It must have something to do with the dry BBQ at the Rendezvous. Or the duck parade at the Peabody (pictured here…sex of the ducks still under investigation). Or the jungle room at Graceland. Whatever the trigger, Memphis is becoming associated with single sex education — the home of the last national meeting of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

Now the AP weighs in with this profile of single sex education in Memphis schools. Interesting read, with updates on the number of single-sex experiments in public schools. Local educators never emphasize it, but when you talk to them the biggest driver they cite are the boy troubles:

 Gender-specific classes have been part of the U.S. private school environment since before the Constitution. But until a few years ago, public school parents who couldn’t afford $15,000 to $20,000 in private tuition were out of luck, said Dr. Leonard Sax, co-founder of the single-sex group.

“If you don’t have that kind of money, you don’t have any choices,” he said. “Why not make these choices available in the public schools?”

In 2002, 11 U.S. public schools offered the option. Today, 514 do, including Washington, Corry Middle, Vance Middle, Kingsbury Middle and Georgia Avenue Elementary in Memphis. Pockets of experimentation are taking off in other Memphis City Schools.

At 48, Sax has given up his medical practice to preach full time the gospel of gender-specific classrooms, hoping in five years that 7 percent of the nation’s public schools will be gender-specific. Just about 1 percent are today.

He lists the benefits with the fervor of a convert, including that girls “tend to find their voice” in classrooms where they don’t have to worry about being wrong and being ridiculed, he said, ticking off a list of women who graduated from all-girl schools, including Reese Witherspoon, Madeleine Albright, Nancy Pelosi, Rosa Parks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sally Ride.

“In colleges, you can tell which women went to girls schools,” he said. “The girls who didn’t will raise their hands and wait for you to call on them.

“The girls who did still raise their hands, but if they don’t get called on, they interrupt.”

This article from the Atlanta JC explains why there’s a surge in single-sex classes and schools in public school districts — the boy troubles. That’s what many don’t understand about the rapidly expanding universe of single-sex classes. There’s a before and after.

In the “before” world, when public single-sex classes were mostly banned by federal law, single-sex education existed only in private schools (with a few exceptions). And, although this is strictly an impression, conventional wisdom held that the benefits were mostly for girls, unless of course you were shipping your wayward son off to military school.

The “after” in this universe arrived two years ago when the DOE lifted its legal ban and after school districts, at least some of them, began paying attention to the boy troubles. Now, single sex education is all about the boys.

For many, their first introduction to these developments came from this NY Sunday Times magazine article. This piece does a great job laying out the doubts behind the “brain based” learning theories used to justify single-sex education, but the boys issue comes off as an afterthought. That’s not the case. Although by law school districts must offer comparable single-sex opportunties to girls, the movement toward these classes is all about the boys.

This from the article about the Clayton district:

The North Clayton all-male academy has mostly male teachers. Students are also paired with mentors from Morehouse College or the police department, said Qiana Cutts, a research associate for the district.
“Students test data shows girls consistently were out-performing the males, particularly at North Clayton,” Cutts said. “Now these boys are performing at level or above the other males. The boys are less distracted and more comfortable in class.”
The boys at the all-male academy are taught the same curriculum as other students, but go on additional field trips and have mandated community service projects, Jackson said.

Actually, there’s no answer to that one, but there is some interesting news about new opportunities for girls in single-sex classes. Here’s an article from England’s Telegraph about girls and science, quoting the new schools head there (photo courtesy of the Telegraph):

Sarah McCarthy-Fry said girls could be put off by boys in the classroom and separating them for lessons could be the answer.
In her first interview since replacing Lord Adonis in the Prime Minister’s recent reshuffle, she said: “Girls do much better in science in single-sex classes. They sometimes feel intimidated in mixed-sex classes with the boys hogging the limelight and putting their hands up to answer all the questions.”
Her call comes just a week after Vicky Tuck, the president of the Girls’ School Association and principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, predicted a return to separate-sex schooling after four decades of numbers dwindling from 2,500 single-sex secondary schools in the 1960s to just 400 today.
Mrs Tuck said more people were aware girls learnt differently from boys due to “neurological differences” in the developments of their brains.
Mrs McCarthy-Fry added that she believed both science and engineering could be presented to girls as an option in a more “girl-friendly” manner.
“If you talk to girls about what they want to do, many say they want to go into caring professions - like nursing,” she told the Independent. “But you could present science and engineering in a way girls could relate better to in careers advice.

And now this Nov. 14 announcement from The Brighter Choice Foundation in Albany, N.Y.:

The Albany City School District held a public hearing last night on the pending charter application to establish the Albany Leadership Charter High School for Girls, the first public girls-only high school, slated to open in August 2010. The school will initially serve a total of 125 students in the 9th and 10th grades, and expand to 9-12.

 Six people testified at the hearing, with five testifying in favor (including several parents) and one person opposed. The sole opponent, an older gentleman, railed incoherently about out-of-state forces setting up charters in New York.

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?