Single-sex classroom at Parkway makes Today Show this morning
In case you missed it, this morning the Today show did a feature about single sex classrooms at Parkway’s Carman Trails Elementary. This was after a story we featured on Feb. 20 about the school. After the feature, during which they interviewed Carman Trails principal Chris Raeker and several students (”boys are weird,” offered one girl from an all-girls’ class) Matt Lauer interviewed Dr. Leonard Sax, president of the National Associaton for Single Sex Public Education, and Latifa Lyles, vice president of the National Organization for Women.
Proponents of single sex classrooms say that boys and girls learn differently and the same information can be taught to them in different ways. Critics fear that single sex classrooms leads to gender inequality.
St. Louis has a particularly vibrant history of single-sex education, specifically in the private high schools. I went to Cor Jesu, an all-girls private Catholic high school, and loved it. There, we focused on education and let our personalities hang out, and boys were something we worried about when we had to find a date for a dance.
What do you think?
Edited to add: Parkway’s website has a few other links about this story. Check it out here.
Is there strong data supporting that it makes a difference? Not saying there isn’t, I just would like to see it.
I only ask because when I look at our gifted education participation, boys and girls are equally represented.
However, when I look by date of birth, (especially in grades K through 3) children born immediately after the cutoff date, August 1, (August, September, and October) outnumber children born just before the cutoff date (May, June, July) by 233%.
And the significant differences do not apply only to gifted education, according to my queries on test scores, there is a glaring difference appearing on MAP test data for no other apparent reason other than birth month.
When some children enter Kindergarten, they are as much as 20% older then many of their peers. This effect appears to carry itself all the way in to college and beyond because of the exponential effects of mistakenly confusing physical and mental maturity with intelligence.
If we were to split classrooms, we may be better to served to look in to splitting the classrooms based on birth quarter in relation to the cutoff date, especially from Kindergarten through 3rd grade.
I have more data on this if anyone is interested. It is a project I have been working on for a couple of months now.
some stlouis public schools have single gender classrooms; I thought they worked out pretty well.