Any time there's a major concern that some students are not learning means we now have to move ahead and deal with it. Girls continue to outperform boys in Kentucky, but that gap appears to be closing, according to the study, commissioned by the Kentucky Department of Education to look at scores from 1992-1998. The gender gap in Kentucky is generally explained by years of research showing that girls tend to do better on tests that emphasize critical thinking, reading and writing, like Kentucky's own tests. The study shows that with the exception of middle school science and social studies, all students have made some progress since 1992. But the pattern of discrepancy has remained steady.
White girls perform the best, followed by white boys, black girls and black boys.
Racial differences in scores appear to be increasing slowly in math at all grades, in science and social studies in the 4th, 5th and 11th grades and in 7th grade reading. Part of the reason for the racial gap is a reluctance by whites to acknowledge that racial problems still exist or that curriculum and teaching need to include viewpoints from other cultures and races, said Susan Weston, head of the Kentucky Association of School Councils. The race and gender gap study, which was done by Doug Smith and Jason Nemes of Western Kentucky University and Dorothy Neff of Transylvania University, went a step further than test scores. Smith decided to study schools that had smaller racial achievement gaps to see what those schools were doing differently. Teachers and principals told him that they thought student wealth was the only factor.