It’s difficult to find anyone today arguing in the public square that US public schools are working well. While there is vociferous conflict over the source of and remedies for the “crisis” in public education, it seems that everyone agrees that there is a big problem. One particularly loud debate first emerged in the mid-90’s with the release of conflicting reports about the relative educational status and success of American boys and girls.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) kicked things off with a 1992 study that claimed that girls were shortchanged in math and science class. The organization posited that the gender gap in technical and scientific careers evident today was based on this bias in schools and urgent action was needed to correct the problem. Soon thereafter a number of studies came out, for instance this one from the Women’s Freedom Network, claiming that girls were outperforming boys at all levels of education—and that the real problem was a “boys crisis.“ The media has since been filled with point and counterpoint from pundits arguing about which sex had a bigger educational crisis and therefore deserved more attention and funding.

This past week the AAUW released a new study in support of it’s girls crisis thesis. The new study acknowledges the main points of the boys crisis camp—girls, on average, have higher grade point averages, fewer disciplinary problems, are more likely to graduate high school, receive a bachelor’s degree and are closing the gap on boys in math and science. However, the study avers that there is no boys crisis because boys’ standardized test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment rates are also rising (just not as fast as girls’ are). The AAUW finds a crisis none-the-less: “the (education) crisis is not specific to boys; rather, it is a crisis for African American, Hispanic, and low-income children. Students coming from families with incomes of less than $37,000 struggle in math and reading. Additionally, African-American and Hispanic students score significantly lower on standardized test scores than white and Asian students.“ This conclusion should come as a surprise to no one.

Meanwhile a group of European academics has used the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment data to bolster the AAUW’s argument that gender bias is responsible for girls’ lower average math scores. In their study, the group shows a strong correlation between the relative size of the math score gender gap and various measures of social equality between the sexes—in other words, in countries where women are viewed as men’s equals the gap in math scores is much lower than in countries where women’s social, economic and political opportunities are limited. There was something in the data to support the boys crisis camp as well though: while math scores equalized with social equality, girls’ advantage in reading grew.

A number of media outlets covered the AAUW’s newest volley in the educational crisis wars, but little was generally made of the AAUW’s finding that average standardized test scores, graduation rates, college enrollments and college graduations were all rising. That finding flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that we are facing an education crisis in the United States. Of course, many would argue that falling standards rather than improvements in performance are responsible for what appears to be a positive trend. That point of view, however, suggests that all of the assessments being used are unreliable—which would mean that none of the gender crisis data can be trusted either.

Ultimately what all of this points to is how little we actually know about the scope and scale of challenges in our educational system, much less the best way to fix them. And it says that rather than spending millions of dollars fighting over education ideology (keep in mind that all of the gender gap studies and reports on both sides are funded by philanthropy) we would all be better served by taking a humble approach that focuses on experimenting and testing various approaches to improving learning and performance by all students.