http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/nyregion/01gifted.htmlBy SHARON OTTERMAN
New York Times, May 31, 2010
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[T]hough the [New York City public] school system over all is 51 percent male, its gifted classrooms generally have more girls.
Around the city, the current crop of gifted kindergartners, for example, is 56 percent girls, and in the 2008-9 year, 55 percent were girls.
Educators and experts have long known that boys lag behind girls in measures like high school graduation rates and college enrollment, but they are concerned that the disparity is also turning up at the very beginning of the school experience.
Why more girls than boys enter the programs is unclear, though there are some theories. Among the most popular is the idea that young girls are favored by the standardized tests the city uses to determine admission to gifted programs, because they tend to be more verbal and socially mature at ages 4 and 5 when they sit for the hourlong exam.
�Girls at that age tend to study more, and the boys kind of play more,� said Linda Gratta, a parent at the Anderson School on the Upper West Side, one of the most selective. �But it�s a mixed bag. The day of the test, you could be the smartest boy in the world and just have a bad day.� She said that Timothy, her first-grade son, had approximately 10 boys and 18 girls in his class.
Biases and expectations among adults are often in play when determining which children count as gifted, and fewer boys appear to end up in gifted programs nationally. A 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that boys were �overrepresented in programs for learning disabilities, mental retardation and emotional disturbance, and slightly underrepresented in gifted programs,� said Bruce A. Bracken, a professor at the College of William & Mary who wrote one of the two exams that the city uses to test gifted children. He said the implications of the study were �disturbing.�
Dr. Bracken�s assessment, which makes up 25 percent of a child�s gifted score in the city, has been field tested for gender bias, and during a recent round of testing in Virginia, no gender differences in the score were recorded. But the longer Otis-Lennon Ability Test, the other 75 percent of the gifted exam, is �more verbal than some of the other tests,� which could play to girls� strengths, said David F. Lohman, a professor and testing expert at the University of Iowa.
The city�s Department of Education mandated the use of the two tests for admission to gifted programs beginning in 2008; before that, individual schools and districts each devised its own criteria. These typically included a mix of standardized intelligence tests, interviews, observation and, for later grades, class work. The additional leeway in admissions sometimes led to an effort to create gender balance in classes.
�Up until about five years ago, there was more of a conscious effort to balance by gender,� said Estelle Schmones, who retired last year as a gifted teacher at Public School 110 in Manhattan. Like other educators and parents, Ms. Schmones noted that the number of girls in some gifted programs had been creeping up over the past several years.
David Cantor, the press secretary for the Education Department, said that any role the tests might play in contributing to the gender gap was not known, because the city did not tally the gender of those who took or passed the test, only those who enrolled in gifted classes. Still, Mr. Cantor said, �A good test for giftedness should be able to control for differences in what children have been exposed to, and for the early verbal development we see more often in girls.�
The imbalance stands in contrast with the gender makeup of the eight high schools, including Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, that use the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test to select students. All have more boys than girls, in keeping with research that shows that boys tend to catch up with girls, especially in mathematics, through middle school and, at the high end of the achievement spectrum, surpass them. (La Guardia High School, the prestigious school for music, art and the performing arts, has three girls for every boy.)
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I don't think a gender (or racial, or socioeconomic) gap is necessarily a problem, but if boys mature later, there should be opportunities to join gifted programs at each grade, not just in kindergarten.
