More public schools splitting up boys, girls

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/More-public-schools-splitting-up-boys-girls-3691592.php#page-1

<snip>

Single-sex classes began proliferating after the U.S. Education Department relaxed restrictions in 2006. With research showing boys, particularly minority boys, are graduating at lower rates than girls and faring worse on tests, plenty of schools were paying attention.

In 2002, only about a dozen schools were separating the sexes, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, an advocacy group. Now, an estimated 500 public schools across the country offer some all-boy and all-girl classrooms.

Proponents argue the separation allows for a tailored instruction and cuts down on gender-driven distractions among boys and girls, such as flirting. But critics decry the movement as promoting harmful gender stereotypes and depriving kids of equal educational opportunities. The ACLU claims many schools offer the classes in a way that conflicts with the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, a federal law banning sex discrimination in education. Researchers also have weighed in.

Diane F. Halpern, a former president of the American Psychological Association, co-authored a review of studies last fall in the journal Science that found research doesn't support the benefits of single-sex education. Additionally, there are lots of problems whenever you segregate people into groups, Halpern said.

"Stereotyping increases so we really do have lots of data that says it's just not supported," she said.

<snip>

[handmade34]

1. my radical ideas

about education (after raising 5 kids, volunteering for years and teaching in both private and public schools) inform me that segregating into most any kind of group is detrimental... most destructive is age...

[Jackpine Radical]

27. "Most destructive is age (discrimination): Yes!

As a matter of fact, I went to a 1-room country grade school for 7 years. The older kids were assigned nurturing and tutoring responsibilities, and served as role models, for the younger kids. It was a far more natural way to conduct the business of preparing us for life. It was like life in an extended family. Age-segregated kids don't get much of that anymore, either the giving or the getting of nurturance or the exposure to more mature role models.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. The results of single sex classrooms have been positive.

Researchers at Stetson University in Florida completed a three-year pilot project comparing single-sex classrooms with coed classrooms at Woodward Avenue Elementary School, a nearby neighborhood public school. For example, students in the 4th grade at Woodward were assigned either to single-sex or coed classrooms. All relevant parameters were matched: the class sizes were all the same, the demographics were the same, all teachers had the same training in what works and what doesn't work, etc. On the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test), here were the results:
Percentage of students scoring proficient on the FCAT

boys in coed classes: 37% scored proficient
girls in coed classes: 59% scored proficient
girls in single-sex classes: 75% scored proficient
boys in single-sex classes: 86% scored proficient.
Remember, these students were all learning the same curriculum in the same school. And, this school "mainstreams" students who are learning-disabled, or who have ADHD etc. Many of those boys who scored proficient in the all-boys classes had previously been labeled "ADHD" or "ESE" in coed classes.

http://www.singlesexschools.org/evidence.html

[Starry Messenger]

3. Also negative-

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/education/23single.html

Single-Sex Education Is Assailed in Report
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: September 22, 2011

The report, “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling,” to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education.

It asserts that “sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence.”

<snip>

Dr. Sax, executive director of the National Association of Single Sex Public Education, was singled out for criticism in the Science article, for his teachings that boys respond better to energetic, confrontational classrooms while girls need a gentler touch.

“A loud, cold classroom where you toss balls around, like Dr. Sax thinks boys should have, might be great for some boys, and for some girls, but for some boys, it would be living hell,” Dr. Halpern said in an interview. She said that while girls are better readers and get better grades, and boys are more likely to have reading disabilities, that does not mean that educators should use the group average to design different classrooms. “It’s simply not true that boys and girls learn differently,” she said. “Advocates for single-sex education don’t like the parallel with racial segregation, but the parallels are there. We used to believe that the races learned differently, too.”

<snip>

While some studies have found better outcomes from single-sex schools, the article said, the purported advantages disappear when outcomes are corrected for pre-existing differences. For example, Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, a school whose high college admissions rates were praised this year by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, was subsequently criticized by the scholar Diane Ravitch as having test results that were actually lower than average on basic skills.

[Starry Messenger]

4. The FCAT itself is notoriously unreliable-

http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/article1230178.ece

After conceding that poor communication with teachers could have contributed to an unprecedented drop in writing scores statewide, the state Board of Education voted Tuesday to lower the passing mark for the test.

But Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson defended the decision against critics who said it was a quick fix for bad test results. He said changing from a 4 to a 3 (out of 6) on the test simply "corrected the process."

