by Fatima Goss Graves, Senior Counsel
and Jocelyn Samuels, Vice President for Education and Employment
National Women’s Law Center
The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer ...
Boys don’t hear as well as girls, which means that an instructor needs to speak louder in order for the boys in the room to hear her; and ... boys’ visual systems are better at seeing action, while girls are better at seeing the nuance of color and texture.
You may think that we’re quoting from some educational primer left over from the 1950s. If only that were the case. Instead, these descriptions come from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, which had a lengthy piece on single sex schools. The article lavished considerable attention on the theories of Leonard Sax, who founded something called the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education — an organization that encourages schools to solve their educational problems by devising sex-segregated programs, classrooms, and schools based on unproven stereotypes about boys and girls.
Sax spends much of his time emphasizing selected developmental and brain research about boys and girls. But most experts agree that the evidence shows nothing about the likely educational achievement of boys and girls, much less justifies Sax’s boosterism about single sex programs. For example, there may be differences in male and female brain size, but that does not mean that boys and girls need different learning environments. What’s more, even where there are differences between boys and girls on average, there are too many students who — as individuals — will deviate from Sax’s supposed “norm.” Sax would have schools exclude from all-boy classrooms even those girls who could do better with cooler room temperatures, and from all-girl programs boys who prefer a cooperative, “warmer,” learning style.