If you follow our work here on State of Opportunity, it will not be news to hear that girls currently outperform boys on most academic measures.
A piece published a few days ago over at The Atlantic points out that this isn't just an American phenomenon; girls are doing better than boys in schools all around the world. This disparity has immense consequences for our education system, in part because, as I reported last year in our documentary "Be A Man," gender acts as a multiplying factor for other types of educational achievement gaps. The gaps we see between students based on family income and race are both much worse for males than females. If we want to tackle these achievement gaps, we can't ignore gender.
So how can we help boys catch up to girls in school? One idea that seems to have a lot of traction lately is just to let boys get away with doing less.
