There’s been a lot of talk lately about the “boys crisis” in education. And also the “girls crisis.”

• Girls score lower in math than boys worldwide, especially in countries with more gender inequality ingrained in the culture, according to a study published this week in Science Magazine. AP story on it.
• A report from the AAUW foundation debunks the”boys crisis” by pointing to statistics that show greater gaps based on race, ethnicity and income level, and saying men still have higher average incomes. The coverage of this report has drawn quite a bit of controversy (thanks for this link, Alexander). Here’s the NYTimes story on the report. Here’s the Washington Post story on it.
• Peg Tyre, who is writing a book about boys and schools, responds in the Huffington Post by pointing out that boys are twice as likely to be held back in school and females outnumber males on undergraduate campuses by 2.5 million.

None of this is particularly new. It’s been reported many times that males outnumber females in high level math and science classes and in jobs in the engineering and technology industries.

At Scholastic, we’re acutely aware of boys’ struggles with reading, which are detailed in the results of the 2007 NAEP.

We also know that the percentages of African American boys who are succeeding in school and graduating are far too low. Alfred Tatum has done some remarkable work on helping schools combat this problem, focusing especially on how to get relevant and meaningful books and text into the hands of African American boys.

So is it the boys or the girls who are being left behind? I think it’s a little of both.