NEWS REVIEW Sydney Morning Herald

The Federal Government has announced an inquiry into the education of boys. Bettina Arndt reports that, despite evidence that boys are falling behind girls, education authorities have failed to act.

Each year fresh school results highlight the sorry story of boys' underachievement. "There has been a marked deterioration in the school performance of boys in the last decade," concludes a recent analysis of school results by Jennifer Buckingham, researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies.

Buckingham's paper - The Puzzle of Boys' Educational Decline - shows that a decade ago boys dominated in both the top and bottom HSC achievement bands.

Now there are almost twice as many boys as girls at the bottom end and males at the top are thinning fast. In the 1998 NSW HSC the average mark for girls was higher than that for boys in 64 out of 70 subjects.

Literacy testing shows boys are not just doing badly in relation to girls, they are doing considerably worse than they were two decades ago. The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth show the proportion of 14-year-old boys who failed to achieve basic literacy in 1995 was 35 per cent, up from 30 per cent in 1975. (The equivalent figures for girls were 26 and 27 per cent.)

"It has long been obvious that boys are underachieving, with dramatic effects on their life chances," says Dr Ken Rowe, principal research fellow at the Australian Council of Educational Research.

Rowe last week attended an international conference held in Kuala Lumpur on child mental health which was abuzz with talk of the link between boys' academic underperformance and rising rates of delinquency, youth suicide, drug and mental health problems and other self-destructive behaviours.

"Here were professionals from countries all over the world, from Britain, even from Iran and Botswana, all concerned that when boys start failing at school, it leads them into trouble," says Rowe. He says education authorities in Australia are all too aware of the costs to our society of the difficulty schools face in engaging boys in the educational process.

Last week the Federal Government called for submissions to a new inquiry into the education of boys, to be chaired by Liberal backbencher Brendan Nelson. It was prompted by the Education Minister, Dr David Kemp, responding to widespread community concern about boys' underachievement.

So why then has it taken so long for politicians to take an interest?

In the United States, an answer was proposed in an intriguing cover story in last month's Atlantic Monthly. The author, Christina Hoff Sommers, attributes a widening gender gap in American education to inaction by an education establishment captured by sex-equity experts who have actively discouraged policies aimed at addressing boys' disadvantage.

In her article The War on Boys, Hoff Sommers accuses these experts of distorting research findings to promote the myth that American schools short-change girls.

She claims, on the contrary, it is boys who are doing badly, providing evidence that boys achieve lower grades than girls, are more likely to drop out or be held back, and are a full year and a half behind girls in their reading and writing skills.

Hoff Sommers calls for an end to the partisanship clouding the issue: "We should call for balance, objective information, fair treatment and a concerted national effort to get boys back on track. That means we can no longer allow the partisans of girls to write the rules."

So have the "partisans of girls" been writing the rules in Australia? Most of the academics who claim expertise on gender issues in education were supporters of the highly successful 1980s strategies promoting girls' education.

A Sydney University professor of education, Peter Cuttance, believes this meant there was resistant to policies addressing boys' disadvantage. "There was a strong alliance between these academics and people in the bureaucracy. For them it was always a girls' issue rather than a gender issue. That group of people weren't interested in boys' achievement. The politics of the issue was they were there to bat for girls, which they did very effectively."

Cuttance tangled with the gender equity push in the NSW Education Department in his previous job in the quality assurance section of the department.

His section was asked to produce a report examining girls' educational progress, in part to assess the effectiveness of the girls' strategies promoted by the department. His report was finished in early 1995 but only briefly saw the light of day.

Cuttance says the problem was the report showed girls were doing very nicely indeed - they were outperforming boys in almost every subject, particularly in English.

"The girls' report was withdrawn because some of the bureaucrats were playing games. They were worried about what this would lead to, given the public attention being paid to boys' underachievement," he said, explaining the fear was that support for girls' education would dry up if the girls' results were known.

What made these bureaucrats nervous was that a groundswell of concern from parents and teachers about boys' poor results had prompted an inquiry into boys' education, lead by then backbencher Stephen O'Doherty. This resulted in a boys' education action plan designed to tackle the problem, which after very positive response from schools, drew government support for an implementation strategy.

But then the Liberals lost power, O'Doherty became shadow education minister and Labor appointed as its consultant one of his most outspoken opponents, academic Victoria Foster, who had been prominent in her public criticism of what she saw as misplaced concern about boys.

When she gave evidence to the O'Doherty inquiry, said a boys education strategy would set girls education back 20 years.

The gender equity policies which followed seemed to address boys only in so far as their behaviour interfered with girls' education.

So sexual harassment, bullying and disruptive male behaviour received far more attention than critical issues such as boys' poor literacy outcomes.

