Girls outnumber boys about two to one in the top tenth of American high school grade point averages, and boys outnumber girls by roughly the same margin at the bottom. Boys make up 67% of the lowest decile and 34% of the highest, according to a January 2025 brief from the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), the research group Richard Reeves founded in 2023, using a federal study of about 23,000 high schoolers. A decile is one tenth of a ranked group, so the top decile is the highest-scoring 10% of students.
This same pattern holds well past high school. Women were 58% of undergraduate enrollment in fall 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the federal agency that collects education data. Among adults ages 25 to 34, 47% of women hold a bachelor's degree compared with 37% of men, per a November 2024 analysis by Pew Research Center of Census Bureau survey data. Go back 30 years, back in 1995, the two genders were even at 25% each.
Agreement stops at what's going on and what to do about it. The loudest answer belongs to Leonard Sax, a physician and psychologist whose 2007 book "Boys Adrift" argues that schools have quietly turned hostile to boys and that teachers should instruct boys and girls differently because the sexes are built differently. That second claim is what eight neuroscientists and psychologists attacked in the journal Science in 2011, and it remains the weakest-supported piece of his case.
What the numbers show
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test given to a sample of students nationwide and usually called NAEP, has shown girls reading better than boys at every grade it covers since the first administration in 1971. In 2024, fourth-grade girls averaged 219 on the 500-point reading scale against 211 for boys, eighth-grade girls 263 against 253, and twelfth-grade girls 288 against 277. To make sense of the version your own child brings home, we wrote a walkthrough on how to read your child's state test scores.
All of those scores are down since the COVID-19 pandemic. The national fourth-grade reading average in 2024 sat 5 points below 2019, and a third of eighth graders scored below NAEP Basic, the largest share in the history of the test. Boys and girls both slid: comparing the 2019 and 2024 averages by sex, boys lost about 6 points at fourth grade and girls about 5, while at eighth and twelfth grade girls lost slightly more ground than boys did. NAEP does not treat differences that small as meaningful, so the honest summary is that the collapse hit both sexes and the gap did not clearly widen.
Reading for pleasure has also dropped hard, though the cleanest federal measure of it does not break out by gender. On NAEP's long-term trend survey, 14% of 13-year-olds said they read for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27% in 2012. Sax states it more forcefully than the survey can: "Girls are reading significantly less today than they were reading 40 years ago. But boys have stopped reading altogether."
Where the argument breaks down
Sax told the Deseret News in July 2026 that he watched the reversal happen inside his own lifetime. "At my own public high school, the highest achievers, the valedictorian, the editor of the school newspaper, the winner of the poetry award, were all boys," he said. "Not anymore. Things have changed profoundly." He is careful about one thing a lot of commentary gets wrong, and he says it plainly: "But the gender gap is growing not because girls are doing better, but because boys are doing worse."
His prescription has two halves. The first is a plea to stop punishing ordinary boy behavior, and he points to schools that discipline children for throwing a snowball or drawing a weapon. "But as I've shared with American schools, don't criminalize boyhood," he said. The second is what he calls gender-aware instruction, meaning teachers deliberately teach boys and girls differently on the theory that the two are wired differently. He insists it costs girls nothing: "You can boost achievement and motivation for boys without making school unfriendly to girls."
On September 23, 2011, Science published a two-page article titled "The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling" by eight researchers led by Diane Halpern, a cognitive psychologist who was president of the American Psychological Association in 2004. They wrote that there is "no empirical evidence" that separating students by sex improves education, and that sex segregation instead increases gender stereotyping. They criticized Sax by name, including his argument that boys and girls need different classrooms because of differences in the autonomic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that runs automatic functions like heart rate.
One of those eight co-authors was Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University. Ten years later she led a synthesis of three decades of brain imaging and postmortem research, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews in 2021. Once you account for the fact that male brains are on average larger, it found, sex explains roughly 1% of the variation in brain structure, and most functional imaging results failed to replicate from one study to the next. Variation within each sex is far larger than the distance between the two averages.
