The gender gap trickles into public schools

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

As the school year comes to a close and anxiety mounts for the fall, administrators, educators, and politicians focus their attention on how to increase their percentages of students who make it to the next grade. What will those classrooms look like?

From incessant testing to rewarding effective teachers to grade inflation, we are exhausting every outlet to improve achievement for all students – but recent information suggests that these are superficial solutions to a much more complex problem.

Female students are steadily outperforming their male counterparts, a trend the Atlantic credits to a major societal shift that can be measured on a global scale. Atlantic contributing editor Hanna Rosin asks, “But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?”