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Colorado to get its first only single-sex public school - for girls
Submitted by mens_issues on Tue, 2010-01-05 06:04
Article here. So the Denver Public School system is finally going to start a single-sex public school. Did they do something for boys and their lagging performance (particularly in reading and writing) in the feminised school system by creating a school just for them? Of course not! The first school will be for girls only. Excerpt:
'Following a growing nationwide trend toward single-gender classroom education, the first all-girls public school in Colorado will open next year in Denver.
In 2002, only 11 U.S. public schools offered single-gender classrooms. Today, at least 547 public schools offer single-sex classes, according to the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education. At least 91 of those schools are single-gender schools.
The surge comes three years after a federal rule said single-sex classrooms weren't discriminatory and as emerging research suggested that girls' and boys' brains develop differently.
Girls Athletic Leadership School, or GALS, was approved at a Denver board meeting this month. The charter school will open with sixth- and seventh-graders and grow to include eighth through 12th grades.
"We know that girls focus on academics more when they're in an all-girls setting, simply put, because we are taking away a large social distraction, especially in middle school," said Elizabeth Wolfson, founder of the school, which will be in south-central Denver.
...
"The idea is to take girls to a place where they can deconstruct what it is like to be a girl," Bowar said.
The next move, she said, is to create a similar program for boys.'
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Comments
Creeping segregation
Note the article says the "next step" is to do the same thing for boys. This of course will create a "separate but equal" situation all over again based now on sex rather than ethnicity. I have a feeling once the ball gets rolling, soon most classrooms in the country will be single-sex by about 2020.
However as we know, "separate is inherently unequal," but that isn't stopping the gender separatists. "It's different though," they say. "It's boys and girls, not blacks and whites. So, it's different." Yeah, sure it is. I recall in the 50s the push was to de-segregate along both racial and gender lines and this was resisted heavily on both fronts. Yet now, we are going back to it, all in less than 70 years, only much more quietly and of course, with the best of intentions (for girls, anyway).
But the Taleban would heartily approve, I am sure.
Single gender classrooms
I actually support single gender classrooms.
I think the male and female brains are so different that it would be efficient and beneficial to have different learning situations for both genders.
Of course curricula, assignments and assessments would need to be tailored to fit the needs of boys, so it is not just the same ol' female curricula and teaching methods being spewed by a male teacher.
Perhaps the rules don't have to be so rigid that they would forcibly exclude any gender from enrolling in the class, but they would definitely promote the leaning styles of either boys or girls.
I do see your point of getting too 'separatist', and the need to watch to make sure that one gender does not get better treatment than the other. But IF both genders are benefiting, I don't see a problem.
Of course, I would never trust public schools to be in charge of such a task, as they have no interest in boys and are run by females from the ground up.
But if a group of professional men got together and opened up a private school for boys based on masculine traits, I would totally consider sending my boys there.
More...
I got so focused on my reasons for supporting single gender classrooms, that I forgot to comment on my outrage that they started by making a girls' school.
Boys are so far behind in school that they should have been given the first shot, but of course we are talking about public schools, which seem to cater to girls.
See why I wouldn't even trust them to run a boys' school? They don't even realize there is a problem.
My guess is...
... it'll be a long time before you see the "separate but eqaul" boys' school in that district. They'll say there's budget issues and the girls' school will stay open indefinitely without a matching boys' school. So in either scenario, who is getting the shaft? You got it.