From today's New York Times:

The Bush administration is giving public school districts broad new latitude to expand the number of single-sex classes, and even schools, in what is widely considered the most significant policy change on the issue since a landmark federal law barring sex discrimination in education more than 30 years ago.

Two years in the making, the new rules, announced Tuesday by the Education Department, will allow districts to create single-sex schools and classes as long as enrollment is voluntary. School districts that go that route must also make coeducational schools and classes of “substantially equal” quality available for members of the excluded sex.

The federal action is likely to accelerate efforts by public school systems to experiment with single-sex education, particularly among charter schools. Across the nation, the number of public schools exclusively for boys or girls has risen from 3 in 1995 to 241 today, said Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. That is a tiny fraction of the approximately 93,000 public schools across the country.

Unfortunately, some advocacy groups don't see it that way, and think it's more important to enact their ideological hobbyhorses on the lives of children than to let families decide what's best for their kids:

While the move was sought by some conservatives and urban educators, and had backing from both sides of the political aisle, a number of civil rights and women's rights groups condemned the change.

"It really is a serious green light from the Department of Education to re-instituting official discrimination in schools around the country," said Marcia Greenberger, a co-president of the National Women's Law Center.

[...]

Nancy Zirkin, vice president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella organization representing about 200 civil rights groups, said the new regulations "violate both Title IX and the equal protection clause of the Constitution."

"Segregation is totally unacceptable in the context of race," she said. "Why in the world in the context of gender would it be acceptable?"

It was all I could do to get past the first line quoted from the NYT. The idea that local school districts might need any kind of permission from the federal government is so unAmerican, and so bad, that it renders the rest of the discussion just about moot.

I always thought that the idea that separate-but-equal was inherently unequal was a crock. It can be but it doesn't have to. As long as people have a choice between single-sex and coed classes and schools, I think that's enough.

The idea of choice is being used disingenuously here. If all the boys at Horace Mann Elementary decide they want a boys-only school, sure, they have chosen. But the girls did not choose to have a girls-only school. Instead, a girls-only school will be forced upon then given the flight of boys to their new school. Now, of course, the girls could be given the option of busing, but then all those old issues come up: an hour on a bus just to attend a school that offers normal social interaction between the sexes.

I also hope that these new segregated classrooms are taught by teachers trained in the latest cognitive science regarding the differences in learning styles between boys and girls. Simply segregating sexes won't mean a better education.

Finally, I wonder who's going to pay for all the new classrooms and teachers. Anyone who teaches knows that space is the greatest commodity a teacher has in a school. If 7th grade English splits into boys-only, girls-only, and co-ed, then you'll need three extra teachers and three extra classrooms.

Why is it that the same people who oppose single-sex education advocate for same-sex marriage? And, to be fair, vice-versa?

Parents should be able to choose what they think is the best option for their children. Why is it that only the parents of relatively wealthy, privileged young women get to choose schools like Wellesley?

It's not as if girls-only schools were teaching only home economics and basket-weaving; or that boys-only schools all have ROTC units.

The more choice, the better, all the way around.

I've noticed that most of those people who are against single-sex education are usually against all-boys schools or classes, not all-girls classes. While I strongly resisted going to an all-girls jr/sr high school, I can see why some would like it and probably excel in such an environment. As long as enrollment is voluntary, I don't have a problem.

And with all due respect, this - "If all the boys at Horace Mann Elementary decide they want a boys-only school, sure, they have chosen. But the girls did not choose to have a girls-only school." - is disingenous as well. The liklihood of something like this scenario occuring is very small.

As an aside, why does the prevailing sentiment run along the lines of it's ok to screw public school parents out of any choices in their child's education? Do the anti-single sex and anti-voucher folks always know better than parents?

Becky, I don't think the prospect I described was disingenuous. The article in Erin's post states outright: "The Bush administration is giving public school districts broad new latitude to expand the number of single-sex classes, and even schools . . ." Clearly, part of the plan is to promote single-sex schools.

Thus, I take issue with Erin's final claim: "It seems to me that the premise behind single-sex public schooling centers on choice, not force, and that parents who choose it for their children are acting within a framework of constitutionally-protected free association, not segregation." This was the exact argument of those schools that still had not desegregated by the late 1970s: "We're not forcing black kids to go to separate schools. We're just freely associating our white children in separate schools." This situation left black kids in de facto segregated schools, unless they (or white kids from another district) were bused to mixed-race schools.

