Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli: Please steal this idea…
Here’s a debate editorial running today in USA Today (Full disclosure: I wrote it). The opposing view, written by the directors of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, is here.
As you can see, there are areas of agreement. We’re both skeptical about the “brain based” research suggesting boys and girls should be taught in different ways. My biggest concern is that the surge in the number of schools trying single-gender classes outstrips both the research on how to do it well and the capacity these schools districts have to train teachers. If this becomes just the latest fad to sputter out after districts discover no academic gains, the experiments will dry up quickly — and prematurely.
This weekend the National Association for the Advancement of Single Sex Public Schools met in Memphis. To me, a better place to have met would have been New York’s Bed-Sty neighborhood where all the practitioners could have visited the Excellence Charter School (pictured here), where inner-city boys are turning in some of the best test scores found anywhere in New York City.
Could schools in South Carolina and elsewhere launching these experiments adopt Excellence’s lessons and take them home? Maybe, maybe not. Excellence is a second-generation charter school, a “no excuses” charter that uses a KIPP-like model of longer days and near total control of a student’s life. But the lack of research into how to run single-sex classrooms leaves schools such as Excellence as the nation’s best resource.
Anyone visiting Excellence can see an obvious solution: What they do there can be captured on camera. Their library is run in a completely unique way. Even their phys-ed classes are startling different. Surely a foundation could sponsor a film crew to spend a week at Excellence to distill what they do. That documentary could then be distributed to educators around the country who would decide which of the lessons from Excellence could be applied to their schools.
Fordham Foundation folks: Are you listening?
Tags: Single Sex Schools
