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A rural Georgia county plans to dump its plan to segregate all its schools by gender after a groundswell of opposition from parents who were outraged that they weren't consulted ahead of time, a school board member said Wednesday.

Greene County school officials will formally drop the plan at an April 14 meeting in favor of asking parents, teachers and staff members for their input, said the board member, Velicia Cobb.

The four-school county may decide to move forward with some single-sex schools as part of future plans, Cobb said.

"I think this is what should have been done first," said Cobb, who voted in favor of the conversion last month despite reservations. "Whenever you're trying to implement a plan like that at that magnitude, you need parents' buy-in for it to be successful."

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls.

The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the school’s principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foley’s lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools.

Students in all of Greene County's regular public schools will be separated by gender starting next fall, a move educators hope will improve rock-bottom test scores and reduce teen pregnancy and discipline rates in the small, rural system.

The school board approved the measure last week, drawing vocal protests from some students, parents and community members. It exempts only a charter school, which is public but operates independently from the rest of the system and has a limited attendance zone.

School officials say they need drastic change to save the low-performing district from slipping further behind the rest of the state.

"This school district is in bad shape," said Superintendent Shawn McCollough. "We've made very positive incremental steps in the last two years. Our kids need help faster than what we're doing, and that's why we're moving to a faster, more innovative program."

Districts nationwide have been scrambling to implement single-sex education, since federal officials finalized rules to ease the process in 2006. But officials in Greene County, east of metro Atlanta along I-20, say they believe they are the first in the country to convert the entire district to a single-gender model.

Leonard Sax, head of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, said he knows of no other public school district that has switched entirely to single-gender classrooms.

Federal law allows single-sex classrooms or schools but parents must also have the option of a publicly funded coeducational experience for their children, Sax said.

"This is the worst kind of publicity for our movement," he said. "It misses the whole point. Our movement is about choice, about giving parents a choice. One size does not fit all. Even a small school district needs to provide choice."

Educators agree that boys and girls learn differently, but do they learn better in single-sex classes? Single-sex education has become a "hot topic" among educators striving to address achievement declines, especially in the middle school years. Since the United States Department of Education confirmed the legality of single-sex classes in public schools in 2006, the number of single-sex classes and schools has increased dramatically and the options continue to grow in popularity. Debating Single-Sex Education offers a timely and detailed summary of the issues surrounding single-sex education. Eight veteran educators provide research-based findings on single-sex classes in the United States and Africa. This book presents a brief historical summary of single-sex classes in the United States. Other features include recent qualitative case studies, interviews with students, and statistical evidence of the effects of single-sex classes on student achievement. The final chapter synthesizes the common findings among these studies and the implications for practice in schools.

Winder-Barrow Middle School students don't yet have standardized test scores to prove whether a pair of single-gender classes is helping them learn, but teachers, students and parents say the experiment is a success.

"It's like a normal class, but it's just girls," said Laquana Peppers, a student in Winder-Barrow's all-girl eighth-grade math class. "I think we get more done. There's more group work, more talking about math and more of my questions get answered."

This summer, when the Barrow County Board of Education voted to allow administrators at Winder-Barrow to schedule one all-boy and one all-girl eighth-grade math class, teachers and principals worried how students and parents would respond.

But in the first semester of single-gender classes, math grades improved, discipline referrals dropped and parents started to request that their children be included in a single-gender class.

Al Darby, an assistant principal at Winder-Barrow High School, is writing a dissertation on single-gender education for his doctoral program. He doesn't necessarily support single-gender charter schools or academies, but was convinced single-gender classes for problematic subjects - math, for instance - might give students a better chance to learn.

Boys. Yuck.

They are noisy, attention-grabbing and make you feel dumb if you ask a question.

"They get all crazy, and I get distracted," 10-year-old Darla Aquino said.

Celeta Stewart, her classmate, doesn't like the way boys act when teachers pair them with girls on projects.