"The results still stand," he said.

Just 27 percent of fourth-graders statewide earned a 4 or better on the writing FCAT, a steep decline from last year's 81 percent. Eighth- and 10th-graders had similar drops.

<snip>

Holly Wallace, a Polk County fourth-grade writing teacher, was one of several teachers who told the state board that they did not feel prepared to teach their students with the new FCAT writing scoring standards.

"We literally did not receive much information at all," she said.

Difficult to make an assessment on the basis of such a subjective factor as a high-stakes test where the parameters can change with literally no notice.

[Starry Messenger]

5. More on the studies of Leonard Sax, the web owner of Single Sex Schools-

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6050/1706.summary

No Evidence from Brain Research

"Brain researchers have proven that boys learn differently than girls," said a teacher in a SS public-school classroom (14). This statement reflects misinformation about neurobehavioral science. Neuroscientists have found few sex differences in children's brains beyond the larger volume of boys' brains and the earlier completion of girls' brain growth, neither of which is known to relate to learning (75). In adults, certain sex differences have been reported (e.g., in brain activation patterns, auditory thresholds, memory performance) (16-18), but none are substantial enough to justify different educational methods. Moreover, sex differences in adult brains cannot be assumed to be mirrored in children. Sex differences in adults' neural structure or function may result from a lifetime of sex-differentiated experiences rather than "hardwiring" (7 7).

But this is not what educators, parents, and school boards hear about brain-related sex differences. In an article in a teachers' journal, for example, Leonard Sax (Executive Director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education) states that boys and girls need different classrooms because of differences in autonomic nervous system function (19). Extrapolating from research on adults' cardiovascular regulation, he concludes that boys respond to classroom stress by activating the sympathetic nervous system, whereas girls respond by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

Sax then infers that boys are "thrilled" and "aroused" by loud, energetic teachers, whereas girls are intimidated, even to the point of nausea. He consequently counsels that boys should be taught through loud confrontation ("What's your answer, Mr. Jackson? Give it to me!&quot , whereas, girls should be approached with a gentler touch ("Lisa, sweetie, it's time to open your book.&quot (19). In his books, Web site, and teacher-training programs, Sax rationalizes different educational experiences for boys and girls by using obscure and isolated findings about brain maturation, hearing, vision, and temperature sensitivity (20). Although scientists have debunked many such claims as "pseudoscience" (17,21), this message has yet to reach many educators who are implementing such recommendations in SS classes within coeducational schools.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/10/the_single_sex_school_myth_an_overwhelming_body_of_research_show.single.html

The Feminist Case Against Single-Sex Schools
No, the studies don’t show that girls’ schools are better for girls. But they’re sure great at perpetuating sexist attitudes.

Together with six co-authors, we recently published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Science, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education,” in which we align ourselves with the latter group of feminists. It’s a provocative title, but our paper supported it with three lines of evidence. Now, our challenge is to persuade the first group of feminists that the very existence of segregated academies reinforces cultural attitudes about gender differences and abilities. But before we get to that part of the case, let’s look at the three lines of research we reviewed for Science.

First, decades of research on academic outcomes from around the world has failed to demonstrate an advantage to single-sex schooling, in spite of popular belief to the contrary. Of course, there are some terrific single-sex schools out there. However, research finds that their success is not explained by gender composition, but by the characteristics of the entering students (such as economic background), by selection effects (for example, low performing students are not admitted, or are asked to leave), and by the substantial extra resources and mentoring these programs provide. When researchers control for these factors, the advantages of single-sex schooling disappear. (And in the case of boys, the research looks even more favorable for coeducation—interesting, given how much the current surge of interest in single-sex programs is directed at them.)

The second line of evidence stems from neuroscience. It has become common lore among parents and teachers that gender differences in brain function mean “boys and girls learn differently.” However, the bulk of scientific evidence demonstrates nothing of the sort. Thousands of studies comparing brain and behavioral function between adult men and women have found small to insignificant differences, and even smaller differences between boys and girls.

