Exciting to see the new programs just announced to boost boys’ performance in education. Boys can do anything!
I jest, of course. The thoroughly feminised education industry will die before they countenance anything that will benefit boys rather than girls. No matter how far behind girls boys are falling. Boys and men are their enemies, and if they can’t convince them to “transition” to be girls, they’re going to make sure that boys are kept dumb and under the thumb.
Tests of 5500 year 4 students from 281 schools across Australia, in the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), found that twice as many children floundered at the lowest level of reading, compared with the previous test in 2016.
Cue teachers’ unions demanding yet more money. Despite the fact that pouring more and more money into the system has directly correlated with worse and worse results.
The global report, released by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) on Tuesday, shows that Australia failed to lower its share of failing students, despite a 13 per cent increase in taxpayer funding per student, in real terms, over five years.
Federal, state and territory funding per student has risen in real terms from $15,960 in 2015-16 to $17,992 in 2020-21, Productivity Commission statistics show.
But the PIRLS report shows that 20 per cent of Australian students failed to meet the international benchmark for literacy – with 14 per cent ranked as “below low” and 6 per cent as “low”.
In 2016, 6 per cent of students were ranked “below low” and 13 per cent “low”. The proportion of top achievers slipped from 16 per cent to 14 per cent.
To give Labor’s Education Minister, Jason Clare, some credit, he’s onto some good ideas.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare, who has championed the use of phonics to teach reading, an overhaul of teacher training and small-group remedial tuition, said the PIRLS study showed the need to reform Australia’s education system.
Unfortunately, Labor being Labor, he has to make it all about class and race.
“The report confirms what I have been saying about the gap in reading skills between children from wealthy and poor families,’’ he said. “This is serious and shows why real reform is needed” […]
First Nations students scored 491 points, on average, in the PIRLS test, compared with 547 points for students from other backgrounds.
There’s nothing stopping poor or Aboriginal students from learning to read, though. Books are cheap, libraries are free, and it costs nothing to sit down and read with your kids before bedtime.
The real problem is cultural: some cultures just foster and value learning more than others.
And the most pervasive cultural divide is not race or class, but sex.
Girls outperformed boys, with 84 per cent of girls and 77 per cent of boys meeting the minimum standard. Girls were more likely to state that they “like reading’’ […]
Boys trailed well behind girls in reading, the study shows, in part because they do not enjoy reading.
The Australian
It’s not because boys don’t enjoy reading per se: it’s that they don’t enjoy reading the texts that feminist, leftist educators set them. To be fair, the Suggested Texts for the English K–10 Syllabus from the NSW Board of Studies, from 2017, does contain a range of texts, some of which most boys would enjoy very much.
The problem, though, is which ones are selected by schools and teachers. You can bet your life it’ll be tendentious, didactic stuff that preaches Insights into Aboriginal experiences in Australia or Cultural, social and gender perspectives and Aspects of environmental and social sustainability.
Kids can spot a mile off when they’re being lectured at, and nothing is guaranteed to turn them off faster. My boys love reading, but their shelves are still full of all-but unread copies of the stuff they were forced to read in school.
But bureaucrats in the feminised education industry will die before they allow special programs to help boys.