Leonard Sax comments on newly released single-sex schools report…
I wrote Sax, founder of the National Association for the Advance of Single Sex Public Schools (yes, he still speaks to me, in spite of the fact I called him out in Eduwonk for being a bit overbearing during seminars) to ask his views of the recently released (and long-delayed) DOE report on single-sex schools. Sax’s response:
1. The publication was delayed for several YEARS. The survey was based on observations made in the fall of 2003, i.e. five YEARS ago. Of course, in the fall of 2003, nobody really knew much about what worked in American public single-sex classrooms compared with private schools. Essentially everything presented at our NASSPE workshops and conferences has been learned in the five years since the survey was conducted.
T2. he survey focused on selective public schools such as the Philadelphia High School for Girls and Western High School, both established in the 1840’s, as well as the Young Women’s Leadership School in New York and the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago. These schools are very successful; however, as the authors point out, the success of these schools may be due in part to the fact that they enroll highly-motivated girls who very much want to attend an all-girls school. Likewise, the Brighter Choice Schools in Albany are selective charter schools with long waiting lists. That’s not a criticism; on the contrary, it’s a testimony to the success of these schools. However, selective magnet schools and charter schools comprise only a small fraction of the total number of American public schools offering single-sex classrooms. It would have been helpful to include regular neighborhood schools (non-selective, non-charter schools) which have adopted the single-sex format. The people appointed by the Bush Administration to do this study chose to ignore all such schools; every one of the ten schools in their survey appears to be a selective school, i.e. a school of choice (either a charter school or a magnet school), not a regular neighborhood school.
3.It’s not clear why the people appointed by the Bush Administration to do this survey ignored all public schools with single-sex classrooms. As the document itself states, repeatedly, it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from the schools they surveyed because the students at those schools were not a random sample of the population. Curiously, this 160-page document never even mentions any of the public schools in the United States where students who have been assigned to single-sex classrooms might reasonably be compared to students from the same school who have been assigned to coed classrooms.
4. The executive summary for this latest Bush Administration document mingles findings from the previous Bush Administration document, even though the previous document overemphasized unpublished findings involving small numbers of students (if those findings were negative regarding single-sex education), and underemphasized published studies involving large numbers of students (if those findings were positive regarding single-sex education). Hence, the “quantitative” conclusions of the previous Bush Administration document were misleading. I made these points previously, in a letter to the authors, posted at http://www.singlesexschools.org/EdDeptStudy.htm.
