GIRLS RULE.

• Author: Wilgoren, Jodi
• Position: Girls outperform boys in high school and in college enrollment rates

In the latest round of the battle of the sexes, girls seem to be winning--performing better in school and enrolling in college at a higher rate than boys. Have boys been left behind?

At Whitefish Bay High School, in a village north of Milwaukee on the shore of Lake Michigan, all four officers of the student council are female. So is the editor of the school newspaper, the Tower Times. And the two news editors.

Each spring at graduation, the school, which has about 900 students, honors the 10 seniors with the highest grade point averages. Last year, nine were girls. Whitefish Bay had nine semifinalists for the prestigious National Merit Scholarships, based on college-board scores; eight were girls.

The senior class president is female, the senior class vice president is female, the junior class president is female, and so is the junior class vice president. Freshman class officers? Girl, girl, girl. Only the sophomores are led by someone with a Y chromosome.

"This jock got it," explains Jon Schweitzer, a member of the Whitefish Bay Class of '03. "He's a nice guy, kind of smart. Everybody likes him. Then, with the vice president, everybody got serious and chose a girl who knows what she's doing. When I want to talk to somebody about stuff, I talk to the vice president."

As the bumper stickers say, girls rule.

Less than a decade ago, educators, researchers, and policy makers set off alarm bells in schoolhouses across the country, warning that America's educational system was shortchanging girls. They worried that girls sat ignored in class while boys called out; that female students were lagging in science and math; that young women suffered withering self-esteem, depression, and eating disorders. Take Our Daughters to Work Day was born, along with a federal law in 1994 that categorized girls as an "underserved population."

Now, the roles are being reversed, with a new round of research raising troubling questions about boys' achievements, extracurricular activities, and attitudes toward education. A spate of school shootings over the last several years spawned a discipline crackdown that largely targets young men. As enrollment in the nation's colleges and universities has flip-flopped--56 percent of today's students are female--the latest skirmish in the educational gender wars casts boys as the underdogs.

"The idea that schools and society grind girls down has given rise to an array of laws and policies intended to curtail the advantage boys have and to redress the harm done to girls," Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosopher, writes in her recent book, The War Against Boys. "That girls are treated as the second sex in school and consequently suffer, that boys are accorded privileges and consequently benefit--these are things everyone is presumed to know. But they are not true."

Indeed, a Department of Education report released last spring shows that girls are less likely to repeat a grade than boys, less likely to be classified as having a learning disability, and less likely to have teachers call home reporting problems with schoolwork or behavior. Girls get better grades, and their parents are more likely to describe them as being near the top of their class.

Girls have outperformed boys on standardized tests in reading and writing for decades, and, in recent years, they have been catching up on math and science exams, the report shows. In 1998, female high school graduates were just as likely as their male peers to have taken upper-level math like trigonometry and calculus, and more likely to have enrolled in biology and chemistry; in higher education, 56 percent of graduate students in 1996 were women, compared with 39 percent in 1970. A separate survey of college freshmen in 1999, by researchers at UCLA, shows that young women spent more time than young men doing volunteer work and participating in student clubs.

"The large gaps in educational attainment that once existed between men and women have significantly decreased or been eliminated altogether," the Department of Education report says. "Females are now doing as well or better than males."

WHERE ARE THE GUYS?

This new gender gap yawns even wider in poor, minority communities. Sixty-three percent of African-American college students are female; five times as many black women pursue master's degrees as do black men. At Frederick Douglass Academy, a...