely factors: phone use at home, phones in school, Chromebooks in schools, or the fact that we have effectively abandoned school accountability. Might any of these be partly responsible for this gap, as they have certainly contributed to others? The reporter is, evidently, not curious.

Bizarrely, the article also omits the larger story about math scores in this country, which improved dramatically for pretty much all groups starting in the ‘90s but, around 2011, fell again. Kevin Mahnken wrote about this last month at The 74, as did Chad Aldeman. The Journal article pins the declines to the pandemic, but they precede the pandemic.

Also left out is the larger, incredibly distressing picture of declining school achievement in this country everywhere we look. As Tim Daly avers: “we are living through an education depression.” History, civics and science scores are down. Reading scores have been dropping for years, and children are barely reading for fun anymore. College enrollment is approaching a cliff. Chronic absenteeism is out of control. Overall student mental health has been worsening for over a decade. (Indeed, the American populace as a whole appears to growing stupider, as do adults everywhere. So much for the Flynn Effect.)

Without that broader context and with no honest consideration of other factors at play, this article, amazingly, manages to pander to liberals and conservatives at once— it blames girls’ travails on toxic masculinity and pins academic doldrums on COVID school closures.

It’s a Well, Actually and a Told You So all in one.

To be sure, the Journal article presents readers with a troubling data point: the gap between girls’ and boys’ math scores is growing. But though boys’ scores declined as well, the article, in blaming boys for the gap, frames the issue in a pernicious and divisive way.

But gender equality is not zero-sum.

We rise together, as Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men has reminded us.

And as Journal’s own data shows, we fall together, too.

Above image: Italy (A), 1946-1948, Boy and Girl with Books, Richard Avedon.