And Becky, the issue isn't really about "school choice" but about money -- property tax money, to be specific. No one opposes school choice, provided alternative schools are privately funded. It's when parents start asking for their property taxes to go to the same school their kids attend that the debate really gets heated. But no school choice advocate I've read has said that my wife and I shouldn't have to pay our property tax because we have no children. Or that Quakers should not be forced to fund the military if they oppose it. School choice raises messy tax issues that its advocates don't deal with openly. (And as it stands now, vouchers really only help the already privileged. Vouchers can't pay the tuition at a decent private school. So poor kids continue to get excluded from private schools, while middle and upper class kids take needed tax money from local school districts in the form of vouchers that go toward their private school tuitions. Walter Benn Michaels discusses this in his most recent book, *The Trouble With identity*.)

Ultimately, the question concerns our vision of education. Horace Mann saw universal public education as one strong force in the construction of a commonwealth, a community with a shared set of interests. I worry that "school choice" means the total fragmentation of the public school ethos into a bunch of disconnected, interest-group-dominated charter schools.

Separate classes for girls and boys makes a sort of sense given the research on how girls and boys learn differently (especially early on). But it could also fuel the fire for a whole slew of separatist schools: schools for Latino boys, schools for sexuality-questioning Italian-Jewish girls, schools for religious conservatives of color, schools for left-handed science-fiction fans, and so on.

I find it quite ironic that the same conservatives who hate identity politics when it comes to certain forms of ethnic or feminist or queer politics wind up finding identity politics quite palatable when it comes to galvanizing the "school choice" movement.

(Finally, there's really nothing comparable between gay marriage and school segregation. One problem with the gay-marriage movement is that it has let conservatives define it as "same-sex marriage," as opposed to "opposite-sex marriage." That makes gender the main concern of marriage. But of course, gender is not central to our notion of marriage -- which is why no conservatives complain that a mannish woman and a mannish man can get married. Instead, sexuality is central to marriage. From the standpoint of sexuality, married gays and married straights are both "same sexuality marriages" -- and from the standpoint of sexuality, all same-sexuality partners should be eligible for marriage.)

One more quick point:

If an institution receives public money, it is forbidden by law to discriminate on racial or sexual grounds.

So if you support state-funded single-sex schools, I don't want to hear you whinging about affirmitive action admissions policies at public universities. If a public school can discriminate on sexual terms, then a public university should be able to use race as an admissions category. (I oppose both, but hey, what's the point of logical consistency in America?)

alvin brings up a good point: funding. the whole "why shouldn't parents be able to choose" sounds fine until one asks "Who is going to pay for a buffet of schools so parents can have a choice?" school districts have problems funding the limited/no choice public system as it is. how will they fund this choice?

here's a piece of anecdotal evidence about a charter school in my area. the man who runs it hired members of his family to administrate the school. the school doesn't have enough books for its students, yet i'm sure the family gets their paychecks. public schools have textbook problems, but aren't charter schools supposed to be better? we should consider the benefits of choice, but we also have to consider the new problems choice will give us.

one problem with this whole idea of choice or school reform is that people want easy solutions to our educational problems when the problems are complex. but complex solutions can't be put into soundbites for politicians (of any flavor).

"If 7th grade English splits into boys-only, girls-only, and co-ed, then you'll need three extra teachers and three extra classrooms"...huh? If you have 90 students and 3 English teachers with 30 students each, then the incremental teacher requirement for this change would be *zero*.

The only case in which your 3X-teachers assertion applies would be if you have only one class section and one teacher to start with.

David, you're right; I wasn't thinking clearly (as usual!). At the same time, I imagine the school districts will have to pay for additional training for these teachers so that they learn how to teach single-sex classes. (Because, if you think the same teaching strategies will work for both, then there's no good reason to split students by sex. The only reason to segregate students sexually is to teach different material or teach the same material differently to each sex. Otherwise, we get into moronic justifications like, "Boys are a distraction to girls and vice versa." And then we open a can of worms, because Jerry and Joey could be a distraction to Gary and Marsha, but we wouldn't say they could each be given separate classrooms, right? So if we're talking about some vague notion of "distractability," then primary sex characteristics are a rather arbitrary criterion for segregation.)

David, though, imagines some perfect split. Given 90 7th graders and three teachers, with a 50/50 sex split: what if 8 of those students go single sex boys? Then you'll have one class of 8 and two classes of 41. Unless, that is, sex segregation comes down to a majority-rules vote, in which case the parents of 46 of those 7th graders will need to want single-sex ed. So then we have one class of 23 girls, one class of 23 boys, and one co-ed class of 45. Or what if the children of those 46 parents are all boys (but one)? Then we'll have a class of 45 boys, and classes of 22 and 23 girls (or we split the boys into two classes and the girls into one). Given that all research with which I'm familiar points to learning advantages in smaller classroom settings, we enter the realm of separate and un-equal.

