Read to your son. It will give him the best start in life.

For an understanding of why the graduation rate for young males of nearly all genders are far lower than that of their female counterparts, consider the results on the reading section of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress and the test results from NAEP over the past two decades.

Thirty-six percent of fourth-grade boys read Below Basic proficiency compared to 30 percent of their female classmates, according to the test; the average scale score for boys of 218 was six points lower for that of girls in the same grade. But the biggest differences aren’t just at the low end of the scale. The percentages of male 4th-graders reading at Basic levels of proficiency and higher is lower than that of females.

As you can see, this is a long-term trend, with boys trailing girls in reading by fairly wide margins over the past couple of decades (and even longer, based on the study of the long-term NAEP data extending back into the 1970s). It is also present by income. As Richard Whitmire, the author of Why Boys Fail, notes, one in every four young boys with college-educated parents is reading below basic proficiency.

The consequences of low reading proficiency extends beyond test scores. Students with low reading levels tend to exhibit aggressive classroom behavior by third grade. Why? Very likely, it is because a child who can’t read slowly realizes that they are falling behind their peers. Add in the lack of intensive reading remediation by schools and the falling behind becomes a reality. Especially in subjects such as math, which involves word problems along with computations at the higher grades. A sixth-grader who fails math (and misses more than 10 days of classes) has just a one-in-sixth chance of graduating on time, notes Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Balfanz.

Schools need to improve their reading curricula and offer intensive reading remediation. At the same time, parents and the rest of us will have to take our own action: Read to our boys ourselves.

Listen to the Dropout Nation Podcast on boys and reading this Sunday.