State of the Georgia Girl Report

K-12 Proficiency: English Language Arts Girls in Georgia outperform boys in English Language Arts proficiency across every grade level. The gap is widest in the middle grades and narrows somewhat by high school – as girls complete American Literature in high school, they maintained a 7% achievement gap above boys, with 44% achieving proficiency compared to 37% of boys. Notably, however, fewer than half of girls across all grades score Proficient or Distinguished at any tested grade, signaling that even the higher performing group of female students is not, on average, reading and writing at grade level. Girls outperform boys in the English Language Arts assessment at every grade level, by an average of 6 percentage points. Georgia Department of Education, Georgia Milestones End-of-Grade Assessments, English Language Arts, 2024-2025

ELA Proficiency – On Grade Level, 2024–2025

47%

46%

45%

45%

43%

39%

39%

36%

36%

36%

36%

32%

3rd

4th

5th

6th

7th

8th

Female

Male

Girls in the United States have consistently surpassed boys in English Language Arts assessments. Researchers offer varying explanations – ranging from cognitive development to social pressure – including evidence that girls are more easily able to utilize both hemispheres of the brain in writing and reading-comprehension tasks (Reilly, 2018). The Georgia data follow that national pattern; what is distinctive in Georgia is the size of the gap itself, which remains stable from 3rd through 12th grade.

Less than half of girls in Georgia achieve proficiency in English Language Arts.

POWERED BY THE GIRL SCOUT COUNCILS SERVING THE STATE OF GEORGIA 59