Maybe the invite is lost in the mail…
The organizers of the upcoming partly-Gates-sponsored national confab in Philly on public single-sex schools somehow overlooked inviting the nation’s biggest name in the field, Leonard Sax, founder of the National Association For Single Sex Public Education. This is no accidental ooops. Not only was Sax, seen here, not 
invited to appear on a panel, he says he wasn’t even invited to come sit in the audience. Not even in the very back row, farthest chair to the end, right next to where the noisy caterers pour in and out.
Sax says he has no idea why he was overlooked. I have an idea. Sax earns his reputation as being an (um … is assertive the right word?) interrogator of anyone who wanders within shooting distance of his PowerPoints. I think his fierce response to the recent Sunday NYTimes magazine article focusing mostly on him ran longer than the outsized article itself. And Sax’s rigid adherence to gender brain-based theories is out of fashion among the more genteel practitioners of single-sex education.
But in bypassing Sax, the organizers give up a chunk of the meeting’s relevancy. There’s nothing wrong with traditional single-sex education. (Full disclosure: our daughters finished high school at an excellent all-girls school). But those traditional schools don’t capture the passion behind the recent surge in public single-sex education, written about Sunday by WPost writers.
The DOE’s decision last year to bless public single-sex schools with a legal green light launched several hundred single-sex schools or classes. Measured against other education fads trends, that makes single-sex a standout. For the most part, the surge is fueled by educators belatedly waking up to the fact they are not succeeding with boys. For better or worse, single-sex schools is their answer.
Given that few schools seem adequately prepared to launch these schools (What was DOE thinking by approving the experiment but offering no research on how to do it properly?), sniffing out future problems with this trend, which I attempted here and here, is fish-in-the-barrel stuff.
But like him or not, Sax is an irreplaceable link to this trend. His organization is where the schools are turning for help. As for Sax, he’s ignoring the snub and proceeding on his busy schedule, which includes his own national gathering. His confab in Memphis includes BBQ and a bus tour of Graceland!
(The Philly organizers, asked Friday morning for a comment, had not responded as of 11:15 a.m. today.)
Tags: single sex