This is important, because much of the new single-gender K-12 pedagogy is based precisely on the idea that girls and boys need different—and often highly gender-stereotypic—learning environments to thrive. News reports describe girls’ classrooms in which the lights are low, the temperature is elevated, students are seated in small, collaborative clusters, and teachers are trained to speak gently and quietly as they conduct lessons involving fashion and wedding planning. Boys’ rooms, in some communities, are brightly lit, with the temperature turned down, the desks removed, and the boys engaged by loud, assertive teachers who keep them running relays and tossing balls during math lessons. Even preschools have followed the trend. And in spite of many feminists’ belief that single-sex instruction counters it, such sexism still lurks at all-girls’ schools, albeit in a more subtle and therefore pernicious form, according to University of Michigan professor of education Valerie Lee and her colleagues. (Such sexism was also apparent in California in the late-1990s, when a state-sponsored experimental single-sex program failed: Five of its six academies closed within three years, with researchers finding that teachers in single-sex classrooms tended to reinforce, rather than break down, traditional gender stereotypes.)

[obamanut2012]

6. Thank you for posting this

I just read the thread, and know Sax;s "reputation," so you saved me the time from having to post all this info.

Good OP!

[obamanut2012]

7. In addition, Sax's website even twists court decisions

For his own agenda, such as the VMI court decision that forced VMI to gender-desegregate and accept female students.

Do blacks brains learn differently than whites? No! Thinking that is really icky and smacks of Bell Curve and Eugenics. Guess what? male and female brains don't learn differently, either.

Also, the FACT girls=better readers, boys=better at math and science? It's bull. In many countries, it's the opposite, including in many Asian countries. So, why is that?

EDUCATIONAL SEGREGATION WAS A BAD THING! It still is. Instead of creating differences that don't exist, why don't we insist on more money for education, so we can have smaller class sizes, and a better economy so parents have more time to be engaged, which is what's needed.

[lumberjack_jeff]

13. Justice Ginsburg

Ginsburg’s opinion states that in some contexts, single-sex schools might be legal, as long as those schools worked to “dissipate, rather than perpetuate, traditional gender classifications.” “The two sexes are not fungible,” Ginsburg wrote, quoting a 1946 decision; the physical differences between the sexes are “enduring” and “cause for celebration.” Yet, Ginsburg warned, those differences cannot be used to place “artificial constraints on individuals’ opportunity.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02sex3-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

[obamanut2012]

17. So you agree Sax's website twists the VMI case's decsiion?

Good.

As I said downthread, I am respectfully telling you to knock it off. Now. Thank you.

[lumberjack_jeff]

18. I'm working on the assumption that you asked a question

... and that your respectful insistence that I not answer it is rhetorical.

No. I don't agree that he's twisting the decision. The context of single sex classrooms meets Justice Ginsburg's test for "dissipating traditional gender classifications".

If we get girls to take (and enjoy) physics, it's a good thing - even if it uses techniques based on their familiar experiences.

In fact, I argue that school environments which effectively discourage girls from science, physics and math create "artificial constraints on individuals’ opportunity."

[lumberjack_jeff]

8. The feminist case for SS classrooms is that is has been shown to increase girls test scores 30%.

Education deals with the aggregate. Approaches which improve outcomes generally are worth being tried.

Also, single sex schools are not what is being discussed.

Equally damaging gender stereotypes are reinforced by modern educational methods, and is in large part responsible for poor outcomes.

http://www.singlesexschools.org/adgirls.html

The advantages of single-sex education for girls fall into three categories:
(i) expanded educational opportunity, (ii) custom-tailored learning and instruction and (iii) greater autonomy, especially in heterosexual relationships. Let's look at each of these categories. ...

...Bettina Hannover and Ursula Kessels RANDOMLY assigned 401 8th-grade students either to single-gender classrooms or to coed classrooms to study physics, for one year. At the end of the year, they found that girls who had been randomly assigned to the all-girls classroom were more engaged in physics, and less likely to regard physics as a "boys' subject," compared to girls who had been randomly assigned to the coed classroom...

...First a few disclaimers. When you participate in one of our NASSPE training events or conferences, you'll hear our trainers emphasize that any statement which begins with the presenter saying "GIRLS LEARN THIS WAY AND BOYS LEARN THAT WAY" is almost sure to be false! There's lots of variation WITHIN sexes. That's one reason why single-sex education creates such amazing opportunities -- precisely BECAUSE of the variation within sexes. In the coed classroom, the process of 'gender intensification' (see above) kicks in so strongly, that the girls can easily get the idea that "any girl who likes computers is a weirdo or a geek." In the all-girls classroom, the girl who likes computers will find much greater freedom to express herself and pursue her interests.

[Starry Messenger]

9. "Teaching Boys and Girls Separately"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02sex3-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

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 and 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.

