This Week In Education: Richard Whitmire Gets The Last Word

One more thing about single-sex ed, this time from Richard Whitmire, USA Today editorial page editor and current prez of the Education Writers Association, who has written and thought a lot about the topic. His thoughts via email (emphasis is mine):

Weil's piece did an admirable job taking a tough look at the two sides of the brain research debate: Is there really sufficient evidence to justify these gender-based teaching techniques? But she missed the most astonishing part of the trend. The U.S. Department of Education unleashed this surge of experimentation with single-sex education without producing any research advising schools on how to do it successfully. What were they thinking?

This rush to experiment reflects the fact that educators are only beginning to realize how far boys have fallen behind in school -- and not just poor, minority boys, as Weil would have you believe. If done well, single-sex schools can help boys, but most of the schools I visit where boys perform as well as girls aren't single sex and they don't rely on gender/brain research as their guides. The keys to their success are refusing to give up on any child and watching over boys' verbal skills, which appear to be the source of the problem.

UPDATE: Here are some previous posts that reference Whitmire and boys (here, here). For a reprint of Whitmire's New Repubic piece that you didn't get fromme, go here (Boy Trouble).