I had an excellent seminar in gender and education two years ago and have a handful of lit that might help anyone looking into this question. The most useful text in discussing schooling and gender (with a particular emphasis on the ramifications for masculinity), I think, is Mairtin Mac an Ghaill's book The Making of Men (http://www.amazon.com/Making-Men-Masculinities-Sexualities-Schooling/dp/...). Mac an Ghaill is a sociologist, I believe, and this book does a really nice job of tracing different trajectories of power (both institutional and productive) and how those power relationships function in everyday practice. For instance, he traces how teachers respond to children of different genders and ages.

There's a fairly significant strand in the gender and education literature trying to puzzle out "the trouble with boys," with a particular emphasis on elementary education (Valerie Hey, Debbie Epstein, Wayne Martino, and Marcus Weaver-Hightower were the other folks we read for that unit). The short answer is that no one is entirely certain what's changing, although it seems likely that it's cultural, rather than biological -- it's affecting almost all boys.

Another interesting piece on masculinity and boys is Carol Gilligan's The Birth of Pleasure (http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Pleasure-Carol-Gilligan/dp/0679759433/ref=sr...). Gilligan traces out the ways in which boys who are interested in and passionate about things like art and music before they go to school radically change their interests and commitments as they encounter dominant forms of masculinity and socialization in early elementary education. It's disheartening in a lot of ways, but also a fascinating phenomenon and Gilligan does a nice job of interrogating how this occurs.