Sax answered within a day. In an Education Week commentary on September 24, 2011, he accused the Science authors of "astonishing errors of fact which invalidate the main thrust of the article," arguing that they built their stereotyping claim on studies of preschoolers in coed rooms, not on single-sex schools, and that they left out research pointing the other way, including a study of eighth-grade girls in Germany. That response deserves weighing. The brain-difference literature has still moved toward Eliot's position in the fifteen years since, not his.
The gap itself is not seriously disputed, and the numbers hold across grades, states and decades. The claim that it comes from hardwiring is disputed by most people who study brains for a living, and building classroom policy on contested neuroscience is a poor bet when other explanations have better evidence.
The revised "Boys Adrift," due in September 2026, adds pornography, artificial intelligence and the online "manosphere" to Sax's list of forces pulling boys away from school, and he tells parents to restrict access to all three.
What has better evidence behind it
Boys lose more class time to discipline and to special education. In the federal Civil Rights Data Collection for 2013-14, 7.3% of male public school students received at least one out-of-school suspension, against 3.2% of female students. In school year 2022-23, 18% of male K-12 public school students were served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal special education law, compared with 10% of girls, per NCES. Whether that reflects real differences in need or differences in how adults read the same behavior is where the honest argument sits, and if your own child is in that system, we laid out what a 504 plan is and how it differs from an IEP. Boys also pile up far more unexcused absences than girls, in AIBM's November 2023 analysis of Washington State records, and there is a research base on what helps chronically absent students that is not boy-specific.
Relative age has the cleanest evidence of anything on this list. Timothy Layton and colleagues, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in November 2018, compared children born in August with children born in September in states that use a September 1 kindergarten cutoff, which makes the August children the youngest in their grade by almost a year. The August children were diagnosed with ADHD at a rate of 85.1 per 10,000 against 63.6 per 10,000 for the September children, 34% higher. That difference was statistically significant for boys and not for girls.
The result gets used to argue for redshirting boys, meaning holding them out of kindergarten an extra year. Thomas Dee and Hans Henrik Sievertsen, using Danish population registers in Health Economics in 2018, found a one-year delay in kindergarten entry cut inattention and hyperactivity at age 7 by an effect size of 0.73. An effect size expresses a difference in standard deviations, and anything above roughly 0.4 counts as large in education research. Their result was identified mainly among girls. AIBM points to work by Cook and Kang on North Carolina data suggesting a 10% redshirting rate among white boys shrank the third-grade reading gap among white students by 11%. That is one study.
Male teachers are the reform with the widest gap between how obvious it sounds and how it tests. Men were 23% of public school teachers in 2020-21 and only 11% at the elementary level, per NCES's National Teacher and Principal Survey, down from roughly a third in the 1980s by AIBM's count. Dee's mid-2000s estimate was that if half of middle school English teachers were men, the reading gap would fall by about a third. Then Antecol, Eren and Ozbeklik reanalyzed randomized-experiment data in 2015 and found no effect of teacher gender on boys' scores in math or reading, and most work since has found little. Bringing more men into elementary classrooms is defensible on other grounds; the achievement case for it is thin, much like the case for homework below sixth grade.
On reading instruction itself, the strongest honest claim is narrow. Explicit, systematic teaching of decoding helps beginning readers, and it helps all of them. No good evidence shows a boy-targeted reading curriculum beats good instruction delivered to everyone, and the research on matching texts to boys' supposed preferences is mostly small and correlational. Letting students choose their own books does appear to raise motivation, which is a separate outcome from achievement.
Boys are clearly struggling in school, but the evidence does not support treating them as a separate neurological species. The better response is less dramatic and more useful: identify at the individual level not by gender. Identify reading problems early, examine whether discipline and special education systems are misreading immaturity as disorder, give younger students time to develop, and use teaching methods that work for children rather than stereotypes. Schools do not need to become more hostile to girls to help boys. They need to become better at noticing which students are falling behind, understanding why, and intervening before a temporary gap becomes a permanent one.
Sources
Deseret News: Psychologist: 'Gender aware' instruction elevates boys in school
PubMed: Halpern et al., The pseudoscience of single-sex schooling, Science, September 2011
Education Week: Leonard Sax Responds to the Science Article
Pew Research Center: U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion
American Institute for Boys and Men: Boys, Girls, and Grades
NAEP: 2024 Reading Assessment, Grades 4 and 8
NCES Condition of Education: Students With Disabilities
