Boys trail girls in reaching “proficiency” reading levels, Maryland’s PARCC tests show.
According to data released Tuesday by the Maryland State Board of Education, 50.9% of elementary and middle school girls taking the English/language arts test achieved a score of 4 or higher — a ranking designated as “proficient” — compared with 36.7% of the boys who took the test. The findings were similar at the 10th grade level.
As Vermelle Greene, one of the members of the state Department of Education, said, “If boys are in trouble, so are we all.”
In Montgomery County, where student achievement on the tests proved better than the state average, Superintendent Jack Smith said there are concerns about that gender gap.
If boys aren’t engaged as readers in the early grades, Smith said, “we do lose them oftentimes in the area of literacy, and we’ve got to do a better job with that.”
The issue isn’t new, he said: There has been concern about boys who aren’t achieving at the same rate as girls.
This past winter, Smith said school staff met with members of the community to look at classroom materials for a new English/language arts curriculum for students in pre-K through eighth grade.
“One of the things that they said loud and clear is that we have to make sure that all students — by gender, by race, by culture, by background — can see themselves in that literacy curriculum,” he said.
Some school districts have experimented with single-sex education. Montgomery County has not. “Federal law puts some barriers to doing same-sex grouping,” Smith said.
But creating support, where students feel welcome, is critical, he added. “The more we can create that feeling all the time, every day in schools, the more successful we’ll be with students,” Smith said.
This is the last year that Maryland will use the PARCC assessments as a benchmark for student achievement. The state is in the process of building a new test. And it’s important that the new test is comparable to the PARCC, which was first introduced in 2014, “because that’s how you see progress,” Smith said.
