Last month, Melissa Roderick, a University of Chicago professor and leading authority on school reform, arrived at a startling conclusion: The traditional measurements of the nation's progress in improving education, which use race and income as markers, are flawed.
Why? Because boys and girls coming from the same race, families, incomes, neighborhoods and schools are turning out very differently. The girls are doing better.
Nearly half of all boys graduate from Chicago Public Schools with less than a 2.0 average, compared with a fourth of the girls. Only 8% of the system's African-American boys have a 3.0 average - a key indicator of the ability to complete college - compared with 18% of the girls.
The numbers are jarring, which explains Roderick's revelation that Chicago schools won't improve without strategies that focus on boys' achievement - the same kinds of strategies used so successfully to boost math and science skills among girls.
Read on ...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment