Boy culture not a fit with school systems

Article here. Excerpt:

'Boy culture is out of sync with school culture. There are several reasons for this, including zero tolerance policies that are too often taken to extremes, the lack of male teachers (the statistics are shocking, having dropped from 14 percent to 7 percent in the elementary classroom in the past decade), and the compression of the curriculum.

Even more, boy culture is not socially accepted more generally and, consequently, boys quickly come to feel that they aren’t good at school, where the friction tends to be the most obvious.

The results are startling — globally in the most recent set of tests, boys scored lower than girls in early literacy skills in every country tested. Several authors have done a wonderful job of explaining these problems and discussing them in clear terms, including Peg Tyre (“The Trouble with Boys”), Ralph Fletcher (“Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices”) and Richard Whitmire with his work on “Why Boys Fail”: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/whyboysfail.'