{ the education review }


tion are tailored to the distinct ways in which boys and girls learn, she says — an argument that is at the core of the dispute over single-sex education.


ing columns of numbers. “Keith and Shawn versus Dionte and


T


River,” Ahmad announces. The four boys stand, counting fingers poised, as Ahmad writes 56 plus 20 on the board. Dionte and River consult each other in a furious whisper. River counts on his fingers, and Dionte raises his hand. “Seventy-six!” he shouts. When


Ahmad nods, the boys high-five each other. Keith and Shawn, eliminated from the round, sit down. The teacher calls the next set of competitors, who stand and whoop, pumping themselves up. Upstairs, in Pointer’s classroom, the


girls are reviewing the same material, adding two-digit numbers. Like her counterpart, Pointer sometimes ener- gizes the girls’ lessons with competition (which experts say is particularly effec- tive with boys). And Ahmad sometimes engages her boys by using collaboration (which is said to be especially motivat- ing for girls). The girls sit sedately on the carpet


and wait for instructions. “The first person to solve the equation will get a point for their house,” says Pointer, who awards the groups “house points” toward a prize. Pointer writes 16 plus 10 on the board, and three girls’ hands shoot up simultaneously. They wave ex- citedly (but quietly), hoping to be the first to get the teacher’s attention and win the competition.


O


ne of the main advantages of a single-sex classroom is that the differences be- tween boys and girls can be exploited to the benefit of


both, says Leonard Sax, a psychologist, physician and a leading proponent of single-sex education, who will conduct a professional development workshop with the Imagine Southeast teachers in mid-August. For example, studies have


16 ThE WaShInGTon PoST MaGazInE | august 8, 2010


he boys in Ahmad’s class are totally jazzed by a math game one winter afternoon. Two boys are paired against a team of two others in add-


Ginene Pointer teaches math to her all-girls first grade at Imagine Southeast. Educators are divided on separating students by gender.


shown that girls have sensitive hearing and may be intimidated by teachers they perceive as yelling at them, Sax says. Girls also are easily distracted by


boys, who have a harder time sitting still and being quiet, Sax says. In an all-boys class, the boys may be loud and wiggly, but they’re learning. As long as there are no girls around to be distracted, he ar- gues, why not let them wiggle?


This whole Mars


versus Venus idea that our minds


are from different planets is really inaccurate.”


“ In his 2005 book, “Why Gender Mat-


ters,” Sax cites a 1999 Virginia Tech study, where researchers found that boys’ brains were developmentally years behind girls’ when it came to qualities such as fine motor skills. That put the boys at an im- mediate disadvantage in school, where many are frustrated by trying to read and write before they’re ready, Sax says. As a result, he says, many boys often check out mentally and underperform. “At what age do we find the single-sex


format has the greatest capacity to not only boost educational achievement but to change the academic trajectory?” he asks rhetorically. “The earlier, the better.” But Lise Eliot, a professor of neuro-


science at the Chicago Medical School, doesn’t accept the arguments for single- gender schools. “I’m a neuroscientist, and this claim that boys and girls learn differently because their brains are dif- ferent is just not supported by real scientific data,” she says. Eliot, the author of “Pink Brain, Blue


Brain,” says she assumed she’d find a slew of powerful differences between girls’ and boys’ brains but grew frus- trated by the research. “If you put all the research together, you are very under-


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