Feminisism is to the educational "boy crisis" what "neo-conservatism" is to global warming.

As a feminist, I understand Broadsheet's repulsion by the new ruling. As a sixth grade teacher in a low-income school, however, I honestly support it. Never would I have thought I'd be saying this two years ago, but after having spent time amidst so many raging hormones and easily distractible kids, I'm all for single-sex education if it's done well and if it's by choice. In a school of all boys, my sixth grade boys would have opportunities to explore things that American culture currently prohibits them from doing: taking dance classes, playing the flute, reading books about girls. And if there were no boys to be computer nerds, some of my girls would have to fill that role. In middle school, my students are so constrained by their obsession with gender roles that it really detracts from their education. I remember vowing never to ask a question in 8th grade algebra again after the boys in the back row made fun of me for asking too many questions, and I see the same thing happening with my girls today. It would be a disservice to my students to assume without having been in a classroom that a single-gender classroom or school would automatically be detrimental.

I'm amazed at how willing(desperate) feminists have been to jump on and herald a *single* piece of research done at a think tank that nobody had ever heard of before. Everyone I've read who opposes single-sex education links back to the same study. If the entire evidence behind boys difficulties in school was based on a single study done by some obscure think tank...well, you all know how you'd respond.

Utilizing single sex education does not equal dismantling Title IX either.

I just LOVE the smell of hypocrisy in the morning...

1. You say you're "reasonably into the findings of Carol Gilligan" that boys and girls can have different ways of learning. If this is true, then aren't same-sex classes, at least part of the time, warranted? Same-sex classes for girls have been pushed for a long time.

2. You say that the "boy crisis" has been officially debunked. But the article you link to simply says that boys are doing better than boys were doing years ago. It refers to the "fact" that girls continue to do better than boys on almost every measure. This has been true for years -- girls get higher grades, a higher proportion go to college, they present far fewer discipline problems, are far less likely to get sidetracked into "special education", and even though girls get pregnant and boys don't, they are less likely to drop out. In short, the link does not say what you say it does, and same-sex classes are pushed by people who (unlike you) are not satisfied to sit back and let this disparity continue.

. . . when the percentage of female college students is 57% heading toward 60%, and the percentage of male college students is 43% headed toward 40% ?????

Can you wrap your minds around the fact that there is no way to use casuistry to explain that away?

The author writes:

Lately the so-called boy crisis in public schools has become every lazy media outlet's topic du jour, fueling the perception that girls get better college preparation than boys.

I read a lot and listen to a great deal of media news, and funny how I haven't noticed this being any kind of "topic du jour". Au contraire, it was picked up around six months ago and has been ignored ever since.

But what is your problem with acknlowledging that just maybe females are not the only members of society who encounter problems?

As a matter of fact, a high percentage of Broadsheet writing suggests quite directly that males have many problems that Broadsheet writers wish they didn't have. But when someone suggests devoting any resources toward helping to end some of the problems that males have, Broadsheet writers are more or less unanimouslly opposed.

This reeks of sexism -- exactly the kind of sexism that Broadsheet writers have devoted column-miles to combatting.

When it's clearly to their advantage to end sexism, that is. The rest of the time, forget about it!

aren't we really talking about a much more far-reaching and general educational crisis? students of all stripes are let down by the public education system, especially if they are unlucky enough to live in an area that is even the tiniest bit lacking in the wealth dept.

There is a huge array of skin colors, but for some reason we *pinker* brown folks have this disabling need to simplify the whole business into black and white. Learning styles have a similarly nuanced spectrum, so let's not disable ourselves and our children by trying to simplify it into male and female.

There are so many different ways of learning - almost none of them fostered by being yammered at by an authority figure at the front of a classroom - and I don't think you actually solve any problems by taking 70 kids and sticking 35 boys in a classroom with one teacher and 35 girls in a different classroom with a different teacher. Do you really think there would have to be *boys* in the back row bullying people? Girls are arguably worse. What if we don't *have* back rows of classrooms? What if we put smaller groups of students with a similar cocktail of learning styles into classrooms with teachers who were good at mixing that particular cocktail?

If more of the affluent families would put their kids in public school and volunteer on the school board instead of segregating them in private schools, we might actually accomplish something with this system.

had various left organizations not challenged every attempt for inner city public schools to try single sex alternatives - including the Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem, then perhaps the department of education would never had needed to make this ruling. And let's face it, no one complains when rich kids pay thousands to go to single sex schools such as The Andrews School (girls) or Chatham Hall (girls) or Blue Ridge School (boys) or Bridgton Academy (boys), and these are the kids who need it the least, but when kids who are really struggling - poor kids who may get very little support at home and are stuck in horrific schools that are more asembly lines for failure, when these kids get a chance at an experiemntal academy - what does NOW and the ACLU have to say: bad, worse and no dice!

As to whether these schools makes a difference is besides the point: if the left can recognize and articulate that women are empowered by wearing a burka in an effort to stave off sexual tension between the sexes, they should at least respect secular attempts that aim for the same concept.