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Boys Suffer More in High School Transition

By Richard Whitmire — September 21, 2011 1 min read
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The interesting study by Fordham Foundation on what happens to high achieving middle schoolers as they transition to high school (an alarming number take a performance dip) can be broken out by gender, as U.S. News shows.

We already know that lower achieving boys suffer most during that transition, a phenomenon known as the 9th grade bulge.

Now we know something similar happens at the top end. From U.S. News:

Although minorities were underrepresented among high achievers, high-performing minorities tended to stay more stable than high-performing white students. Boys' performances suffered more often than girls' performances during the middle-to-high school transition, as the proportion of high-achieving girls grew from 49.8 percent to 52.6 percent in reading and from 39 percent to 41.7 percent in math.

The opinions expressed in Why Boys Fail are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.