<snip>

Among advocates of single-sex public education, there are two camps: those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs. Leonard Sax represents the essential-difference view, arguing that boys and girls should be educated separately for reasons of biology: for example, Sax asserts that boys don’t hear as well as girls, which means that an instructor needs to speak louder in order for the boys in the room to hear her; and that boys’ visual systems are better at seeing action, while girls are better at seeing the nuance of color and texture. The social view is represented by teachers like Emily Wylie, who works at the Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem (T.Y.W.L.S.), an all-girls school for Grades 7-12. Wylie described her job to me by saying, “It’s my subversive mission to create all these strong girls who will then go out into the world and be astonished when people try to oppress them.” Sax calls schools like T.Y.W.L.S. “anachronisms” — because, he says, they’re stuck in 1970s-era feminist ideology and they don’t base their pedagogy on the latest research. Few on the other side want to disparage Sax publicly, though T.Y.W.L.S.’s founder, Ann Tisch, did tell me pointedly, “Nobody is planning the days of our girls around a photograph of a brain.”

If parents wish to experiment with gender pseudoscience, they are more than welcome to do so. Many parochial schools are segregated by gender.

The greatest effect on education is known to be socioeconomic status of the family.

http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-education.aspx

SES and Family Resources

Families from low-SES communities are less likely to have the financial resources or time availability to provide children with academic support.

Children’s initial reading competence is correlated with the home literacy environment, number of books owned, and parent distress (Aikens & Barbarin, 2008). However, parents from low-SES communities may be unable to afford resources such as books, computers, or tutors to create this positive literacy environment (Orr, 2003).

In a nationwide study of American kindergarten children, 36% of parents in the lowest-income quintile read to their children on a daily basis, compared with 62% of parents from the highest-income quintile (Coley, 2002).

When enrolled in a program that encouraged adult support, students from low-SES groups reported higher levels of effort towards academics (Kaylor & Flores, 2008).

SES and the School Environment

Research indicates that school conditions contribute more to SES differences in learning rates than family characteristics (Aikens & Barbarin, 2008).

Schools in low-SES communities suffer from high levels of unemployment, migration of the best qualified teachers, and low educational achievement (Muijs, Harris, Chapman, Stoll, & Russ, 2009).

A teacher’s years of experience and quality of training is correlated with children’s academic achievement (Gimbert, Bol, & Wallace, 2007). Yet, children in lowincome schools are less likely to have well-qualified teachers. In fact, of high school math teachers in lowincome school districts 27% majored in mathematics in college as compared to 43% of teachers who did so in more affluent school districts (Ingersoll, 1999).

The following factors have been found to improve the quality of schools in low-SES neighborhoods: a focus on improving teaching and learning, creation of an information-rich environment, building of a learning community, continuous professional development, involvement of parents, and increased funding and resources (Muijis et al., 2009).

SES and Academic Achievement

Research continues to link lower SES to lower academic achievement and slower rates of academic progress as compared with higher SES communities.

Children from low-SES environments acquire language skills more slowly, exhibit delayed letter recognition and phonological awareness, and are at risk for reading difficulties (Aikens & Barbarin, 2008).

Children with higher SES backgrounds were more likely to be proficient on tasks of addition, subtraction, ordinal sequencing, and math word problems than children with lower SES backgrounds (Coley, 2002).

Students from low-SES schools entered high school 3.3 grade levels behind students from higher SES schools. In addition, students from the low-SES groups learned less over 4 years than children from higher SES groups, graduating 4.3 grade levels behind those of higher SES groups (Palardy, 2008).

In 2007, the high school dropout rate among persons 16- 24 years old was highest in low-income families (16.7%) as compared to high-income families (3.2%) (National Center for Education Statistics, 2008).

[lumberjack_jeff]

11. Schools can't do anything about socioeconomic status of the families living in the district.

It's pointless to worry about it. At worst, it simply becomes an excuse to do badly.

In contrast, single sex classrooms is an actionable idea.

From your link

Foley, population 11,300, is 10 miles from the Gulf Coast. Fifty-seven percent of Foley Intermediate’s students are white, 24 percent are black and 17 percent are Latino; 70 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches each day. In the first year of Foley’s single-sex program, a third of the kids enrolled. The next year, two-thirds signed up, and in its third year 87 percent of parents requested the program. Principal Mansell reports that her single-sex classes produce fewer discipline problems, more parental support and better scores in writing, reading and math. She does, however, acknowledge that her data are compromised, as her highest-performing teachers and her most-motivated students have chosen single-sex.

