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As principal Daniel Kramer pored over data tracking whether Roosevelt High School’s freshmen and sophomores were staying on track amid the pandemic, he noticed a troubling trend: While girls had held their own as coronavirus tested the school, boys were falling behind, widening a longstanding gender gap at the predominantly Latino school on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
This past school year, Chicago leaders pointed to grading and attendance numbers as evidence the pandemic had caused more academic damage for the district’s Black and Latino students. But data obtained by Chalkbeat shows even more dramatic disparities when gender is factored in.
Black and Latino boys, who have long faced the largest gaps in the district, saw steeper drops in attendance and a sharper increase in failing grades than girls. The boys also saw only a modest uptick in As, which at the high school level increased markedly for white and Asian students and for Latinas.
“This past year was really difficult for everyone,” said Jenny Nagaoka of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. “But it’s really striking to see the outcomes for young men of color in particular.”
Comparing pandemic student outcomes to previous years is tricky, given the profound shift in how students learned. Still, emerging national data appears to back up Chicago’s numbers about the uneven impact on boys and young men of color.
Experts are only beginning to dig into why male students might have been harder hit, but they are urging districts to invest in efforts tailored to the needs of boys as part of a national pandemic recovery push. Such efforts, if successful, could be significant: Nationally, young men of color have remained less likely than girls to graduate from high school — with a 15 percentage point gap between Black boys and girls in Chicago — and then go on to college and well-paying careers.
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