"They talk to their friends, and you get stuck with the work," the 10-year-old said.

The view is a little different across the hall.

Girls. Ugh.

They bait you, and the teacher thinks you're the problem. They dominate the classroom and make it all girly.

"They want to talk to us, and we talk to them and they get us in trouble," said Klayton Diaz, 10.

"When you have girls, they're so distracting," 11-year-old Trae Blocker agreed. "They try to get you in trouble."

These fifth-grade boys and girls at Woodbridge Elementary are getting a chance this school year to see what happens in the classroom when distractions from the opposite sex disappear.

David Chadwell believes boys and girls can get through the awkward middle school years better when they're separated, learning in classrooms tailored to the learning styles of each gender.

As the country's first and only statewide coordinator of single-gender education, Chadwell is helping to make South Carolina a leader among public schools that offer such programs. About 70 schools offer the program now, and the goal is to have programs available to every child within five years, he said.

The theory is that by separating girls and boys - especially during middle school years typically marked by burgeoning hormones, self doubt and peer pressure - lessons can be more effective because they are in unique classroom settings.

School Puts Boys and Girls to a Test
Washington Mill Elementary experiments with single-gender classrooms
Article by Mike DiCicco, connectionnewspapers.com, September 12, 2007

Second-grader Adrienne Becker said she is finding it easier to speak up and to concentrate in class this year. This is not the result of some new medication.

"I can talk to my friends and work out what the problem is without any boys getting in the way and saying, ‘Whatcha doing?’" she reported. Adrienne is in one of four experimental single-gender classrooms being tried out at Washington Mill Elementary (in Alexandria, Virginia) this year. She said her classroom is considerably quieter.

Most schools reported high satisfaction rates with the gender-segregated classes, which they tried in hopes of emulating success seen at single-gender Catholic schools such as St. Xavier, Elder and St. Ursula Academy.

Advocates also pointed to growing psychological research pointing to biological differences in the way boys and girls learn.

But keeping boys and girls apart usually means smaller classes, fewer scheduling options and another teacher or two, said John Riehemann, principal of Lloyd Memorial High School in Erlanger.

Lloyd bucked the trend and expanded its program to include juniors as well as underclassmen, but Riehemann admitted it could easily fall victim to spending cuts in the future and adds an extra layer of complexity to scheduling.

Single-gender education gains ground as boys lag
Experts worry that coed classrooms geared to girls put their counterparts at a disadvantage
Article by Janine DeFao, San Francisco Chronicle, June 18, 2007

For more than a decade, the conventional wisdom has been that schools have shortchanged girls, who were ignored in the classroom as they lagged behind in math and science.

But now a growing chorus of educators and advocates for boys is turning that notion upside down.

Boys are the ones in trouble, they say. They are trailing girls in reading and writing, are more likely to get in trouble or be labeled as learning disabled, and are less likely to go to college.

The educators, citing emerging brain research, say that the two sexes learn differently and that schools are more geared to girls than to their ants-in-the-pants counterparts. But they are adopting strategies to help boys succeed, from playing multiplication baseball to handing out stress balls and setting up boys-only schools.

A School of Their Own
Educator, activist, author, and mother of two girls, Diana Meehan explains
why she believes in single-sex schooling
Interview, Teacher Magazine, June 12, 2007

Should girls be separated from boys in schools? Yes, says author Diana Meehan, whose book, Learning Like a Girl: Educating Our Daughters in Schools of Their Own, was released in May. The book details her research on how girls learn differently and her growing concern for the lack of girls’ voices in the classroom, both of which led Meehan to co-found the Archer School for Girls in 1995 in Los Angeles. Meehan’s work has been supported by the likes of Tom Hanks, Brooke Shields, and Arianna Huffington, but questioned by many who say single-sex education is outdated and anti-democratic. Meehan, who is also the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Women and Men at the University of Southern California, recently corresponded with Teacher Magazine, by e-mail, about gender and education.

