Separate but more equitable?
Are single-gender schools the answer to Guilford County's racial achievement gap?
School board Vice Chairman Amos Quick at least sees them as a solution and one Georgia system plans to go exclusively to that approach. Read about it here.
For reasons that are not altogether clear, single-sex schools have, in some cases, produced dramatic results, for boys and girls..
We're working on an editorial that explores the growing trend nationwide and speculates whether it might make a difference here.
Comments (1)
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Hats off to Amos!
It seems to me that if what we are really primarily concerned about is quality education for children (this is not necessarily a rhetorical question), we should not be afraid to think outside the bounds of traditional education and we should be willing to embrace new ideas (or in this case, old ideas, as the article referenced below states that before the late 1800's most schools were single-sex).
The John Locke Foundation's "Carolina Journal" has an article about this topic in its most recent edition. (You can go to www.carolinajournal.com) According to the article, the change to single-sex education is working not only in Nashville, but also in Seattle. Indeed, the improvement seems dramatic. The outcomes in these schools have been repeated in England as well. Our neighbors in South Carolina have even gone so far as to create an Office of Single-Gender Initiatives, and are expected to have more than 200 single-gender programs up and running next year.
The evidence is that boys and girls learn better in single-sex environments, where they don't have to worry about distractions that follow when boys and girls are together. This seems almost intuitive (and I don't intuit a lot).
One of the biggest criticism of modern public education is that it focuses on socialization instead of education. We are more concerned about having the right number of black, white, rich, poor, etc. in a schol than we are about whether they are really learning anything. We need to put first things first, and put kids in an environment where they learn.
Amos, keep thinking.
Posted on July 15, 2008 3:16 PM