Very interesting and long article in the NYT Magazine on Single-Sex Public School Education. Lots of good information that if you're at all interested in the subject you'll enjoy. I don't do it justice by these excerpts, chosen because they either supported my opinion or made me laugh:
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.
There are two movements behind single-gender education: one is based on the belief that boys and girls are wired differently (this group led by Leonard Sax), and the other based on the belief that society shapes behavior. Here's a statement from a teacher at a school founded on feminist theories:
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.”
And I thought this was funny:
Speaking to a group of sixth graders, Sax explained his theory that girls’ hearing ability is much better than boys’, as is girls’ sense of smell. The girls, just on the edge of puberty, sat utterly rapt, seeming to want to understand why their brothers, boy cousins, cute skater-dude neighbors and fathers were so weird. A few weeks after the lecture, Sax sent me a packet of color photocopies of thank-you notes he had received from the girls. One, from a girl with two fathers, read: “Dr. Sax, Thank you so much for coming to Burkes. . . . I had a smell in my room and my Dads couldn’t smell it but I could. I thought I was going crazy. It ends up there was a dead rat in the wall. Hope you come back soon.”
And this, from all-boys Excellence Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, makes me cry:
There, (Sawicki, the principal) told me that educating lower-class black boys is “the new civil rights movement.” He then walked me down the hall to one of his kindergarten classrooms, where a sign on the door read “Fordham, Class of 2024.”
“Jacob,” said Sawicki, folding himself into a tiny chair and pointing to a line in a workbook, “will you read that for our guest?”
Jacob, who is 5, straightened his tiny tie under his green cardigan and used his index finger to track his place on the page. “A rat and a rabbit went down the slide.”
“Thank you,” said Sawicki. “And can you tell our guest what you like about the Excellence School?”
“I like that I get to wear a sweater with buttons,” he said, glancing down at his uniform. “And I like that I’m going to college.”
There's really good stuff happening in single-gender education. I see it every day. Can't explain the theories or even defend them. I just know that it's working for our family.
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