At Slate, Lise Eliot and Diane F. Halpern write, The Single-Sex Trick - The flaws in a new survey that praises girls-only and boys-only classes:
It sounds like great news! Children and teachers like their all-boys and all-girls classrooms, according to a recent survey of some 7,000 students by the South Carolina Department of Education, the nation's leader in single-gender public schooling. In the survey—which has gotten plenty of media attention —76 percent of children between kindergarten and ninth grade reported increased self-confidence since they began participating in single-gender academic classes. They also rated more highly their chances of completing high school. The cheering was extra loud among girls and younger students: A whopping 93 percent of girls in kindergarten through second grade reported that their motivation had increased, compared with 58 percent of sixth-through-ninth-grade boys.
But let's not mistake students' opinions for evidence that separating boys and girls can close gender gaps in achievement—or even that it is in their best interest. These aren't questions children can answer themselves. And this survey is especially misleading because of its serious methodological flaws.
The biggest problem with the survey is that the state Single-Gender Initiatives program that administered it—and which fervently advocates single-sex education—did not give students the option of answering "no change" when asking how their current attitudes compared with their feelings before they moved to single-sex classrooms. Forced to choose between "increase" and "decrease" for questions about their motivation and confidence since switching from coeducation, the students were more likely to pick the positive option. The younger students' glowing answers to every question in particular reflect the instinctive desire to please adults in many kids of their age group. By contrast, about 42 percent of middle-school-aged boys responded that their motivation had decreased since switching to single-gender classrooms—a finding that is easily lost in the way the data are presented.
The survey is also stacked in favor of single-sex classes because it queried only children who are currently enrolled in them. |
According to the National Association for Single Sex Education, at least 540 public schools in the United States offer various single-sex educational environments under U.S. Department of Education regulations mandated by No Child Left Behind legislation. Most of these schools conduct single-sex classrooms but retain some coed activities.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:
It's too bad that in politics, especially in the Senate with its six-year terms, politicians don't suffer any repercussions for lying to the voters.
Here's Lieberman in July:
So I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops, and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home.
Here's Lieberman yesterday:
"We need more, not less, U.S. troops here," said Sen. Lieberman (R-CT).
He said what he needed to say during the election, and then tossed it all aside after the votes were counted. It is because of people like Lieberman that people are cynical about politics. |