I think you're partly right, Luciferase, but you forget that the systemic changes that favour girls are a response to enormous amounts of feminist hand-wringing in the 70s and 80s and that the people now in charge of curricula and setting assessment criteria are the very same people who were marching in the streets to protest "discrimination" against girls and would happily do so again tomorrow.

Their policies are deliberately intended to favour the learning and assessment styles that girls prefer, which also happen to fit well with the post-modernist fervour for deconstruction and circularity rather than with a positivist approach.

Science education, on the other hand MUST emphasise postitivism and psot-positivism, or it will fail at producing scientists. There is no useful way to deconstruct chemical bonding modes, or vector sums, or matrix operations. They are the product of learned observation and rigorously positivist application of reason and they are only amenable to being taught in a similar way. No amount of advocacy or self-referential circularity will provide an understanding, or even improve the understanding provided by a mathematical modelled approach.

The failure of our education system is that we have allowed feminist, post-modernist fools and charlatans to drive out those who are capable of applying such rigour from the teaching profession. It is no surprise that the charlatans have inherited the reins and the enterprise is failing boys. To those people that is precisely the outcome that was aimed for.

Killarney, not all stats are created equal. Your effort to muddy the waters is a case in point.

Yes, yes, we know you think those dastardly 'feminists' are at it again Antiseptic.
This dreadful hidden conspiracy against men and boys is apparently rampant in our education system...and every where else too, no doubt?

What I can't understand is how all these dreaded feminists managed to avoid having sons or grandsons?
If they couldn't practice sex selection, then I imagine many did have sons and that they loved them and wanted to see they had a good education and succeed in life?

Why then would there be this so-called sexism in education in Queensland then?
Couldn't it merely mean that girls are given the same opportunities and encouragement in education now that boys have always been given?
Maybe that's why the girl's results have improved?

If the boys do appear to be falling behind the girls academically, then why aren't their parents doing something about it? Surely we all love our boys as much as our girls, and want to see them succeed, feminist mothers or teachers or not?

Sadly Susie, there is no shortage of examples of ideology trumping other factors.

Besides, I'd bet London to a brick that few of those educational femocrats have ever had their own children at the mercy of the public education system.

The article was about Qld, but the same forces are at play all over the country. http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Censored-the-boys-own-manual/2005/05/02/1114886318639.html

It's fascinating that you seem to find it more palatable to blame everyone BUT the very people in charge of curricula and assessments though. Another example of ideology trumping rationality, perhaps.

Sorry, forgot to add this:

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/09/feminists-the-faceless-women-of-the-alp/

Nothing of substance, but lots of affirmations that "women are better than men, so there" and an obvious commitment to ideology over rationality.

One of the women spoken of in glowimg terms as a shining light of feminism is Sharan Burrow, now off spreading the faith at the ITUC.

" we have a Labor woman feminist and EMILY’s List Australia member doing this right now. Former ACTU President Sharan Burrow didn’t retire to the north coast, she is now the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation no less."

Care to guess what Ms Burrow's profession is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharan_Burrow

"She graduated in teaching with the University of NSW in 1976 and became a teacher in the early 1980s, which allowed her to become involved in the New South Wales Teachers Federation. She later became President of the Bathurst Trades and Labor Council. Before becoming President of the ACTU she was also President of the Australian Education Union (AEU) in 1992."

Care to guess how many children Ms Burrow has managed to produce?

No Antiseptic, I'm still not convinced .

Did Ms Burrow have brothers, nephews, and close friend's male children she may have been fond of, even if she didn't have kids herself?

Just because you might push for equal rights for women in education, and in society in general, doesn't make you a male hater.

I do not think that there has been any intentional anti-male agenda by QSA, education faculties or others.
However just because there have been no intention to bias against boys does not mean that there has been no actual discriminatory outcomes. The original article puts forward arguments that the present system favours girls. It does not impute intention. I think that is unfair to claim that there has been deliberate sexism, but it is much worse for people to deny that the outcomes are de facto sexist. Even worse would be any suggestion that the girls deserve to do better. That would be sexism at it's crudest.
A quotation from a paper 'Can we tell the difference and does it matter' by Gabrielle Matters et al which dealt with the emerging problem of weaker male performance back in 1999; merits careful thought.
'Some reasons suggested for their poor performance such as "boys are not so mature as girls" or "boys have to be taught to create a caring environment" (Biddulph 1994,1997) may be seen as suggesting the need for a redefinition of masculinity. Imagine the reaction 20 years ago if it had neen suggested that girls should be taught to create a studious environment, say, as an antidote to their percieved poor performance.'
Matters et al continue: 'There is no parallel, it would seem, between solutions to the problems now faced by boys and to those previously faced by girls.' The girls, in the main, were to have something external transform their lives: the boys, it is suggested, have to transform themselves'

I have seen that idea put elsewhere thus:'When the boys beat the girls we changed the system. Now the girls beat the boys we expect the boys to change themselves'.