Anonymous wrote:Most likely scenario: The Great Schools data is flawed. Even MoCo doesn't have a good fix on the number of kids enrolled at each school: During the RM#5 boundary discussion, the numbers provided by the county differed significantly from the (correct) numbers that the principals had for enrollment at each of their schools.

OP here - aha, that would make sense. Thank you.

Even if the general population is close to equal it doesn't mean that that smaller subsets of the whole will naturally be 50/50. Sort of like when you flip a coin there is a 50/50 shot of getting heads or tails but each flip is independent so flipping 10 times doesn't mean that you should get 5 heads and 5 tails.

Our ES was pretty equal at the school level but the % varied significantly by grades. My kids lucked out. DD was in the grade/group that had significantly more girls than boys. DS was in the grade/group that had significantly more boys. DS's grade/group was particularly bad and his class was 70/30 boys to girls split.

If you ever look more carefully at the great schools data you'll see its sorely incomplete. I would not use it to make any conclusions, but fyi, about 51% of newborns are male, so its not odd for the male population to be slightly larger.

If the school skews asian, then its possible that it was due to sex-selection by the parents. Sad.

Most likely scenario: The Great Schools data is flawed. Even MoCo doesn't have a good fix on the number of kids enrolled at each school: During the RM#5 boundary discussion, the numbers provided by the county differed significantly from the (correct) numbers that the principals had for enrollment at each of their schools.

I would think in some HS the boys drop out earlier to work and help support the family.

Anonymous wrote:There are slightly more males in the population than females, OP. Google it.

The difference in the general pop is much smaller than seen here.

I don’t have answers but we noticed that boys far outnumbered girls at our preschool in potomac.

There are slightly more males in the population than females, OP. Google it.

All these theories are neat but it might just be random. Most families have both boys and girls so I doubt that all-boy families are frequently behaving differently than mixed or all girl families enough to be statistically significant.

My MS will have a slightly skewed male sixth grade class this year. Since we have a large immigrant population, I wonder if parents of boys are more likely to immigrate to escape war or gangs and to provide future economic opportunities. I read somewhere that men are more likely to be financially engaged fathers when they have sons, but I think that study was US born low income non-Hispanic whites and blacks rather than immigrants.

With the DCC, both Blake and Einstein have some sort of arts focus. By high school, that run heavily female. In racially and economically diverse schools, I also think one might run into issues in high school where boys are more likely to leave school than girls.

As to your question about "low performing" versus "high performing" schools, I genuinely don't think this is an issue of valuing the education of boys.

I do think that the slower emotional maturity of boys makes them less resilient, and less likely to succeed without additional supports. So, a girl can find her academic peer group in a diverse school and thrive, whereas I would suspect boys are more susceptible to peer pressure and their parents worry they need a more homogeneous environment.

Anonymous wrote:Read "Why beautiful people have more daughters ". Very interesting book that may have some applications here.

Huh! Well, you may have just persuaded me to try a free Audible trial.

Read "Why beautiful people have more daughters ". Very interesting book that may have some applications here.

I noticed an odd thing while looking up the new GreatSchool ratings in MoCo. Some schools in MoCo have a disproportionate number of boys enrolled. Often, they are better regarded schools, although there is no clear trend that I could determine. It jumped out at me during a casual glance at our elementary school, and became more pronounced as I looked up the schools along the 270 corridor.

There is no way to make a table in DCUM, so this is a little cumbersome, but each line will contain:

Name of school...% boys
Ashburton ES...52%
BannockburnES...53%
Barnesley ES... 58% (compare to Cold Spring, another magnet - much more pronounced)
Bethesda ES... 55%
Bell's Mill ES... 49%
Beverly Farms ES... 52%
Bradley Hills ES...52%.
Burning Tree ES...57% (wow - that is out of 497 students! Not a magnet! should be closer to 50/50)
Carderock Springs ES...51%
Cold Spring ES...53%
Diamond ES... 53%
Dufief ES... 50%
Fallsmead ES... 51%
Farmland ES...54%
Luxmanor ES...49%
Potomac ES...52%
Rachel Carson...49%
Richie Park ES...49%
Seven Locks ES...48%
Stone Mill ES...50%
Travilah ES...47%
WaysideES...53%
Wood Acres ES... 53%
Wyngate ES... 51%

High Schools:
Walt Whitman 50%
Walter Johnson 52%
Churchill 53% (did they get extra boys through COSA from Einstein?)
Wootton 50%
QO 50%
Northwest 50%
Einstein HS 46% (where did all the boys go?)
Seneca Valley HS 50%
Blair 51%, despite having the STEM magnet
Blake 43% (where are the boys?)
Northwood 50%

Do parents with talented boys in the family try harder to move to the top-rated schools? This does not seem to be related to sex-selection in pregnancy because several schools with the highest representation of cultures that traditionally value boys over girls have nearly 50/50 ratios (i.e. Stone Mill ES is 50:50 and is plurality Asian). Casual glance at Silver Spring elementary schools reveals that many have 48% boys or less; I ran out of steam compiling a list.

Any ideas? Does anyone who knows stats better than I do want to run a regression model with number of students included to see if this could be happening by chance? How come higher performing schools appear to have more boys, whereas lower performing schools seem to have more girls? We know from national trends that generally girls do better on standardized tests, so this is not a case of girls underachieving. I suspect there is selective movement of boys to higher rated schools because families prioritize their educations. Any other ideas?