...

Wylie says she believes she is a better teacher, and her students are better students, because they’re in a desexualized — or at least less-sexualized — environment. “Sure,” she says, “when they take pictures, they often present their backsides first. But I think I’m giving girls a better education than I could have if there were guys in the room. I’m freer. I’m more able to be bold in my statements. When I teach poetry and I talk about the sex in poetry I don’t need to be worried about the boy in the room who is going to chuckle over the thing he did with the girl last week and embarrass her. Which happened more than once in my last coed environment.”

Nearly everyone at T.Y.W.L.S. acknowledges that often parents’ most pressing concern when enrolling their 11-year-old daughters is sheltering those girls from sexualized classrooms and sexualized streets. “Harlem’s a very intense environment,” says Drew Higginbotham, T.Y.W.L.S.’s assistant principal, who lives in the neighborhood. “You’re constantly needing to prove yourself physically, to prove yourself sexually. Parents, when they come to our school, they sort of exhale deeply. You can hear them thinking to themselves, I can see my daughter here and she’s going to be O.K. for six hours a day.” Sax is not above or beyond this kind of thinking, either. In fact, after a nearly-two-hour conversation filled with scientific jargon and brains, he told me, perhaps wishfully, that really the most important reason to send a child to a single-sex high school was that those kids still go on dates. “Boys at boys’ schools like Old Farms in Connecticut, or Saint Albans in Washington, D. C., will call up girls at Miss Porter’s in Connecticut, at Stone Ridge in Maryland, and they will ask the girl out, and the boy will drive to the girl’s house to pick her up and meet her parents. You tell kids at a coed school to do this, and they’ll fall on the floor laughing. But the culture of dating is much healthier than the culture of the hookup, in which the primary form of sexual intimacy is a girl on her knees servicing a boy.”

[Starry Messenger]

14. Parents who choose schools are defacto more involved in their children's education.

This is a major factor. As stated, parents who wish to send their children to single sex environments can choose to do so. Parochial schools. Though again, the difference in outcome there will be the pre-selected factor-the parents will already be more involved in their children's schooling than parents who don't search out educational environments for their student.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/parent-involvement/

Parent Involvement

"When schools, families, and community groups work together to support learning, children tend to do better in school, stay in school longer, and like school more." That's the conclusion of a recent report from the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. The report, a synthesis of research on parent involvement over the past decade, goes on to find that, regardless of family income or background, "students with involved parents are more likely to:

Earn higher grades and test scores, and enroll in higher-level programs;
Be promoted, pass their classes, and earn credits;
Attend school regularly;
Have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school; and
Graduate and go on to postsecondary education" (Henderson & Mapp, 2002).

Also from the snippet you quoted:

She does, however, acknowledge that her data are compromised, as her highest-performing teachers and her most-motivated students have chosen single-sex.

http://articles.boston.com/2011-09-25/bostonglobe/30201500_1_brain-scan-boys-and-girls-neuroscience/2

The single-sex school myth
OP-ED | Gareth Cook
No scientific basis for teaching boys and girls separately, report says

Still, supporters of segregated classrooms now have a substantial academic record to confront. There are many hundreds of studies, of varying quality and with results across the spectrum. In the larger and better of these any apparent advantages tend to evaporate.

And we pay a price in segregating the sexes. Boys and girls learn from each other, and that prepares them for the world. Being separated cannot help but emphasize differences.

We need more experimentation in public schools, so perhaps there is a place for a small number of single sex classrooms or schools. But when they work, let’s at least be honest about the reason.

“We are not denying that there are some excellent single-sex schools,’’ says Halpern. “But their excellence does not come from the fact that they are single-sex.’’

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/17/single-sex-schools-separate-but-equal/what-our-research-on-single-sex-education-shows

What Our Research Shows

<snip>

Now these advocates are emphasizing “social justice” as their rationale, arguing that parents who cannot afford private, elite single-sex education deserve comparable educational options. But this argument is hollow given the evidence that single-sex schooling has nothing to do with a school’s success. Certainly, there is great social injustice in the quality differences between elite private schools and many public schools, but this injustice is never going to be remedied by segregating the sexes.

