News & Reporting

This week's New York Times Magazine featured an excellent article on single-sex education, a topic that has shifted to the limelight in public debate after a Georgia school board unanimously decided last week to convert its public classrooms to single-sex next fall. While it's debatable whether their plan will go through (most of the county's parents and teachers decry their absence in the decision-making process), the idea has nonetheless raised new discussions about gender and justice in U.S. public education.

At the center of these discussions stands Leonard Sax, a family physician who began espousing the benefits of single-sex schools after studying the neurological differences between males and females. While Sax does not support the Georgia school board's decision (he believes parents should be given a choice to enroll their children in sex-segregated classrooms), he nonetheless continues to campaign for more single-sex classrooms across the country. Sax founded the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education in 2002, and claims that there are now 366 U.S. public schools that are sex-segregated. Many of these schools have significantly benefited from the set-up, seeing higher test scores, less misbehavior in the classroom, and more parental support and investment.

The primary benefit of sex-segregated classrooms, argues Sax, is that the classroom can be tailored to fit each gender's biologically based learning method. Sax has concluded that the environment of most public classrooms is not conducive to boys' intellectual growth; he points to the "feminization" of curriculum and teaching methods as one reason why so many young men drop out of the learning experience (a concern he popularized in his 2007 book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men).

Another group of educators espouse the benefits of single-sex education, but do not root their arguments in what some have called Sax's "gender ...

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