BEST IN SCHOOL? IN ’06, GIRLS RULE: Valedictorian Disparity Mirrors National Trend
By Peter Smolowitz, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.
Jun. 22–Most of this year’s high school valedictorians had something in common besides being smart.
They’re girls.
In Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s public schools and 10 of the county’s biggest private ones, 26 of the 31 valedictorians — or 84 percent — were girls.
The numbers weren’t as overwhelming in nearby counties, but several still saw more females finishing first. In Catawba County, five of seven valedictorians were girls. In Lincoln, it was three of four. And the lone valedictorians at public schools in Kannapolis and Mooresville were, you guessed it, girls.
The trend gives rise to an age-old question: Are girls smarter than boys?
Boys’ performance in schools has attracted national attention, with the publication of best-selling books on the issue and a Newsweek cover story entitled “The Trouble With Boys.”
Locally, this isn’t a one-year fluke. In CMS, girls have outnumbered boys at the top of their classes every year since 2000. Three times during that stretch — even before this year — the district had nearly twice as many female valedictorians.
And at Fort Mill High, this year was the first time since 2002 that a boy finished first.
CMS school board chairman Joe White attended about 10 graduations this year and said he noticed the pattern.
“The females tend to take the academics much more seriously than we do,” White said, “and they do a pretty good job of kicking our rear ends.”
The spike has helped fuel a shift the past few years in college applications, said officials at UNC Charlotte and the Washington-based American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. More of the most qualified applicants are girls.
Admission directors at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill haven’t seen the shift.
The national publications cite other statistics that show boys are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities or assigned to special education classes.
In CMS, standardized test results are mixed. Reading scores released last week for elementary and middle schools show girls had higher pass rates than boys in more than 100 of the 120 schools. High school scores from last year, though, were split.
Most educators aren’t surprised. They say girls typically learn to read sooner than boys, they mature quicker and they have an easier time following directions.
In Mooresville, for example, young students struggling the most with reading tend to be boys, said Carol Carroll, the district’s director of elementary education. And when Mooresville teachers review their new classes, the first thing many look to see is if they have more boys than girls. If so, they’ll likely adapt their teaching style and spend more time “managing behavior.”
But others say efforts to assist girls could have helped produce some of today’s top scholars. CMS and other school systems nationwide, for instance, launched a push in the 1990s to recruit more girls into math and science competitions to make those subjects more appealing, said Ann Clark, a middle school principal at the time who now oversees CMS high schools.
And now more women teach those subjects, and they might connect more with female students, said Duke psychology professor Nancy Hill.
Boys, take heart. Bill Gates wasn’t his class valedictorian and he dropped out of Harvard. But in the end, he turned out just fine.
Staff writers Steve Lyttle and ann doss helms contributed.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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