A spokesperson for the Minister for Education, John Aquilina, refused to comment on past history, detailing recent initiatives such as new vocation courses, increased HSC subjects and middle year strategies likely to benefit boys.

Cuttance claims the influence of these gender equity experts has been felt in education departments throughout Australia. "It was basically there in all education systems, as a feature of the late 1980s. But clearly these groups don't have the clout they did 10 years ago," he says.

A recent example of the greater scrintiny now being paid to gender issues is a research report which has been languishing in the Federal Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) since late last year.

The report - on factors influencing educational performance of males and females and their destinations after leaving schools - was commissioned from a group of academics led by Jane Kenway, a professor of education at the University of SA.

Last year a workshop was held to discuss the report and participants were told to expect its release late last year. But apparently the final report received a poor reception within DEETYA, with key bureaucrats concerned about the way the report deals with the poor performance of boys.

Seven months later, after strong suggestions the report was to be buried, DEETYA sources reveal it has been extensively rewritten and will soon be released.

A spokesperson from Kemp's office says the delay is not unusual and any rewriting was simply "the normal process of dialogue between researchers and the department".

Jane Kenway, who is working on a country boys project, states her document has not been rewritten.

An early version of the document made available to the Herald claims: "Gender differences are not as great as the public concern over boys' literacy has implied," quoting data on basic skills tests and similar literacy measures.

A professor of education at Melbourne University, Peter Hill, is the former head of education in Victoria and an expert on literacy. He believes it is grossly misleading to draw conclusions about gaps in literacy simply on the basis of such basic tests.

"To talk about literacy in terms of basic skills is dangerous stuff," he says, criticising researchers for failing to include achievement measures in reaching this conclusion.

Had achievement tests such as the NSW HSC English results been used to make this assessment, a very different picture would have emerged, as here the gap between boys and girls is alarmingly large and extends right through to the highest achieving groups. According to 1998 figures, females outnumber males by more than two to one in the top quarter of the English results.

While Hill is full of praise of the job done in schools to address the issue of girls' underparticipation in maths and science subjects, he says there's no question as to where priorities should lie.

"Now we have a gender gap in the opposite direction that is bigger than anything we saw in the past. We must attend to the problem of low achievers, of whom the majority are boys."

He takes issue with the implication in the Kenway report that factors such as socio-economic background are just as important in determining school outcomes as gender.

"Socio-economic status is not an ongoing drag on kids - it simply determines their starting point," he says, referring to the most recent evidence that gender is a factor which continues to exert an impact on its own.

Equally there are flaws to Kenway's argument that there's no real need for concern about boys' school results because they still do fine when it comes to finding jobs.

Ken Rowe says that although some male early leavers gain the few apprenticeships still available, the evidence is that windows of opportunity for less literate boys are closing rapidly.

"Our society is demanding higher levels of sophisticated verbal reasoning and written communication skills," he says. "Our feminised curriculum and its assessment reflects this new demand which is a key reason why boys on average are falling further behind.

"But unless we find some way of helping boys develop functional literacy skills, they will find themselves on the scrapheap when it comes to future employment."

In Victoria, that message is being heard and the State Government has already committed $102 million to an early years' literacy scheme, which has been shown to produce astonishing results. With new middle year strategies being put in place, Victoria is leading the way in programs likely to benefit males.

It is doing so simply by targeting poorer students. Hill feels it's a better approach than fighting the gender war. "If you tackle the ideologues head on, you have an argument which is bloody and people run for cover. It's better to target low achievers and pick up disproportionately more boys in the process."

Meanwhile out in the community, there are many taking matters into their own hands and seeking out strategies to help boys. Throughout Australia there is a huge demand from teachers and schools for such programs. Ian Lillicoe is a West Australian headmaster who has spent much of the past year on a Churchill fellowship researching developments in boys' education, both here and in America and European countries.

He is being inundated with requests for information about the overseas research.

"I'm booked up right through this year, travelling to schools all over Australia who are desperate to find out what works for boys," he says. He has many suggestions, particularly from Britain, which is pouring resources into improving outcomes for boys.

Strategies include increasing structure in classrooms, greater emphasis on literacy and reading, reducing complex verbal instructions, more silent work, carefully structured homework tasks, consistent sanctions for uncompleted work, greater variety of testing instruments and high expectations.

Richard Fletcher is the manager of the Newcastle Men and Boys program, which has boys' education as a primary focus.

Fletcher struggles to meet the demand for information about promoting boys' school achievement - a conference on teaching boys being planned for Brisbane in August has already attracted participants from around the country.

"The calls are constant from teachers, schools and from parents - parents of boys who are withdrawing, losing interest in their studies, parents concerned about sons who are depressed, violent, faced with expulsion from schools," says Fletcher.

The new Federal inquiry into boys' education should find no shortage of people keen to encourage the Federal Government to follow Britain's example in making the issue a national priority.