Here's an analogy which, while imperfect, is, I think, nonetheless suggestive: Suppose we built cars the same way we run schools. Car factories would be owned by state governments; financial help and product-design ideas would come from the Federal government.

We would have endless national debates about car-building: Is building convertibles a good use of national resources? What colors should be produced this year? Where should the factories be located? Indeed, debates about cars would probably dominate national politics.

In this scenario, you could still buy cars from private manufacturers, but this wouldn't get you out of paying your car tax, which would average $7000/year/family. Thus, the private manufacturers would be small and would cater to elite markets. In the state car factories, unions would be absolutely dominant, and it would be virtually impossible to fire an incompetent employee--say, a welder who couldn't weld and didn't want to learn.

As quality in the state car plants went ever-downward, along with the safety of the porduct, families would scrimp and save to buy from the private manufacturers. This would be made difficult by the ever-increasing car taxes, driven by the growing inefficiencies in the state plants.

Politicians would argue against any change in the system, arguing that it would be unfair to those who couldn't afford privately-made cars and were dependent on the state factories.

yes, and the debate about "choice" would be sponsored by the elite who didn't want to pay their car tax, and they wouldn't care what happened to state car purchasers.

the inaccuracy in your analogy is part of the problem with education: we treat it like a consumer good and ignore how education is different from a consumer good. "knowledge" isn't something that one just purchases. teaching isn't a matter of filling passive vessels--to go back to your analogy--cars have to want to be built. and the owners need to monitor the building.

i don't think schools are growing more inefficient; students are learning advanced math and science at earlier levels than when i was in schools. it's a complex problem that won't be solved with a simple solution. for another example free market "competition" gives us britney spears and paris hilton as icons and reality television as one of the most popular forms of entertainment. the same people that are responsible for this can pick schools for their children? but then again, the quick solution has the potential to save us a few tax dollars.

Well stated, Jason.

David seems annoyed that we have "endless national debates" about education, as if privatizing education would end those debates. (Like private entertainment industries have ended national debates about ratings, moral codes, regulated content, and so forth!) The reason why we have endless debates about education is that education must adapt to shifting historical and social conditions. The debates around education in the 1950s and early 60s (see Bruner, *The Process of Education*), stimulated by the Cold War and the space race, could not have been foreseen a generation earlier. Likewise with the debates around education resulting from the Civil Rights Movement; or the debate stirred up by the false data of *A Nation At Risk* (see Berliner and Biddle, *The Manufactured Crisis*, for a thorough deflation of many myths of American education in the 80s and 90s).

We could also extend David's analogy in a reductio argument. Once we privatize education, we eradicate teacher's unions. Private schools already pay unliveable wages to teachers (especially in the high cost-of-living regions where private schools tend to be). So teachers' salaries are cut, their benefits are cut, while the CEOs of these private schools keep earning ever-increasing bonuses each quarter. (America has the largest gap between owner income and worker income in the world.)

But then the CEOs realize that it would be far cheaper simply to shut down American schools and move them to Third World countries where teachers are paid next to nothing. We can fly students to Malaysia on budget airlines and run our schools in small, dimly lit, poorly ventilated shacks. Parents won't care because the cost of tuition will go down greatly and because they'll be rid of their kids for 9 months (just as Americans are supposed to enjoy losing pay and benefits because Wal-Mart sells products for so cheap!).

When the Third World teachers of American kids try to unionize, they'll be imprisoned and murdered, just like the South American employees of Coke.

And like the private auto industry, private schools won't compete to meet the actual needs of its consumers. Instead, private schools will manufacture new needs and stay competitive by appealing to lifestyles and identities: a school for red heads, a school for gay boys who like My Chemical Romance, a school for kids who want to imagine themselves as cool, a school for kids who worry about safety, a school for kids who want to study four years of DJing, and so on.

Let's just hope Ken Lay's buddies get in on this sweet-ass deal!

(And David, let's privatize the military first. When that works out, I'll let you privatize the future of our children.)

"And like the private auto industry, private schools won't compete to meet the actual needs of its consumers"..the quality of automobiles has increased substantially over the last 20-30 years, very largely as a result of foreign competition. If the Big 3 had been a legally-protected monopoly, you could still count on your car faling apart by 70000 miles or so(if you were lucky.

(And David, let's privatize the military first. When that works out, I'll let you privatize the future of our children.)

Educational services are not what economists call a 'public good' and private markets can and do function for the provision of educational services.

But then the CEOs realize that it would be far cheaper simply to shut down American schools and move them to Third World countries where teachers are paid next to nothing.

Personal services are what economists call 'non-tradeables'. This is a fantasy. It would requrie the non-coerced participation of parents, among other things.

