New York Times Death Spiral Watch

On Elizabeth Weil. Outsourced to Sara Mead--who could have written a very good magazine article on single-sex public schooling, but was not asked to do so:

The Problem with Gender-Based Education | New America Blogs: Yesterday's New York Times Magazine featured a very long article that's purportedly about single-sex public schooling, but is really about a narrower--and much more problematic--concept of gender-based education. Gender-based education is the notion that "Boys and Girls Learn Differently"... that recent neuroscience research shows significant difference in male a female brains and that as a result educators must employ different approaches in teaching male and female students. Unfortunately, many of the arguments for gender based education are bunk.....

Elizabeth Weil profiles Dr. Leonard Sax, a family doctor from Washington, D.C.'s Maryland suburbs and a leading advocate of gender-based schooling.... [S]he does a decent job in laying out some of the key critiques of Sax's work. Sax and Gurian exaggerate the neuroscience and get some of it flat-out wrong. Much of the science they do cite is primarily descriptive--it's not adequate to serve as a guide to making decisions about teaching or policy. And they ignore the fact that variation among both males and females often far exceeds average differences between the genders.

But, since the critiques don't appear until roughly halfway through a very long article--the first part of which reads like a puff piece on Dr. Sax--many readers may miss them.... Actual neuroscientists... aren't the ones banging the drum on gender-based education... caution against trying to draw practical implications.... Jay Geidd, one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying brain development in children (including gender differences) cautions that gender is much too crude a tool to differentiate educational approaches: the variation within each gender is often larger than the average difference between genders, and there's substantial overlap in the distributions....

There is pretty strong evidence that preschool-aged boys develop gross motor skills faster than girls do, while preschool-aged girls tend to have an advantage in language development. As a result, boys and girls are, on average, at different levels of language and motor development when they enter school. Sax and Gurian see this as one argument for separate sex, gender-based schooling. That might be reasonable if gender were the only source of variance in young children's learning. But it's not: Young children's development is highly variable. Some 5-year-old girls might lag many boys in language skills, and some boys' motor skills might lag those of their female peers. If one is really concerned about adjusting education to variations in children's development, increased customization and multi-age groupings in early elementary school, which allow teachers to group children who are developmentally similar, regardless of age, and children to progress at their own paces, are a far better solution than simply separating children by sex.

The appetite for single-sex and gender-based educational approaches is understandable... this country does a... particularly poor job of educating poor and minority boys....

Unfortunately, there's no evidence that the gender-based approaches work in improving student acheivement. Even if Sax and Gurian's didn't have such a weak basis in neuroscience, a basis in neuroscience isn't enough.... There's even evidence that some of their recommendations are wrong: For instance, Sax argues boys will do better in school if parents wait until they're 6 to enroll them in kindergarten--a practice known as kindergarten redshirting. But researchers have studied the effects of kindergarten redshirting and found no evidence it make a significnat difference....

No one disputes that single sex schooling can have benefits for some students--particularly for girls in math and science. And a single sex approach may also help educators to create the strong, shared culture and values we know highly effective schools have. But there are plenty examples of schools doing this in coed settings as well.... Wouldn't it be nice if the New York Times devoted at least as much attention to the strategies we know are working to educate students in these settings, as it has on a faux controversy about marginal gender-based educational approaches?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Comments

[jerry]

"No one disputes that single sex schooling can have benefits for some students--particularly for girls in math and science."

Thud.

"as it has on a faux controversy about marginal gender-based educational approaches?"

I think the faux controversy is in the blogs of those that apparently think that it's okay to have single sex classes for girls, but not for boys.... It's okay to say there's a girl crisis in schools, but it's not okay to discuss any sort of boy crisis in schools, because one might be asked to look again at the girl crisis, its reality, and how we've responded.

Sara agrees that we do poorly teaching poor and minority boys, but when someone tries to work on that issue, and someone else wants to write a newspaper article about it, well, it becomes all about some faux controversy about gender based schooling. Many of us think that kudos are due to anyone working on that issue, and on any paper that will publicize that.

Reality-based.... Reality-based.... Reality-based....

Just thought someone here should type that in now and again.

[polo]

I don't know much about the arguments over gender-split classes. I have a kid imminently facing the education machine and all the battling around it. So I don't understand why use this article to make gratuitous attacks on the NYT? Sure, I thought I would be reading a broader assessment of single-sex schooling...

[That's why.]

[Thorstein Veblen]

much of the difference between the sexes is quite clearly learned (cultural) though, so separating the sexes will just widen the gulf, and could result in other negative effects, such as the the guy from the 40-Year Old Version who "put (u know what) on a pedestal"

[Queequeg]

Didn't anyone in the NYT's editing process -- the writer, any of the editors -- think at some point, "This doesn't quite ring true."? I stopped reading the article shortly after I read a description of a boys' classroom that was relatively more rambunctions than a girls' classroom. If they had split classes by sex when I was an elementary school age boy, I would have wanted to be in that quieter girls' classroom. Are we to assume that no one -- absolutely no one -- in the editing process thought the same thing? That no one raised such an objection?

I'm shocked at the lack of empathy for children. It's evident everywhere. The Times had an article this weekend about reduced-price and free school lunches. In some schools, these lunches are sold separately, so the poor kids line up in one place and the not-poor kids line up in another. How could someone make a living as a school administrator and not see the cruelty of such an approach? There are professional school administrators who make good money and who can stand in a lunchroom and look at the separate food lines -- one for poor kids and one for kids who aren't poor -- and it never, ever occurs to them that there might be a stigma attached to standing in the poor kids' line.

Then we get the NYT Mag piece about separating boys and girls in elementary school, and apparently no one -- not any of the sources, nor the writer, nor the editors -- ever stops to wonder what it's like to be an introverted boy in a rowdy boys' class, or to be a tomboy in a demure girls' class.

[Elizabeth]

I actually thought the article was pretty good. It was clear to me that there were two distinctive and diametrically opposed arguments in favor of single sex, it was clear to me that Sax was a nutcase and it was clear to me that not a lot is actually understood about this.

I thought was an article that discussed a significant trend in education and raised a lot of questions about the assumptions behind it-- what more do you want?