Three years ago, Jeff Gray, the principal at Foust Elementary School in Owensboro, Ky., realized that his school needed help—and fast. Test scores at Foust were the worst in the county and the students, particularly the boys, were falling far behind. So Gray took a controversial course for educators on brain development, then revamped the first- and second-grade curriculum. The biggest change: he divided the classes by gender. Because males have less serotonin in their brains, which Gray was taught may cause them to fidget more, desks were removed from the boys' classrooms and they got short exercise periods throughout the day. Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings. Because boys have higher levels of testosterone and are theoretically more competitive, they were given timed, multiple-choice tests. The girls were given multiple-choice tests, too, but got more time to complete them. Gray says the gender-based curriculum gave the school "the edge we needed." Tests scores are up. Discipline problems are down. This year the fifth and sixth grades at Foust are adopting the new curriculum, too.

The Gurian Institute Training Division has worked with many schools around the country that have successfully implemented single sex classes within their coed schools, most often in core areas including language arts and math. We have also worked with many single sex schools, from preschool through grade 12. When teachers are well trained in the nature-based learning differences between boys and girls, these single sex environments have proven to help both boys and girls excel.

We are often asked which we think is better for kids, single sex or coed schools. In answer, we believe that when all teachers are trained in nature-based learning differences, performance has been shown to improve for both boys and girls whether they are in single sex or coed classes. Choosing the most effective option for a class, a school or a district is an important decision, and parents, teachers and administrators should all have a voice in the decision-making process.

"Boys and girls can often learn very well in traditional co-educational settings. At the same time, their inherent learning differences often make a separate sex environment very useful. My experience in the field tells me that both co-education and separate sex classrooms are needed, not one to the exclusion of the other." -Michael Gurian

To learn more about schools having success with single sex classes, read the results from:

Listen to Lieutenant Governor James (Duke) Aiona of Hawaii, a graduate of Saint Louis School in Honolulu, introduce Kathy Stevens to the faculty, January 12, 2007. Saint Louis is a Catholic Marianist school for young men.

"The pictures depict a girl's brain showing more activity during rest and a boy's brain shows less activity.

" 'Boys go here several times a day,' said Hadaway, a math teacher at the all-boys Riverside Military Academy, pointing to the boy's brain scan.

"Traditional education says 'Sit down, pay attention and do your work,' " said Hadaway. "And that's what turns boys off to school."

For information about other schools that have received training from the Gurian Institute, please click success.

The U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, announced the release of revised Title IX regulations for single sex classrooms and schools.

These new regulations amend existing regulations that implement Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibit sex discrimination in education programs or activities that receive federal funds.

"Research shows that some students may learn better in single-sex education environments," said Secretary Spellings. "The Department of Education is committed to giving communities more choices in how they go about offering varied learning environments to their students.

"These final regulations permit communities to establish single sex schools and classes as another means of meeting the needs of students. They also establish that enrollment in a single sex class should be a completely voluntary option for students and their families and they uphold the prohibitions against discrimination of Title IX. Every child should receive a high quality education in America and every school and district deserves the tools to provide it."

The new regulations do not require single-sex education, but make it easier for educators to offer, and parents and students to choose, single-sex educational opportunities while upholding nondiscrimination requirements. Enrollment in a single-sex class must be completely voluntary and a substantially equal coeducational class in the same subject must be provided.

Private single-sex schools are not subject to the requirement to provide a substantially equal school for students of the other sex. Public or private institutions of vocational education that receive Federal financial assistance are prohibited by the Title IX statute from operating single-sex schools, even at the elementary and secondary education level, and single-sex vocational schools are not permitted under these new regulations.

"Separate But Superior? A Review Of Issues And Data Bearing On Single-Sex Education"
Report by Gerald Bracey, Education Policy Research Unit, Arizona State University
November, 2006