The Gender Gap in Washington State

There's an interesting post over at Joanne Jacobs' blog talking about the gender gap. The researchers in this article at the Washington Post argue that there really isn't a boy crisis, at least for middle-class white boys.

I wandered over to the report card site that OSPI runs to see what the situation is in Washington. The trick there is that you can only see the results for one of the NCLB subgroups at a time; for example, boys or whites, but not white boys. If you look at the overall gender gap with all races put together this is the pictures that emerges, organized by reading, math, then writing:

4th Grade Boys: 76.9, 60.5, 48.6
4th Grade Girls: 82.3, 61.1, 67.3

7th Grade Boys: 64.0, 50.1, 52.2
7th Grade Girls: 74.5, 51.6, 70.9

10th Grade Boys: 68.2, 47.1, 56.3
10th Grade Girls: 77.8, 47.9, 74.4

Boys trail in every single area, true, but in math the gap is never bigger than 1.5%. Reading ranges from 6% to 10%. Writing is the single biggest problem in each grade level, starting with a 19.7% gap in the 4th grade, 18.7% in 7th, and 17.9% in 10th.

If anyone knows of a way to disaggregate the data from the OSPI website, or find a place where it's broken down more thoroughly, I'd love to hear about it.