Really. About South Carolina’s leading position in single-sex public education programs (South Carolina has 70 of these programs around the state, while there are 363 nationwide):
For example, Chadwell explains, research shows boys don’t hear as well as girls, so teachers of all-boys classes often use microphones. And because boys’ attention spans tend to wander, incorporating movement in a lesson, like throwing a ball to a student when he’s chosen to answer a question, can keep them focused.
In one recent boys’ class, a group of gangly seventh-graders sprawled on the floor around a giant vinyl chart, using skateboard parts and measuring tape to learn pre-algebra. In a different school a few miles away, middle school girls interviewed each other, then turned their surveys about who’s shy and who has dogs into fractions, decimals and percentages. Classical music played softly in the background.
Teachers in all-girls classes say they’ve learned to speak more softly, because their students can take yelling more personally than boys. And the educators gear their lessons to what students like: assigning action novels for boys to read or allowing girls to evaluate cosmetics for science projects.
“Boys like the activities. They like moving around. They like something dramatic,” said Becky Smythe, who teaches all-boys and all-girls English and history at Hand Middle in Columbia, which launched single-gender classes this year in its sixth grade. The school plans to expand the program to seventh grade next year.
Boys like action; girls like relationships and cosmetics. Boys do things; girls talk about things. Boys are tough and active; girls are sensitive and emotional.
Sounds like somebody decided that what middle-school kids really needed was a good dose of gender-role conformity. Which is pretty much what you get when you get public schools instituting single-sex curricula. From a complaint filed by the ACLU challenging Louisiana’s single-sex public school curriculum on the basis of gender inequity:
Mr. Murphy briefly outlined the differences in instruction that would be given to girls and to boys.
For instance, girls would receive character education and be subject to high expectations both academically and socially. Girls would be taught math through “hands-on” approaches. Field trips, physical movement, and multisensory strategies would be incorporated into girls’ classes. Girls would act as mentors for elementary school girls.
On the other hand, boys’ teachers would teach and discuss “heroic” behavior and ideas “that show adolescents what it means to truly ‘be a man.’ Boys’ classes would include consistently applied discipline systems and offer tension release strategies. Boys’ classes would also feature more group assignments.
Ann wrote a bit about this issue last year, when the Bush Administration announced that it was easing Title IX restrictions on single-sex education so that federal funding could be used to develop new single-sex programs under No Child Left Behind (the abstinence-only boondoggle can’t last forever, after all, and it’s much more efficient to hold girls back if they’re separated from the boys, who can get a real education). (Sheelzebub did a guest-post here, too, but I’m not sure the link will work. The post was dated 10/31, though, so it will appear at the top of the archives for October 2006).
Girls do very well in single-sex private schools and colleges, but those schools are noted for their rigorous educational standards. Well, at least the schools which are committed to actually educating girls and women, rather than preparing them for a life of second-class citizenship and submission to their fathers and husbands. And it appears from the description in the first blockquote that the South Carolina system is more in the latter category than the former.