[English] Single sex schools and classrooms?

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Hi all,

This feature article in the New York Times today reports that, in America,
"single-sex public schools, and classrooms, are opening at an accelerating 
pace."  The numbers are indeed quite low, but it may perhaps seem a trend.

--
Teaching Boys and Girls Separately 

By ELIZABETH WEIL <www.nytimes.com> Published: March 2, 2008

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster
and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public
school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster
than the class boa constrictor. 

Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the
corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on
their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think
boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’
classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and
the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the
walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the
temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard
Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit
his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex
public education. 

Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and
girls a few years ago, after the school’s principal, Lee Mansell, read a
book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” After
that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights
would help improve the test scores of Foley’s lowest-achieving cohort,
minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in “Why Gender Matters:
What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex
Differences.” Both books feature conversion stories of children,
particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings an
then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Sax’s book and
lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of
obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in
a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and
cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few
other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently,
including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls’
drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10
or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown;
boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool
hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which
Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and
make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly. Under Sax’s leadership,
teachers learn to say things like, “Damien, take your green crayon and
draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines
coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it’s
going faster.” “Now Damien feels encouraged,” Sax explained to me when I
first met him last spring in San Francisco. “To say: ‘Why don’t you use
more colors? Why don’t you put someone in the vehicle?’ is as
discouraging as if you say to Emily, ‘Well, this is nice, but why don’t
you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.’ ”

During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to
read “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” and, in the spring of 2004, to
attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boys’ and
girls’ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all
Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of
single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley
Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after
summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girls’ and a
boys’ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each
grade remained coed. 

Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private
and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American
public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more
choice in their children’s public education and the separate education
crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girls’
crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University
Women published “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which
described how girls’ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are
subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what
Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a “man
bites dog” sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys.
Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college
graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by
females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by
soft-spoken women who bore” boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in
Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States
Department of Education, claiming that his high school — where there are
twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys — discriminated
against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment
found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as
part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs
aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the
Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for
districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools. 

In part because of these regulations and in part because of a mix of
cultural and technological forces — ranging from the growth of brain-scan
research to the increased academic pressures on kindergarteners and a
chronic achievement gap between richer and poorer students and between
white and minority students — new single-sex public schools and classrooms
are opening at an accelerating pace. 

In 1995, there were two single-sex public schools operating in this
country. Currently, there are 49, and 65 percent of those have opened in
the last three years. Nobody is keeping exact count of the number of
schools offering single-sex classrooms, but Sax estimates that in the fall
of 2002, only about a dozen public schools in the United States offered
any kind of single-sex educational options (excluding schools which
offered single-sex classrooms only in health or physical education).

By this past fall, Sax says, that number had soared to more than 360, with
boys- and girls-only classrooms now established in Cleveland; Detroit;
Albany; Gary, Ind.; Philadelphia; Dallas; and Nashville, among other
places. A disproportionate number of the schools are in the South (where
attitudes toward gender roles tend to be more conservative) or serve
disadvantaged kids. Sax claims that “many more are in the pipeline for
2008-2009.” 
--

Cheers people
Stephen Loosley
English List Moderator