The following article is a variant of the one above, published on the same day, but in another 'sister' newspaper. It was not available online and was scanned in thanks to GC.

The Age (Melbourne)

Their school performance is falling while their behavioural problems increase. Why haven't we been told? By Bettina Arndt.

Richard Fletcher gets calls like this all the time: a school rings about a violent 15-year old boy. It doesn't know what to do, and the boy's mother is frightened of her own son and in despair. Or the principal of a primary school who says: "I've just looked at the figures - 80 per cent of our learning difficulty students are boys and 100 per cent of our discipline problems. That's why I want to talk to you."

As manager of the Newcastle Men and Boys program, which focuses on boys' education, Fletcher is contacted by parents from all over the country. Many are worried about their sons. "The calls are from teachers, schools and from parents - parents of boys who are withdrawing, losing interest in their studies, parents concerned about sons who are depressed, violent, faced with expulsion from schools."

The concern about boys and schools stretches way beyond Australia. An international conference in Kuala Lumpa last week on child mental health was abuzz with talk of the link between boys' academic under-performance and rising rates of delinquency, youth suicide, drug and mental health problems and other self-destructive behaviours.

"Here we have professionals from all over the world, from Britain, even from Iran and Botswana, all concerned that when boys start failing at school, it leads them into trouble," says Dr Ken Rowe, principal research fellow at the Australian Council of Educational Research.

Last week the Federal Government called for submissions to a new inquiry, chaired by Liberal back-bencher Dr Brendan Nelson, into the education of boys. The inquiry will examine the social, cultural and educational factors affecting outcomes for boys, including their literacy needs and socialisation skills. The inquiry is also keen to learn of successful strategies for helping boys. The initiative was prompted by the Education Minister David Kemp, who responded to community concern about boys' under-achievement.

Each year, fresh school results highlight that sorry story. "There has been a marked deterioration in the school performance of boys in the last decade, "concludes a recent analysis of results by Jennifer Buckingham, researcher at Sydney's Centre for Independent Studies. And since 1995, girls have achieved an average 18 per cent higher grades than boys in the Victorian Certificate of Education. In English, the gap is more that 20 per cent.

Buckingham's paper, The Puzzle of Boys' Educational Decline, shows that a decade ago in new South Wales, boys dominated in both the top and bottom HSC achievement bands. Now there are almost twice as many boys as girls at the bottom end and the number of males at the top is thinning fast. In the 1998 New South Wales HSC, the average mark for girls was higher than that for boys in 64 out of 70 subjects. Literacy testing shows boys are not just doing badly in relation to girls, they also are doing considerably worse than they were two decades ago. Longitudinal studies of Australian youth show that the proportion of 14-year-old boys who failed to achieve basic literacy in 1995 was 35 per cent, up from 30 per cent in 1975. (The equivalent figures for girls were 26 and 27 per cent.) "It has long been obvious that boys are under-achieving, with dramatic effects on their life chances," says Ken Rowe.

So why the has it taken so long for politicians to take an interest? In the United States, an answer was proposed in last month's issue of the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the cover article, The War on Boys, author Christina Hoff Sommers attributes a widening gender gap in American education to inaction by the education establishment, which, she claims, has been captured by sex-equity experts who have discouraged policies aimed at addressing boys' disadvantage. Hoff Sommers accuses these experts of distorting research findings to promote the myth that American schools short-change girls. She says that, on the contrary, it is boys who are doing badly, and provides evidence that boys achieve lower grades than girls, are more likely to drop out or be held back and are a full year-and-a-half behind girls in their reading and writing skills.

Hoff Sommers calls for an end to the partisanship clouding the issue: "We should call for balance, objective information, fair treatment and a concerted national effort to get boys back on track. That means we can no longer allow the partisans of girls to write the rules."

Has that partisanship also occurred in Australia? As in the USA, most of the academics who claim expertise on gender issues in education were supporters of the highly successful '80s strategies promoting girls' education.

"There was a strong alliance between these academics and people in the bureaucracy, "says Sydney University Professor of Education Peter Cuttance. "For them, it was always a girls' issue, rather than a gender issue. That group of people weren't interested in boys' achievement. The politics of the issue was they were there to bat for girls, which they did very effectively."

Cuttance tangled with the gender-equity bureaucrats in the NSW education department in his previous job in the department's quality assurance section. His section was asked to produce a report examining girls' educational progress, in part to assess the effectiveness of the girls' strategies promoted by the department. His report was finished in early 1995, but only briefly saw the light of day.

Cuttance says the problem was the report showed girls were doing very nicely, outperforming boys in almost every subject particularly English. However, "the girls' report was withdrawn because a couple of the bureaucrats were playing games. They were worried what this would lead to, given the public attention being paid to boys' under- achievement." He believes the bureaucrats feared support for girls' education would dry up if the girls' results were known.

