Same Sex Classrooms

The New York Times Magazine has a long article on single sex classrooms (it will be in this Sunday’s paper). I find it to be not as good as this article in the Boston Globe last fall (which I talk about here). The basic idea is that differences have been found between the sexes in learning in a few areas, but the difference is usually very small–much smaller than the differences between individuals. The single sex advocates play up these differences and also cherry pick studies, such as:

Leonard Sax represents the essential-difference view, arguing that boys and girls should be educated separately for reasons of biology: for example, Sax asserts that 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 that boys’ visual systems are better at seeing action, while girls are better at seeing the nuance of color and texture.

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Among the differences Sax notes between boys and girls: Baby boys prefer to stare at mobiles; baby girls at faces. Boys solve maze puzzles using the hippocampus; girls use the cerebral cortex. Boys covet risk; girls shy away. Boys perform better under moderate stress; girls perform worse.

but then when the studies are looked at you find (the second piece is from the Globe article):

For instance, Sax initially built his argument that girls hear better than boys on two papers published in 1959 and 1963 by a psychologist named John Corso. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent a fair amount of energy examining the original research behind Sax’s claims. In Corso’s 1959 study, for example, Corso didn’t look at children; he looked at adults. And he found only between one-quarter and one-half of a standard deviation in male and female hearing thresholds. What this means, Liberman says, is that if you choose a man and a woman at random, the chances are about 6 in 10 that the woman’s hearing will be more sensitive and about 4 in 10 that the man’s hearing will be more sensitive. Sax uses several other hearing studies to make his case that a teacher who is audible to boys will sound too loud to girls. But Liberman says that if you really look at this research, it shows that girls’ and boys’ hearing is much more similar than different. What’s more, the sample sizes in those studies are far too small to make meaningful conclusions about gender differences in the classroom. The “disproportion between the reported facts and Sax’s interpretation is spectacular,” Liberman wrote on his blog, Language Log.

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In 2000, psychologist Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College reviewed a range of studies of cognitive abilities in areas in which you might expect to find sex differences, such as problem solving, computation, and spatial and verbal abilities. She found that differences were so slight as to be inconsequential. Cognitively, there is far more variation within each gender than there is between boys and girls.

Looking for explanations for the apparent boy-girl divide in math and science performance, some experts and numerous newspaper and magazine articles have seized on the idea that boys are biologically programmed to focus on objects, predisposing them to math and understanding systems, while girls are programmed to focus on people. This idea was based on a study of day-old babies done by British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in 2003. Baron-Cohen surveyed 100 babies and found that the boys looked at mobiles longer and the girls looked at faces longer.

His study, however, has since been attacked as unreliable by Elizabeth Spelke, a Harvard psychology professor. In an article in American Psychologist, she pointed out that the experiment lacked critical controls against experimenter bias. Female and male infants were propped up in a parent’s lap and shown, side by side, an active person or an inanimate object. Since newborns can’t hold their heads up independently, their visual preferences could easily have been determined by the way their parents held them.

In fact, there’s a vast scientific literature showing that male and female infants respond equally to people and objects.

Sax makes fun of the notion that his ideas are sexist:

Sax told me that in 2005, he delivered a lecture at a conference at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. When the next speaker, Michael Younger, of Cambridge University, took the lectern, Sax says Younger threw down his speech and said, “I’m going to depart from my prepared remarks because I’m so annoyed by the sexist rubbish I just heard from Dr. Sax. Dr. Sax is trying to tell us that boys draw action and girls draw stasis. He might as well have said: ‘Boys are active, girls are passive. Boys should go out and have jobs, girls should stay home and have babies.’ ” While Sax, a gadfly, enjoys telling this story, Younger calls it “a fiction,” though he does concede “that certain aspects of Sax’s work suggest an essentialism about boys and girls which is not borne out by reality as exposed in our own research.”

really how can you say things like this are not sexist:

On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen’s young-adult novel “Hatchet.” Bender’s voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, “don’t want to be parents. They want to be their kids’ friends.” Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, “Are you going to make it, brother?” Then he kept reading. “ ‘The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .’ What’s abating, gentlemen?” The protagonist of “Hatchet” survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you’re out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.

Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay’s fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of “Always Sisters” and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you’re doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.

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Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by soft-spoken women who bore” boys).

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David Chadwell, one of Sax’s disciples and the coordinator of Single- Gender Initiatives at the South Carolina Department of Education, explained to me the ways that teachers should teach to gender differences. For boys, he said: “You need to get them up and moving. That’s based on the nervous system, that’s based on eyes, that’s based upon volume and the use of volume with the boys.” Chadwell, like Sax, says that differences in eyesight, hearing and the nervous system all should influence how you instruct boys. “You need to engage boys’ energy, use it, rather than trying to say, No, no, no. So instead of having boys raise their hands, you’re going to have boys literally stand up. You’re going to do physical representation of number lines. Relay races. Ball tosses during discussion.” For the girls, Chadwell prescribes a focus on “the connections girls have (a) with the content, (b) with each other and (c) with the teacher. If you try to stop girls from talking to one another, that’s not successful. So you do a lot of meeting in circles, where every girl can share something from her own life that relates to the content in class.”

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While Sax rejects the notion that he is a gender essentialist — according to Sax’s own definition, “a gender essentialist is a derogatory term that arose in the 1970s to define someone who is an idiot, or a Republican, or both, who does not understand that gender is socially constructed” — he does say that “human nature is gendered to the core” and that “all that happens when you take a toy gun away from your son and give him a doll instead is that you tell him, ‘I don’t like the person that you are and I wish you were more like your sister, Emily.

Really, you teach boys by talking about hunting and girls by talking about cooking and dishwashing; you teach boys by using action and girls by relating? It’s straight out of the 1950’s. About the only good that might come out of this is the idea that children do not all learn in the same way and we need to take that into acount.

This paragraph in the Globe article summarizes it well:

Of course, it would be naive and even harmful to pretend there are no differences between boys and girls. Boys, for example, are more vulnerable to autism and dyslexia – and teachers and parents need to be alert to that fact. But there’s a mountain of evidence to show that gender is the wrong lens through which to view education policies and practice. Some kids learn best visually, others verbally; some do best in “boot-camp” type settings, while others thrive in informal classrooms with lots of freedom. But science and aptitude surveys tell us that gender isn’t a helpful way to sort students into those groups.

If you want to know what this is really all about, look at this:

Nearly everyone at T.Y.W.L.S. acknowledges that often parents’ most pressing concern when enrolling their 11-year-old daughters is sheltering those girls from sexualized classrooms and sexualized streets. “Harlem’s a very intense environment,” says Drew Higginbotham, T.Y.W.L.S.’s assistant principal, who lives in the neighborhood. “You’re constantly needing to prove yourself physically, to prove yourself sexually. Parents, when they come to our school, they sort of exhale deeply. You can hear them thinking to themselves, I can see my daughter here and she’s going to be O.K. for six hours a day.” Sax is not above or beyond this kind of thinking, either. In fact, after a nearly-two-hour conversation filled with scientific jargon and brains, he told me, perhaps wishfully, that really the most important reason to send a child to a single-sex high school was that those kids still go on dates. “Boys at boys’ schools like Old Farms in Connecticut, or Saint Albans in Washington, D. C., will call up girls at Miss Porter’s in Connecticut, at Stone Ridge in Maryland, and they will ask the girl out, and the boy will drive to the girl’s house to pick her up and meet her parents. You tell kids at a coed school to do this, and they’ll fall on the floor laughing. But the culture of dating is much healthier than the culture of the hookup, in which the primary form of sexual intimacy is a girl on her knees servicing a boy.”