Australia: Results prove education system favours girls, yet we do nothing

Article here. Like the NYT, you'll probably get a login challenge, so to get around it, go to Google and enter "Results prove education system favours girls, yet we do nothing" and click the first link in the results list. Excerpt:

'Australian children have been subject to haphazard experiments in reading and writing for a very long time. And not just reading and writing, but in all aspects of pedagogy and curriculum. The ones who have really suffered from all this are the boys.

It was recognised in 2002 that there was a real crisis in the education of boys. Brendan Nelson had an inquiry which produced an important report on the subject. But despite research confirming that boys are doing worse overall than girls, and despite some attempts by individual schools to rectify the problem, the crisis continues.

On just about every marker, including behaviour, boys score worse than girls. Lately they have even started to score worse than girls in their traditional strengths, like mathematics.

Yet you wouldn't know it from the complacent attitude of most of the teaching profession. When I wrote about this in 2002 the then head of the Australian Education Union wrote a letter to The Australian complaining that my argument blaming this situation on contemporary education, particularly teaching methods, was wrong. Did I not know that there is a worldwide "crisis in masculinity", not education? Silly me. In other words the boys just don't know how to fit into this new female-dominated world order - and they just should.'