In today’s New York Times columnist David Brooks does a nice job laying out what may become the key education issue in the last 100 days of campaigning, not No Child Left Behind but rather the flat lining of higher education attainment in the United States. Compared to our international competitors, the U.S. is slipping behind in average education levels. Brooks places the blame not on the the country’s higher education system but rather at the K-12 level, where the pipeline hasn’t grown.

Brooks is right, and he’s also right about how this translates into a political issue (preschools). But what Brooks doesn’t mention is why that pipeline hasn’t grown. Girls are reacting logically to the demands of the marketplace, heading off to college at ever-rising rates. Boys, however, are not matching them. One reason for this was laid out expertly last week by the Schott Foundation, which issued at 50-state report on black boys falling behind, which I posted about here. Black boys are hardly the sole source of the gender imbalance. Sons of blue-collar parents are falling behind in education attainment as well (see the library offerings on that in the right column), and far too many sons of upper-income families end up at colleges one or two tiers below what they’re capable of reaching.

What continues to puzzle me is the dearth of foundation work on this. Several of the top national foundations have correctly focused on deficiencies in higher education attainment, and yet few have tapped into what researchers are discovering at the local level: It’s all about the boys. Consider this research from the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

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