We and many other scientists and educators agree with the U.S. Department of Education’s demand for “educational practitioners to use ‘scientifically-based research’ to guide their decisions about which interventions to implement.” Anecdotes do not meet this standard but are frequently used to support single-sex schooling. If modern science has learned anything, it is to be highly skeptical of anecdotes.

The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates that single-sex education fails to produce academic benefits and inflates gender stereotyping.

For myself as an educator and an activist, I work for economic justice in the community. I don't think it is pointless to worry about it. It is all part of the same system.

[Starry Messenger]

10. "Pseudoscience in Sax on Sex"

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/201109/pseudoscience-in-sax-sex

PT blogger cherry-picks science to support single-sex schools

<snip>

This is not, however, the message that single-sex school advocate (and Psychology Today blogger), Leonard Sax, has been conveying. In December 2010, he blogged about a PNAS paper by Raznahan et al. which he alleged shows that "sex differences diminish as a function of age" (his emphasis).

To Leonard Sax, this idea is very important. If boys' and girls' brains differ from each other more than adult men's and women's brains differ, it justifies sending boys and girls to different classrooms and teaching them in different ways. Adult men and women may work and govern together, given our highly similar brains, but children aren't ready for this integration, because of their metaphorically pink or blue neural circuits.

As evidence, Sax refers readers to an online movie which is based on Figure 1 of the PNAS paper, but he misinterprets the figure legend. (The movie didn't play for me, and Sax warns readers they may have trouble playing it, but I'm assuming it is the same movie shown in a Wall St. Journal article that repeats Sax's mistaken interpretation, including its faulty caption.)

The figure/movie shows beautiful colorized brains, with cortical areas that are thicker in males shown in a blue-purple color scale, while areas that are thicker in females are shown in white (with no color scale, to avoid confusion with the male-larger color scale). What you see as the images progress from 9 to 22 years of age is that blue/purple areas give way to white areas in the frontal lobe. In other words, during early adolescence, males' gray matter is thicker through much of the cortex, but in adulthood, females' frontal gray matter is thicker, while males' gray matter remains thicker in other cortical lobes.

But Sax misread the figure legend! He states that the white coloring shows areas of no sex difference in cortical thickness, when in fact, the white depicts areas that are thicker in females. So despite what Sax wrote in his Psychology Today blog, the paper by Raznahan et al. does not demonstrate that sex differences are globally greater in childhood and diminish in adults.

[lumberjack_jeff]

12. I'm more persuaded by arguments that refute the outcomes.

This is a "less filling/tastes great" argument.

I care that it's better or worse. "Why?"... not so much.

[obamanut2012]

15. Jeff, I am politely asking you to knock it off, now

It has been shown again and again that single-sex education for school-aged children hurts both boys and girls by reinforcing outdated gender stereotypes.

Sax has fudged and twisted stats and court decisions.

You are in a safe haven group. We do not have to "prove" reinforcing gender stereotypes are bad.

[Starry Messenger]

16. It's worse.

The outcomes have been refuted.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/17/single-sex-schools-separate-but-equal/dont-be-tempted-by-single-sex-schools

Don’t Be Tempted

There is little to no data showing that sex separation alone leads to better outcomes. These schools work when class sizes are reasonable, academics are paramount and parents are involved. Gender neutral factors, all.

So, what’s the appeal? Look more closely at the rhetoric. It recalls time worn images of matriarchal black families, emasculated men, perpetually fertile women. For poor people of color, sex segregation is the balm for their supposed pathology. Really?

California’s experiment is telling. Researchers found that separating sexes meant "All Quiet on the Western Front" for boys, "Pride and Prejudice" for girls. Survival skills helped boys learn about Western expansion, while quilt-making was the focus for girls. One spot of equality: neither boys nor girls could take Advanced Placement courses. Investigators concluded that sex segregation might be the next dead-end track for low-achieving students.

So, while the law may permit single-sex schooling in some circumstances, it’s not the magic bullet proponents proclaim. We know what really works and we know what children need, notwithstanding the fact that particulars will vary child by child. Let’s home in on evidence-based strategies and resist the mythic remedy of single-sex education.

[lumberjack_jeff]

19. From the president of Bryn Mawr.

From your link

Jane Dammen McAuliffe a scholar of Islamic studies, is the president of Bryn Mawr, a liberal arts college for women.

What's missing from the report in Science magazine is an examination of the larger cultural forces that, in the case of young women, lead many to believe that there are some fields of study that just aren’t for them.

