Young, Gifted–and Not Male?
If you’re young, gifted, and male, will your talents be overlooked? In New York City, boys comprise 51 percent of the student population; but in the city’s gifted kindergarten classes, fifty-six percent of the students are female, the New York Times reports. While boys have long lagged behind girls in high school graduation rates and college enrollment, educators fear that this new finding may suggest that gender disparity starts at a very early age, according to the Times.
No one is sure why the girls dominate, but one theory suggests that the standardized admissions tests used by gifted programs favor girls, who are more verbal and socially mature than boys by ages 4 and 5. One expert told the Times that literacy-oriented tests play to girls’ strengths, because at that age, boys think spatially and mathematically. Even those boys who are enrolled in gifted programs aren’t prone to sitting still. As one teacher told the paper: “If they are not moving, they are thinking about moving.” And it’s not just a New York problem. A 2002 National Science Foundation paper found that boys were “overrepresented in programs for learning disabilities, mental retardation, and emotional disturbance, and slightly underrepresented in gifted programs.”
The paper also points out that the kindergarten enrollment is in stark contrast to the city’s eight high schools, which use specialized admissions tests, including Technical. There, boys outnumber girls. That’s in keeping with research that finds that boys tend to catch up with girls, especially in mathematics, during the middle school years, often surpassing them at the higher end of the achievement spectrum.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
Tags: Education Policy, Elementary Education, Girls Education, Research on Learning
