Feminists

The report, “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling,” to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education.

It asserts that “sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence.”

<snip>

Dr. Sax, executive director of the National Association of Single Sex Public Education, was singled out for criticism in the Science article, for his teachings that boys respond better to energetic, confrontational classrooms while girls need a gentler touch.

“A loud, cold classroom where you toss balls around, like Dr. Sax thinks boys should have, might be great for some boys, and for some girls, but for some boys, it would be living hell,” Dr. Halpern said in an interview. She said that while girls are better readers and get better grades, and boys are more likely to have reading disabilities, that does not mean that educators should use the group average to design different classrooms. “It’s simply not true that boys and girls learn differently,” she said. “Advocates for single-sex education don’t like the parallel with racial segregation, but the parallels are there. We used to believe that the races learned differently, too.”

<snip>

While some studies have found better outcomes from single-sex schools, the article said, the purported advantages disappear when outcomes are corrected for pre-existing differences. For example, Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, a school whose high college admissions rates were praised this year by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, was subsequently criticized by the scholar Diane Ravitch as having test results that were actually lower than average on basic skills.