Even after the majority of U.S. colleges and universities have gone coed, women’s colleges continue to prepare an inordinate percentage of their students to succeed in fields traditionally dominated by men.

Cultural forces lead many young women to believe that there are some fields of study that just aren’t for them.

At Bryn Mawr College, our students are six times more likely to graduate with a degree in chemistry than college students nationwide and nine times more likely to do so in math. Indeed, we are second in the nation in the percentage of female students receiving degrees in math, beating out science-oriented coed universities like the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[Starry Messenger]

20. Bryn Mawr is not a public school.

Or an elementary school. Don't see what this has to do with the discussion, except to reinforce that rich kids get more opportunities. I was friends with a Bryn Mawr alum in college. Her parents worked in publishing in New York and she had a trust fund.

http://inside.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2011/02/24/tuition-and-fees/

"The Bryn Mawr College Board of Trustees has approved the 2011-12 tuition and fees. Undergraduate tuition will be $39,860. Room and board will be $12,890. SGA fees will be $290."

I'm sure the teacher/student ratio is small too. For $40,000 per pupil and classroom ratios of 1:12, public schools could probably make every single kid in the United States an astronaut. Too bad it won't ever happen, because small class sizes are definitely scientifically proven to lead to improved learning outcomes.

edit: I'm not sure what link you're referring to. That quote isn't in the article you are replying to.

[Gormy Cuss]

22. The "why" matters, else it's hard to ascribe the outcome to the intervention.

For example, if I segregated classrooms based on eye color and the brown eyed children had higher average test scores, it would be a giant leap to state that eye color segregation improved the scores for brown eyed children.

I'm no expert on this topic but it appears that the research literature does not support gender segregation by classroom as the determinant for better outcomes.

[lumberjack_jeff]

23. In this case, both the blue eyed and brown eyed students tested better.

The data is ambiguous and colored by the investigators respective biases.

The nonprofit which published the critique is dedicated to that goal. They are not unbiased.

[Gormy Cuss]

24. You missed the point about eye color but bias is one way that data can be corrupted.

Faulty research design, poor study controls, and amateurish or intentionally rigged analyses can also corrupt the outcome measures.

It would take a considerable amount of large scale research, replicated by different teams, all using rigorous protocols, in order to support the conclusion that single sex classrooms are the causal link to better outcomes.

As for the nonprofit if NASSPE isn't biased in favor of single sex education it needs to change its name.
It's an advocacy group, isn't it?

[lumberjack_jeff]

25. I don't think I did.

A causal mechanism is interesting to know, but if a phenomenon is repeatably predictable, it's appropriate to use it.

The NASSPE is as arguably biased as the American Council for CoEducational Schooling (on the board of which all the authors of the "pseudoscience" article sit).

We're in the audience of a match between dueling special interest groups.

I agree that independent research is merited, but that requires actually trying it.

[Gormy Cuss]

29. Without at least a strong correlation it's just a guess.

The thing of it is, there is no evidence that the phenomenon is repeatedly predictable until the factors controlling the outcome have been identified through causality or at the very least a strong correlation. Again, that requires more than a few experiments by advocates.

That's why I used the eye color example. If the study is ostensibly designed to demonstrate that eye color is an important predictor of outcome, a careless or zealous researcher may put too much weigh on eye color as the determinant and ignore other factors which may have played a bigger role. For example, if the experiment is on one classroom or one school, there may be other factors at play such as teacher skills, parental involvement, parental educational attainment, income and stability of home life, earlier educational interventions, etc.

Unless those potential sources of bias are identified and examined as part of the analysis, the conclusion that eye color segregation produces better outcomes may be totally wrong. That's why having advocates handle research is a prescription for disaster. The advocate thinks that the eye color segregation worked and promotes it as proven when in fact the data do not support that conclusion.

The thing of it is, there is no evidence that the phenomenon is repeatedly predictable until the factors controlling the outcome have been identified through causality or at the very least a strong correlation. Again, that requires more than a few experiments by advocates.

[lumberjack_jeff]

30. I agree to this extent.

The amount of experience with single sex classrooms is not adequate to use it as a template for all education everywhere. At a minimum, adequate time to develop best practices and teach educators about them is required.

However, we do have several A-B trials that suggest it works, a couple of competing theories as to why it works, and a lot of anecdotal evidence that it does no harm.

This, against a backdrop of a clear problem with education generally that market-based solutions like high stakes testing and NCLB have completely failed to solve, indicate to me that it's an idea that deserves a shot.

