And overwhelmingly, they are girls.

Across the Portland-Vancouver area, The Oregonian found, girls make up
71 percent of the students in the Class of 2004 who earned the grades
necessary to be honored as tops in their class.

Yes, they're a brainy bunch -- but not brainier than guys, say
top-ranked girls such as Corissa Lee at Gresham High, Laura Hartle at
Hillsboro's Century High and Rachael Averi at McMinnville High.

Instead, they say, many girls have a perfectionist urge that propels
them to finish their homework, study hard for every test and put a
flourish on routine assignments to get those As.

They are part of a nationwide crop of girls who have been targeted
since they were little with messages designed to correct the inequities
of their mothers' generation: You can succeed at math and science; every
career is open to you; aim for the academic stars.

And it's worked, experts say.

Hundreds of area girls in the Class of 2004 earned As in the hardest
courses their schools offer.

Take Nicole Johnson, one of 15 valedictorians at McMinnville High this
year. No boys made the cut.

Johnson played varsity softball and headed the school's hunger-relief
club while taking Advanced Placement calculus, AP history, physics and
fifth-year French -- and aced them all. She's headed to Oregon State
University to study civil engineering and figures being a woman in a
male-dominated field will be a plus.

"More power to girls, I guess," she says of McMinnville's all-female
valedictorian slate.

The problem, some educators say, is that boys haven't been similarly
targeted with messages to help them succeed in school.

There are no book clubs just for guys, no summer camps to lure boys
into the humanities, no mentor programs to show guys that finishing
homework on time is the manly thing to do, researchers say.

During the 1990s, girls maintained their edge over boys in reading and
writing and began to overtake them in biology, in chemistry, sometimes
even in calculus. For generations, researchers say, girls have posted
higher grade-point averages than boys. But only in the past decade have
they accomplished that while taking as many tough math and science
courses as boys.

Men still earn more degrees in science and snag nearly all the
tenure-track professorships in computer science and physics. They far
outnumber and outearn women in technical fields. Men dominate the upper
reaches of power, from the U.S. Senate to the Fortune 500.

It took less than 30 years for longstanding male dominance in college
to be reversed, lightning speed for social change of that magnitude,
says Cornelius Riordan, professor of sociology at Providence College,
who has tracked gender differences in education for years. In the early
1970s, 60 percent of college students were male, he says. Now, roughly
60 percent of college students are female, he says.

Oregon's most selective public university is no different. Selected
under gender-blind criteria, the freshman class at the University of
Oregon is 56 percent female.

Top seniors in area high schools point to what they see as a stumbling
block for male achievement: sports.

Male success on the playing field is glorified, they say. When
educators and parents tell boys that classroom success is just as
important, it rings hollow, top students say.

Michael Teschke, one of four male valedictorians among 17 at Portland's
Wilson High, has experienced that. A varsity golfer who earned straight
As, he's headed to Santa Clara University on an academic scholarship to
study business management, with an eye toward owning his own business.

"When I have good golf scores, 10 or 20 people come up to me to
congratulate me. Nobody pays that kind of attention to great grades. . .
. If my buddy gets a scholarship for football, The Oregonian writes
about it. But who knows if I got a scholarship for academics? Being a
scholar will take (a boy) farther, but he will be more popular being an
athlete," he says.

High school girls are driven to succeed in sports, too. But students
say excusing weak grades with sports accomplishments doesn't work for
girls.

"It's a double standard," says Laura Hartle, one of Century High's 12
valedictorians, 10 of whom are girls. "It's OK for a guy to be a dumb
jock, but when a girl gets bad grades, they call her a ditz."

Hartle competes in elite figure skating competitions but also drove
herself to earn straight As in precalculus, statistics, advanced
economics and AP English. She's headed to the University of Portland and
plans to become a doctor.

Amanda Cline played varsity basketball for McMinnville for three years.
But rather than glory in her victories on the way home from games, she'd
sit on the bus with a flashlight and a pile of books. A valedictorian,
she will study forensic science at Western Oregon University and wants
to join the FBI.

When this year's high school graduates were in kindergarten, Wellesley
College researcher Susan Bailey wrote a report that made national
headlines. Titled "How Schools Shortchange Girls," the study chronicled
how teachers paid more attention to boys, steered girls away from math
and science, and made schools more inviting to boys than girls.

Today, Hartle and her counterparts snicker at that idea. Bailey, who
now heads the Wellesley Centers for Women, acknowledges huge gains have
been made. She credits programs that resulted from attention to the
study. There's still a lot of work to do to create equity for women in
college, on faculties and in the workplace, she says.

In the meantime, she says, her research center and others are studying
ways schools shortchange boys -- a problem that could prove harder to
fix, she says.

"When we said girls don't get enough encouragement to do the same
things boys do, everybody understood that. It was seen as a move up for
girls. But when we say our boys should start doing the same things girls
do, it's seen by many as a step down. Skills that girls have ought to be
seen as good skills for boys, too."

Some valedictorians didn't submit photos and biographies. They include
Matthew Franklin-Lyons, Jared Sain and Dillon Save from Wilson High;
Kathleen Bunnage, Emma Colburn, Lauren Edgecombe and Lucas Marks from
Lincoln High.