More technical high schools: a gender-sensitive policy approach

Vocationally-oriented learning seems to benefit boys and men more than girls and women—on average, of course. For example:

• A 2023 MDRC evaluation of the seven founding P-TECH programs in New York City, for example, which are vocationally-oriented 9–14 initiatives based on a three-way partnership between high schools, employers, and community colleges. Male students were 9.9 percentage points more likely to obtain a postsecondary degree within 7 years of entering high school. There were no statistically significant gains for female students (Rosen et al., 2023).
• An earlier evaluation, also by MDRC, of Career Academies, small, vocationally oriented high schools, which generated a 17% earnings boost, equivalent to an extra $30,000, over the 8 years of the follow-up study, for male students. There were no statistically significant gains for female students (Kemple & Willner, 2008).
• A study of Connecticut’s statewide system of 17 technical (CTE) high schools in Connecticut, which collectively educate around 11,000 students, or 7% of those in the school system, showed a 10 percentage-point higher graduation rate for male students than for those in traditional schools. Their wages were 33% to 35% higher by the age of 23 and there were no apparent gains for female students (Brunner et al., 2021).

But there are not many such schools. Of the 98% of school districts that offer CTE programs, only 12% have a full-time, CTE-focused high school. Adding more technical high schools would almost certainly improve educational outcomes for boys. I estimate that adding 1,000 new CTE secondary schools could be achieved for around $4 billion a year.

Given the results of the evaluation studies, only showing benefits for boys overall, should these be single-sex schools? No. Even if, in general, girls derive less benefit from attending these schools, some girls will, and they should not be denied access to this opportunity, just as young men in Kalamazoo should not be denied the Promise Program.

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, requiring the Virginia Military Institute to become coed, differences on average between male and female learners do not as a rule justify separation. VMI might be a better learning environment for the average boy compared to the average girl, Justice Ginsberg conceded, but this did not provide a justification for excluding girls “whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description” (United States v. Virginia, 1996). (Today, around 13% of students at VMI are women.)

But the expansion of technical high school I propose does have the explicit intention of helping boys and young men. Success would be judged primarily against that metric. If the schools skew heavily male, that should be considered good news, not bad news. At the margin, it would make sense to market these schools primarily to male students. It would, in other words, be a gender-sensitive policy.

Redshirting boys: A gender-based policy

Boys develop, on average, a little later than girls. The gap is mostly in the development of non-cognitive skills, which are important for school success especially in adolescence. This fact should influence education policy.

Specifically, by default, boys should start school later than girls, spending extra time in pre-K. This is already fairly common practice in more educated and affluent families. Among summer-born boys with BA-educated parents, the redshirting rate was 20%, according to an analysis of 2010/2011 data by Diane Schanzenbach. (Schanzenbach & Larson, 2017). In one DC private K–12 school (who shared their data with me on condition of anonymity), 30% of senior boys were older than the cut off dates for school entry for their cohort, compared to 7% of girls.

There’s some evidence that being a year older helps boys, especially those from lower-income backgrounds:

• In a predominantly low-income and racially diverse sample, Cascio and Schanzenbach (2016) found that being a year older had a positive impact on test scores in eighth grade, reduced the risks of repeating a grade before high school, and improved the chances of taking the SAT or ACT at the end of high school. But the benefits for boys were at least twice as big as for girls on all the outcome measures through 8th grade, and by high school only boys were seeing any gains.
• A study by Cook and Kang (2018), using data from North Carolina, found that redshirted children are doing significantly better in both reading and math by the end of third grade, especially boys. Looking at gender gaps within racial groups, they found that the 10% redshirting rate among White boys reduced the overall gender gap among White students in third grade reading by 11%.
• A Norwegian study (Flatø et al., 2023) exploits a sharp change in policy away from redshirting, introduced at different times in different regions, and finds that the option of a later start increased adult earnings by 4% for redshirted boys from the younger end of the cohort. The positive effects of a later school start were greatest for boys from lower-income families, who were also most likely to be redshirted under the previous policy regime.

The idea here is not to force children of either sex to start at a certain age, but to change the “default setting” so that boys start school somewhat later. I have previously argued that the default should be set a year older for boys, but the evidence suggests much bigger benefits for the younger boys. So I would now argue for setting the default entry birth date for boys at 6 months later than for girls. Parents would be at liberty to override the default, to either hold back their daughter or accelerate their son, just as they are in the current system (except in Chicago and New York where redshirting is prohibited).

An obvious objection to such a blunt policy intervention is that all such systems are blunt tools. There is a good deal of overlap in the development of boys and girls, at any chosen age, with the degree of overlap depending on what yardsticks are selected. But the same is true of children in one grade and those in the grade above or below, separated only by the blunt tool of an age cut-off for school entry.

A vital component of this proposal is that the students who do start school later get a longer dose of pre-K. And most of these will be boys: that’s the point of the policy. Whether these extra resources are justified will depend on how the long-run educational and economic outcomes of boys change as a result, which is an empirical question, and possibly a legal one too. So careful evaluation of pilot studies is essential.