Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

NPR’s "All Things Considered" takes a 6 minute, 40-second look at Single-Sex Ed ...in South Carolina, where there are 97 public schools that have all-male and all-female classrooms. Some 49 public schools around the nation are completely single sex, and more than 350 have at least some single-sex classes. These include schools as far-flung as Albany, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Gary, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

Michele Norris:The theory is that boys and girls learn differently. For example, boys need to stand up or move around to pay attention, while girls can sit quietly and remain focused. Boys need teachers to talk louder because they don’t hear as well. And boys’ classrooms should be cooler to help them pay attention. Leonard Sax is head of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education. He travels around the country leading workshops for parents and teachers.

Sax: Many boys learn better when they are standing. As one teacher in an elementary school told me, "When that boy sits down, his brain shuts off."

Norris: Sax calls it an "emerging science."

Sax: Differences between adult men and women and how they learn or in how the brain works [are] very small. Differences between 12-year-girls and 12-year-old boys are huge. And the single-sex format allows you to accommodate those differences.

Single-sex classes and schools were legitimized by the federal Department of Education in October 2006 in regulations passed under the widely criticized No Child Left Behind legislation. The rules offer rationales under which single-sex classes or schools can be initiated, require that "geographically accessible" coed classes are available at the same school or a different school as the single-sex classes (without defining the term "geographically accessible"), and mandates two-year reviews of single-sex classes and schools to see if they are remedying whatever problem was identified when they were established.

In early March, Elizabeth Weil wrote a piece on single-sex public education, Teaching Boys and Girls Separately, in The New York Times Magazine:

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."

The two camps face a common enemy in the A.C.L.U., which opposes all single-sex public education. (When I asked a lawyer at the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project why, she said, "Have you ever heard of Title IX?" referring to the 1972 Education Amendments that outlaw all discrimination in educational programs on the basis of sex.) But that hasn’t brought the two sides together. "What kind of message does it give when you tell a group of kids that boys and girls need to be separated because they don’t even see or hear alike?" asks Rosemary Salomone, a legal scholar at St. John’s University School of Law.

Sax wrote a scathing rebuttal of Weil’s piece, Just the Facts, Please!!! – or, how the New York Times got this story all wrong, which, he claimed, misrepresented "my position; portraying me (Dr. Sax) as a ‘gender essentialist’."