Private schools already pay unliveable wages to teachers

Would you care to provide evidence that private school teachers live predominantly in slum neighborhoods and trailer parks?

Art, while there is a growing private market for educational services, American has a long-standing tradition of constructing education as a public good. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. In the American system of universal public education, one students' consumption of educational services does not exclude another from those same services. Likewise, public education was all about setting up a non-excludable means of educating. Now, I don't have a degree in economics, but the American tradition of education is to view it as a public good. In fact, the right-wing idea of "school choice" is all about making education rivalrous and excludable, so that all education becomes like yuppie competition for elite day-care.

More importantly, education is a common good. The genius of Horace Mann was to make democracy contingent on education. Because the United States was founded on the idea of equal opportunity, a certain common level of education is necessary both to preserve the nation and allow a citizen the fullest exercise of her democractic rights.

As far as shipping education overseas goes, remember, Art, my argument was a reductio. At the same time, we already ship our kids off to camps and faraway colleges, so it's not inconceivable that we'd ship em off for a cheap education in Mexico -- especially if it saved us those precious property taxes: more money for the down payment on my new Escalade with a DVD player, an iPod jack, ass-warming seats, and a GPS unit!

And David, while some cars have gotten better, you'll notice that Americans at least don't seem to care much about quality. They more often than not buy overpriced, inefficient, oversized vehicles for status reasons. SUV, anyone? The trend in the auto industry is to appeal to identity and niche markets: the new VW Bug, the Mini, the Escalade, the Scion with DJ turntables in the back, the all-American pickup with a hemi (purchased by balding guys on Viagra who work in offices all day). The auto industry has gone the way of Target, with its bullsh-t Michael Graves "design for all" ideology. I'm sure Virginia Postrel will have a book out on her SUV stretch limo any day now.

Centralized, bureaucratically-managed institutions rarely do a good job of acccmodating individual preferences; this goes double for institutions that are coercive in nature. The "bandwidth" of the political process is very limited, in terms of the number of decisions that can be intelligently discussed and resolved: this is a good reason for allowing matters of individual preference to be resolved on a decentralized basis whenever feasible. If the Swenson family in Eden Prairie, MN, thinks that their daughter will benefit from all-girl classes, do we really need "experts" in Washington, DC to decide whether they will be allowed to act on this belief?

When you say "Americans at least don't seem to care much about quality" and go on to say that they buy cars for "status reasons," you don't come across as liking your fellow citizens very much. Do you really think that the average European (for example) cares less about status than the average American?

David writes, "Centralized, bureaucratically-managed institutions rarely do a good job of acccmodating individual preferences." I'd like to see some empirical evidence for that claim.

I also question the idea of "individual preference" as a basis for the total overhaul of the American educational system. Education is not a hamburger; "have it your way" may be a great marketing slogan but it is not a very smart educational philosophy. Education is also not a matter of individual taste. And let's not kid ourselves that David's actually talking about individual preference. He's talking about parental preferences to dictate to their children where and how they will be educated. Today, if an American family decides to raise their children as worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they are treated as brave culture warriors and not child abusers.

David continues, "If the Swenson family in Eden Prairie, MN, thinks that their daughter will benefit from all-girl classes, do we really need 'experts' in Washington, DC to decide whether they will be allowed to act on this belief?" Of course not. So the Swenson family is perfectly able to send their daughter to a private, all-girls academy. Likewise, if the Swenson family believes that their daughter will benefit from orgone box therapy or Scientology or corporal punishment or primal screaming, by all means, send her to a charter school. But that doesn't change the need for universal public education available to all American children and based on the best scientific data available in terms of pedagogy and content.

David can put the word "experts" in scare-quotes all he wants. But I advise him to read the literature on learning disabilities. He might learn that a vast number of cases involve the parents' total ignorance -- often willful ignorance -- of their children's problems, problems only recognized and treated by experts. For years, many parents thought (and continue to think) that military school or strict religious schools could knock the learning problems from their children.

Finally, David uses the popular right-wing strategy of impugning my patriotism: "you don't come across as liking your fellow citizens very much." I don't know "my fellow citizens," so I can't say if I like or dislike them. I do know that I often disagree with some of them. I do know that Americans buy a ton of crap they don't need for status reasons or to advertize their identities. Do Americans do this more or less than the people of other nations? I have no clue ('tho the average car size and gas mileage of cars in Europe is smaller and greater respectively, compared to American averages).

When I was a kid, I knew a girl who went to the Madeira School for girls, and she was heads above anyone else I knew. There were probably other factors there, but I don't see the harm in letting people who want single-sex education give it a try. I'm also okay with same-sex marriage.