The influence of such gender-equity experts has been felt in education departments throughout Australia, Cuttance believes. "It was basically there in all education systems, as a feature of the late '80s." But now, Cuttance believes, these people lack the "clout" they had 10 years ago.

The best example of this is a research report that has languished in the Federal Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs since late last year. The report - on factors influencing educational performance of boys and girls and their destinations after leaving schools - was commissioned from a group of academics led by University of South Australia Professor of Education Jane Kenway.

Last year a workshop was held to discuss the report, and participants were told to expect its release late in the year. But, apparently, the final report received a poor reception Within the department, with key bureaucrats concerned that the report downplayed the poor performance of boys. Seven months later, after strong suggestions the report was to be buried, department sources say it has been extensively rewritten and will soon be released.

A spokesperson for Kemp's office says the delay is not unusual and any rewriting was simply "the normal process of dialogue between researchers and the department".

Jane Kenway says her document has not been rewritten. She also cites her current work on a project involving country boys as evidence that she has no gender bias.

An early version of the document does spell out the lower male retention rates and poorer achievement of less able boys, but it makes much of the few areas, such as the top levels of mathematics and English, where there are negligible differences between the sexes. The report's discussion of "which boys, which girls" suggests that factors such as socioeconomic and rural backgrounds may be more important than gender in determining educational outcomes. Finally, an analysis of tertiary education patterns and workplace outcomes suggests that girls are still disadvantaged in the workplace due to their over- representation in subjects with poor vocational linkages.

Perhaps the most striking conclusion reached in the report refers to literacy. "Gender differences are not as meat as the public concern over boys' literacy has implied," says the report, quoting data on the national basic skills tests and similar literacy measures.

But Melbourne University Professor of Education Peter Hill, an expert on literacy thinks it is misleading to draw conclusions about gaps on literacy simply on the basis of such basic tests, which measure only minimal skills. "To talk about literacy in terms of basic skills is dangerous stuffy" he says.

He criticises the report for failing to include English achievement measures, such as year 12 English results, in reaching this conclusion. Had it done so, a different picture would have emerged. Here, the gap between boys and girls is alarmingly large and extends right through to the highest achieving groups. According to 1998 figures, in New South Wales, females now outnumber males by more than two to one in the top quarter of the English results. (Equivalent figures for Victoria are difficult to obtain, although patterns appear similar.)

Hill praises efforts by schools to address the issue of girl's under-achievement in maths and science subjects, but says there is no question where priorities should lie. "Now we have a gender gap in the opposite direction that is bigger than anything in the past. We mus find the reasons for the gap and attend to the problem of low achievers, of whom the majority are boys."

He takes issue with the implication in the Kenway report that factors such as socioeconomic background are important as gender in determining school outcomes. "Socioeconomic status is not an ongoing drag on kids - it simply determines their starting point," he says. His recent research shows the continuing importance of gender.

Kenway argues there is no real need for concern about boys' school results because they still have no trouble finding jobs. But Rowe says that although some male early-leavers gain the few apprenticeships available, the evidence is that opportunities for less literate boys are diminishing rapidly.

"Our society is demanding higher levels of sophisticated verbal reasoning and written communication skills, which is now reflected in our curriculum its assessment," says Rowe. "This is a key reason why boys, on average, are falling further behind. But unless we find some way of helping boys develop functional literacy skills, they will find themselves on the scrapheap when at comes to future employment."

In Victoria, that message it being heard. The State government has already committed $102 million to the early-years literacy scheme, which has been shown to produce astonishing results. With new middle-year strategies now being put in place, the state is leading the way in programs likely to benefit young men.

It is doing so simply by targeting poorer students. Hill feels it's a better approach than fighting the gender war. "If you tackle the ideologues head on, you have an argument which is bloody and people run for cover. It's better to target low achievers and pick up disproportionately more boys in the process."

Meanwhile, out in the community, many people are taking matters into their own hands. Throughout Australia there is huge demand from schools for programs to help boys.

Ian Lillicoe is a West Australian school principal who has spent almost a year on a Churchill fellowship researching developments in boys' education here and in the US and Europe. He is being inundated with requests for information about the overseas research.

"I'm booked up right through this year travelling to schools all over Australia who are desperate to find out what works for boys," he says. He has many suggestions, particularly from Britain, which is pouring resources into improving outcomes for boys. Strategies include greater emphasis on literacy and reading, reducing complex verbal instructions, more silent work, carefully structured homework tasks, consistent sanctions for uncompleted work and a greater variety of testing instruments.

Brendan Nelson's new inquiry should find no shortage of people keen to encourage the Federal Government to follow Britain's example, and make boy's education a national priority.