The "pseudoscience" article referenced ONLY the work of the authors, and then fixated on a critique of Sax's brain-biology causative theory. They didn't study single sex classrooms AT ALL to reach their conclusions. Their entire body of study were very small samples of pre-k students in a co-ed classroom and equally small samples of grownups.

I think the ACLU has this one wrong. The current way we do it places "artificial constraints on individuals’ opportunity."

[One_Life_To_Give]

21. Do banks issue Mortgages based upon gender or income, payment histories etc?

Why would any teacher look at a child and say they should be in class X because they have a &*$? We might as well claim that Obama and Bush are identical or with Hillary Clinton the same as Sarah Palin.

We don't have classrooms full of "Average" students, we have classrooms full of individuals of which we can take an average but no one child will ever be exactly average. Some students may benefit from a different class structure and teaching style. But you can't determine who belongs where by genitalia. And when the child is staring you in the face why would you even try? Would you use a math aptitude test or genitalia to determine math potential?

[ladjf]

26. Very bad idea. nt

[xfundy]

28. I'm so damn tired of everything being politicized.

Facts show something, as it is or isn't.

Politics and spin work to help or kill it, depending on the politics of the writer.

Like most Americans, I don't have time to read it all and sort it out, so I rely on "experts" of my preferred political philosophy to read it and tell me why it's good or bad.

This sucks, and is symptomatic of a failure in our system, supposedly of, by, and for "the people."

Guess they should have specified which "people."

I doubt it would have contained corporations, which are now "people, my friend."

[kdmorris]

31. I thought we figured out that "Separate but Equal"

didn't work a long time ago? What the hell?

[Starry Messenger]

32. Public education in the US has been co-ed since the early 1900's too.

We sent men to the moon and other numerous great feats with co-ed education. I think it would be more useful to look at why that worked rather than experiment with things that would be more appropriate in schools of choice, ie. private school.

Here's an excerpt from a letter from a parent:

http://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/my-daughters-deserve-be-taught-more-stereotypes

As a parent, I like to know about what’s going on in my kids’ lives. We go to every ball game. Every school function. We sit down as a family for dinner every night. It’s important for me to know what’s going on with their education.

So I was shocked to learn that Van Devender Middle School in, where my three daughters attend school in Wood County, West Virginia – with no warning to parents – was using our children in a misguided experiment to separate the boys from the girls, giving them completely different educational experiences. This was not mentioned in the parent orientation when my daughters entered the sixth grade. And there was no other option: unless we wanted to uproot our girls from the friends and classmates they had made in elementary school and send them to a different school, they had to participate in the single-gender program at Van Devender.

<snip>

Meanwhile, the girls are restricted in their movement and are placed in desks facing one another. They don’t do this with the boys because they think that it would make the boys too confrontational.

The idea that all boys and all girls learn the same way is ridiculous—and I know my daughters would benefit from some of the methods used in the boys’ classrooms. For example, one of my daughters has attention-deficit disorder. She gets fidgety and sometimes needs to move around. Because this wasn’t permitted in the girls’ classroom, she is sometimes placed with the boys. And while this gives her the chance to move around, it’s unfair to single her out as being different from her classmates, as if she wasn’t a “normal” girl. My second daughter is legally blind, and would benefit from the brighter lights that are supposedly only better for boys. Another of my daughters learns best by repeating things out loud. Although she does this quietly, it can be disruptive to the student sitting at the desk opposite her. When she asked if she could move to the back of her English class to study, she was told she had to stay in the face-to-face formation.

Professional educators are trained to educate in many ways to accommodate different learning styles already. It doesn't break down along gender lines.

[kdmorris]

33. I have three daughters, as well

While one of them would have loved that "face to face" thing (because she can talk to anyone about anything and is just a social butterfly, not because she would get a better education), the other two would have withered in that configuration, one because she was overweight her whole life and constantly teased and one because she is too shy to handle that sort of face to face learning.

How does one expect children to learn about others this way? To restrict their experiences to one gender only is to rob them of experiences with people of all races, genders and nationalities.

[Starry Messenger]

34. Perfectly stated!

I was insanely shy too, this would have done me in. Plus I *did* go to an all-girl's school for one year and was bullied. I left to go to public high school and made tons of awesome male friends from my classes. A lot of them were gay too.

Which is another thing, how much this model enforces hetero-normative stereotyped gender roles.