Explain why the single sex experiment at James Lyng High School worked positively for both girls and boys.
(1) James Lyng High School serves one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Montreal. Many of its students are visible minorities, and many are from single-parent homes. Until a few years ago, it had all the problems of a typical inner-city school. Boys acted out and got in trouble; girls got pregnant. Academic achievement was low, and the dropout rate was sky-high.(2) Then the principal, Wayne Commeford, split the school into single-sex classes. Girls have female teachers, boys male teachers for their core classes. Today, the school is a different place. Absenteeism has fallen by two-thirds. Test scores have improved by 15 percentage points. Twice as many kids are going on to postsecondary school. And the pregnancy rate has dropped from 15 percent to almost zero.(3) “The impact of gender-based classes has been just about equal for both genders,” Mr. Commeford says. “Girls learn with a sequential, more methodical approach. And they don’t have to worry that if they speak up too much or seem to have the answers, they won’t be invited to the right parties on the weekend.” Girls’ self-esteem issues are built right into the curriculum.(4) The boys’ self-esteem gets a boost, too. For the boys, who often don’t have positive male role models in their lives, the impact of a male teacher can be powerful. In single-sex classes, there’s less need to project a macho self-image and remind each other that doing homework isn’t cool. “They feel a lot less threatened,” says Mr. Commeford.(5) The benefits of single-sex schooling are among the most hotly debated topics in education today. It started back in the early ‘90s, when people argued that the schools were shortchanging girls, who shied away from math and science. Then the focus switched to boys, who, as we all know, as dropping out like flies. In Ontario , for instance, more than 30 percent of boys don’t graduate from high school.(6) Can it be that schools shortchange both boys and girls? Yes, argues Leonard Sax, who’s written a potent new book called Why Gender Matters. It argues that girls and boys are hardwired so differently that trying to educate them in the same way - even in the same classroom - is a big mistake.(7) “Boys and girls learn differently,” he argues. “Girls are just as good in math as boys and boys are just as good in reading as girls - providing you teach them differently. That doesn’t mean they both cannot excel.”
(8) Dr. Sax, a family physician and psychologist who practices in Maryland , has many fans in Canada He cites a cascade of research that shows the many ways boys and girls differ, from how their brains develop to how they handle stress. Little boys don’t hear as well as girls. They see colour differently. Many of them are years behind the girls in readiness to read. Boys enjoy risky and dangerous play; girls dislike it. Boys like to shout out the answer first; girls want to understand the reasons why. And on and on.(9) All these differences, says Dr. Sax, have consequences in the classroom. Take reading instruction, which, he contends, starts way too early for many boys. “Kindergarten isn’t about finger painting now; it’s about reading. But boys’ language areas develop more slowly, he says. “The whole elementary curriculum has been perverted.”
(10) Trying to teach an active but unready little boy to read is torture for the boy. He won’t learn to read, but he’ll probably learn that he’s a behaviour problem and a dummy. “Boys disengage. They decide school’s not for them. Once they develop those beliefs, they are very difficult to shake.”(11) By high school, the gender divide is solidly entrenched. Girls like to read; boys don’t. This chasm is reinforced by the curriculum. Teachers, who are mostly female, teach the books they like, which are not the books that boys like. Boys like action stories, with brave male heroes and gore and guts. They do not like books by Margaret Atwood. (12) Girls lose out in different ways. “We have fewer girls going into physics and computer science than we did 20 years ago,” says Dr. Sax. “We lose girls at every stage in the pipeline.” One reason is the male-oriented way these subjects are typically taught. “A girl looks at the physics class and sees all these boys jumping up and shooting out their answers, and she says, ‘Maybe I’ll take French.’”(13) Another reason is that, in co-ed* settings, girls get more girlie in their interests and behaviour, and vice-versa. You can see the results in any mixed high school. The advanced French class is 80 percent girls, the advanced computer science class 90 percent boys. “That’s the irony of co-education,” says Dr. Sax. “It reinforces gender stereotypes.”
Explain why the single sex experiment at James Lyng High School worked positively for both girls and boys.
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