Last week’s Science article about the National Science Foundation-sponsored study concluding that girls and boys perform equally well on state math tests predictably attracted the MSM (Mainstream Media … yes, that includes me).

How’d we do?  All respectable reporting, but every reporter overlooked the obvious insight. If girls are now the equal of boys in math, and that fact is due to the push everyone gave to girls a decade ago to encourage them to take more math and science classes, then why is there no parallel push for boys today who lag behind considerably in literacy scores?

Here’s the New York Times article. Minneapolis also wrote on this. The Los Angeles Times is here. And let’s not leave out the Associated Press story, as it ran in the Washington Post and my own paper, USA Today (our K-12 reporter, Greg Toppo, was in New Orleans).

As you can see no reporter asked the obvious follow-up question. Why? My guess: Groups such as the American Association of University Women have succeeded in their goal of making the problems boys are having in school a “controversial” issue, one that always requires a he-said/she-said approach in the MSM — and thereby a subject to be generally avoided.

Problem is, there really is no controversy about whether boys are suffering in school: 54% of black fourth grade boys score below basic in reading, nearly one in four white sons of college educated parents score “below basic” on the the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test, and by the year 2015 six in ten graduates of four-year colleges will be female.

Hats off to the AAUW. Convincing the press to ignore that data can’t be easy. They must employ the same PR experts who allowed President Bush to run out the clock on the global warming crisis. You see, global warming is all a matter of he-said/she said, right? We did have an unusually cool spring, right? This whole global warming thing could be a liberal conspiracy, right?

For further thoughts on that study, visit my post on the issue.

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