Evidence-based decision making has never been especially popular

Naomi Schaefer Riley has an op-ed, Michelle Obama’s misguided girl power agenda which raises a question I hadn't really considered before. Or at least hadn't focused on. Riley's argument in the article is the Michelle Obama is conflating problems of the developing world with those of the US and that that is a category error.

As is the tendency with people who speak on behalf of Girl Power, Mrs. Obama seems to be confusing the problems of girls like, say Malala, with those in America’s inner cities.

In the developing world it is true that girls are prevented from getting an education. They are too poor, their families need them to carry water to and from their homes, they have no sanitary facilities at school or there are Islamist lunatics trying to kill them or kidnap them when they go to school.

But the girls in America are in an entirely different situation.

The problems in the developing world do include that too few girls and women are educated to their full potential. But that is not the problem in the US. In fact we have the reverse problem. Too few boys and men are being educated to their full potential.

From National high school graduation rates at historic high, but disparities still exist by Lindsey Layton.

Nationally, girls had a higher graduation rate, at 84 percent, while boys had a rate of 77 percent.

So girls graduate high school at a rate that is ten percent higher than boys. That means that girls are 52% of all high school graduates. That is pretty consequential given the yawning gap between incomes of high school graduates versus non-graduates.

But it gets worse. Back to Riley.

In 2013, according to the Current Population Survey, 25- to 34-year-old women were 21 percent more likely to have a college degree than men and 48 percent more likely to have finished graduate school.

Put differently, in 2015, women earned 63% of all associate graduates degrees, 60% of all four-year degrees and 61% of all graduate degrees (all from Projections of Education Statistics to 2015 from the National Center for Educations Statistics).

If we go strictly by the numbers, there is no crisis in American education for girls. They graduate at a higher rate than boys at every stage of the educational chain, and at increasingly disproportionate rates, the higher up the chain you go. If we should be focusing on anybody, the data tells us we should be focusing on boys. But evidence-based decision making has never been especially popular.