It's not a gender gap. It's a family income gap, report says.

A new study to be released today (May 20, 2008) on gender equity in education concludes that a "boys crisis" in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade.

The report by the nonprofit American Association of University Women, which promotes education and equity for women, reviewed nearly 40 years of data on achievement from fourth grade to college and for the first time analyzed gender differences within economic and ethnic categories.

The most important conclusion of Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education is that academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender, its authors said. Read more in The Washington Post online.