If you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal...

be sure to check out yesterday's article on "Where the Boys Aren't" by Christina Hoff Sommers. My dad pointed this out in his paper. Unfortunately, it's not one of the ones selected for the WSJ's free Opinion Journal page.

The article explains the deficiency in Washington think tank Education Sector's new study on educational discrepancies between boys and girls. The study, "The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: Truth About Boys and Girls" blows off concerns about poor educational achievement by boys in general and claims that "the problem of male underachievement is largely confined to black, Hispanic and low-income white males." Even if it was somehow acceptable to blow off the underachievement of minority and low income males, the problem is clearly broader than that. Here is a particularly shocking statistic regarding the enormous discrepancy present even under the "best" of circumstances:

at the end of high school, 23% of the white sons of college educated parents scored "below basic." For girls from the same background, the figure is 7%. "This means," Ms. Kleinfeld writes, "that one in four boys who have college educated parents cannot read a newspaper with understanding."