This from the Gaston (N.C.) Gazette:

Boys in this class, girls in the other: Gaston school experiments with single gender education
Amanda Memrick
2009-10-02 18:40:01
Kindergarten teacher Pam Miller has a class full of boys. (boys class story) (girls class story)

Fellow kindergarten teacher Sherry Stamper’s class is made up solely of girls.

The two teachers at Page Primary in Belmont have single gender classrooms this year after researching the benefits of keeping boys and girls separate.

“Simply putting boys in one room and girls in another does nothing unless the teacher has proper training,” said Dr. Leonard Sax, founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

If teachers don’t have the right training the can do more harm than good if they use sports analogies with boys and shopping analogies with girls, Sax said.

“We don’t want to reinforce gender stereotypes,” Sax said. “We want to break down gender stereotypes.”

Dr. William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men and best selling author, agreed that the most important factor is the relationship between the teacher and the student.

Single gender classrooms work because students aren’t afraid to try things that are considered nontraditional, Pollack said.

A shift in culture has made it seem unmasculine to get straight A’s, Sax said.

Sax calls it the “Hermione Granger effect.” Granger was the bookworm in Harry Potter who would jump up and down to answer questions in class while the boys rolled their eyes.

The same thing applies to girls in areas like math and science.

The number of schools opting to offer single gender classes is growing, Sax said. In 2002, the National Association for Single Sex Public Education counted 11 schools offering that option. Now there are more than 540 schools with single gender classrooms.

Page Primary could to continue the single gender classroom when the students move to first grade.

The school will be making lots of comparison between the all-boys, all-girls and traditional kindergarten classes to see if gains are made in the single gender classes, Fisher said.

You can reach Amanda Memrick at 704-869-1839.

This article out of Port Huron does a good job sifting through the pluses and minuses of single sex education. The challenge with single sex education is getting beyond the anecdotal. There’s a conventional wisdom about what works in single sex classes, but that wisdom has not been tested by rigorous research. And there are many small bore “studies” about whether separating the sexes works, but true outcome data is not available. This should be up to the U.S. Department of Education to pursue, but I don’t know of any federally funded research.

My biggest fear about the surge in single sex education has been the faddish nature of it. The Bush DOE gave it the legal green light without offering districts any research on how to do it well. A backlash is inevitable, especially in states such as South Carolina which embraced it completely.

Here we have Williamburg County killing off their experiment. Read Norma Bartelle’s interpretation of what she saw in a class — a complete misunderstanding of the philosophy of single sex education. But that matters little. If districts don’t see immediate results, the backlash is just around the corner.

The article:

By John Sweeney
Editor
Published: August 7, 2009

KINGSTREE -Williamsburg County District School Board voted to discontinue the single gender education program currently in place at Kingstree Middle with a vote of three for, two opposed and one abstention.

Those who opposed the program said sufficient evidence did not exist to justify the method of education’s continuance. Others speaking in favor of single gender pointed out that the program was working and if given more time, additional statistics would support that claim.

This was not the first time the topic been brought before the Board. On July 27 initial arguments were heard both for and against the issue. Discussion at that time focused on the overall development between the genders and what role that plays in class room learning.

(more…)

This profile of single-sex education in Nevada’s Clark County offers up a flattering account — most educators seem to like it. But after reading the entire story you realize some teachers are guessing at how to conduct the classes and principals are offering up unscientific numbers about whether it actually boosts learning.

I’m not an opponent of single-sex education, and I think Leonard Sax is a really smart guy who has some good advice about to to contruct these classes. But…this is too large a swing in public education strategy to go unguided by large-scale research, which the federal Department of Education has yet to undertake. That’s stunning … hundreds of public schools launching on a new education course based on hunches. Parts of this remind me of California’s big swing to whole language. Shouldn’t the DOE have learned a lesson from that debacle and undertaken some serious research before giving the legal green light for public schools?

(I would like to distance myself from any criticisms of single-sex education offered by David Sadker, whose involvement in the flawed AAUW report on gender in K-12 schools should trigger a warning label on all his quotes. Not familar with this issue? It’s all summed up nicely here by Chronicle veteran writer Peter Schmidt.) 

From the article:

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Sunday, July 19, 2009 | 2 a.m.

In the boys-only fifth grade classroom at Diaz Elementary School, students are free move about. As they work independently on a writing assignment, some sprawl on the floor, others lean against the wall. The teacher speaks loudly to be heard above the hum of activity and classical music playing in the background.

Down the hall, in the girls-only first grade class, it appears another species, not gender, might be at work here.

The girls sit at desks in tidy rows, face to face as they collaborate on a writing project. The only sound is their quiet chatter as they discuss their work.

These single-sex classrooms are part of a Clark County School District experiment to see whether teaching boys and girls separately improves academic performance. The jury is still out, but not for a small group of local educators who are convinced that boys and girls learn so differently that teaching them the same way, in the same room, shortchanges the group.

(more…)

I don’t see this very often, a contract school, Imagine Schools, proposing single sex schools for Prince George’s County, Maryland.

The Bayou Blue Middle School (why didn’t any of my schools have a cool name?) in Louisiana will be trying single-sex classes for sixth graders. The reason? Because girls score lower in math and science on tests and boys have more discipline referrals. That roughly mirrors national trends, including the NAEP. On state exams, however, girls are moving ahead of boys in math while remaining far behind in literacy skills. On the NAEP, boys lag far behind girls in reading. So how are the boys doing in literacy skills at Bayou Blue? Oops, the reporter forgot to ask. Maybe there’s another reason to launch those classes. Well, that leaves room for a follow-up story.

From the article:

By Daniel McBride

Published: Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 11:34 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 11:34 a.m.
THIBODAUX - The Lafourche School Board approved plans Wednesday to begin teaching sixth-grade boys and girls in separate classrooms next year at Bayou Blue Middle School.

Participation in the pilot program requires the consent of students and their parents. Bayou Blue administrators have met with parents and sent home consent forms; almost all parents who replied agreed.

Bayou Blue Principal Sharon Dugas told the board that she and faculty member Raecheal Vizier researched same-sex classes for the past four months. Their investigation has reached across the country, including talking to leaders of similar programs in South Carolina.

“We’ve seen nothing but success,” Dugas said.

Dugas said splitting boys and girls may solve three problems at the school. The first two involve test scores: On average, girls score lower in science and math than boys. The third problem involves discipline, with boys receiving about four times as many conduct referrals as girls.

The plan involves oversight from third-party education experts, including Nicholls State University faculty, to judge the program’s effectiveness. Vizier said if the program succeeds through the 2009-10 school year, she can bring the outside assessment to the School Board. If it is successful, administrators said they are interested in expanding the program.

Board President Louis Thibodaux and Lafourche schools Superintendent Jo Ann Matthews support the program.

“We’re looking for anything and everything for our students to move forward,” Matthews said.

Dugas said the program will do just that because separating boys and girls will allow students to get the most out of the seven hours they spend in class each day. But just as important, she said, are the ways it will affect children when they are outside the classroom.

“It is amazing to me what response we get from them in those 17 hours they’re away from us,” she said.

The study also found that girls benefit from single-sex classes in math and science. This from the Daily Mail:

Why boys are held back by girls in English and should be taught separately
By Laura Clark

Children should be taught in single-sex classes for English because boys are being held back by the presence of girls, a study suggests.

It found that many boys are left ‘hiding in the background’, and perform up to a 10th of a grade worse when they are placed in mixed lessons.

And it claimed that the more girls there are, the worse boys do.

Lagging: Boys perform up to a 10th of a grade worse in English when they are taught in classes dominated by girls research has shown
The researchers from Bristol University found that the trend was particularly marked in primary schools but may also apply in secondaries.

The study, which is being presented this week at the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society, also found that in maths and science, primary school girls benefit from being taught in single-sex groups.

(more…)

Just seven years ago there were only 11 public single-sex schools. Now there are 540. The majority of those schools were formed in response to boys floundering in school, but are girls helped more? This study from UCLA only answers the girls side of that equation, but I detect a pattern. There’s ample evidence that girls benefit from single-sex education. (Full disclosure: Although our daughters attended co-ed schools, they graduated from a girls school.)

Here’s an interesting one from England: Boys do worse in English when they have a lot of girls in their class.

And finally, here’s an interesting story about a boys school opening up on the banks of North Carolina’s French Broad River. (Next full disclosure: When young, I spent nearly summer on my grandmother’s farm on the French Broad, so naturally I’m pulling for this to succeed.) This from the Citizen-Times:

All-boys middle school hopes to start in fall

By Ashley Wilson

Will Yeiser had been looking for a way to connect his love for the outdoors with his passion for teaching children.

Now he thinks he’s found it.

In August, Yeiser, a former Spanish teacher at Asheville Middle School, plans to open The French Broad River Academy, a private all-boys middle school with a focus on the French Broad River and global awareness.

He will open the school with longtime friend David Byers, a former Asheville High science teacher.

“I got really intrigued with the idea of combining outdoor experiential education with the traditional public school setting,” Yeiser said. “We both started talking about scaling up our passion and vision for what schooling should be.”

After learning about the different ways in which boys and girls learn, Yeiser decided the Asheville area needed an all-boys middle school.

This is a topic that the federal Education Department should have taken up before giving its legal blessing for public school districts to launch single-sex classrooms and schools. But it didn’t, and still hasn’t, just as the department has never launched an Australian-style query into the gender gaps. Maybe Arne Duncan will step up and do the right thing. Given the stark gender gaps found in Chicago schools, both city and suburbs, there’s reason to hope he will.

Meanwhile, educators are relying on other sources for advice on how to carry out these experiments, most of which are driven by realizations that boys are falling behind. Here’s a new one, a book from Michael Gurian  and others, on successful single-sex practices. This article explains the background of co-author Peggy Daniels.

A profile of an all-male class  at Albert Einstein High school.