Friday, October 27, 2006

Sara Comes Around

As I noted a few weeks ago, Sara from the Quick and the Ed seemed to be against single sex education:

Its been fascinating--and disappointing--to me to see how conservatives, who are generally skeptical of conferring victim status, and critical of untested new educational ideas, seem to embrace both so uncritically when the "victims" are boys and the education "innovations" include single sex schools and implementing gender stereotypes in the classroom.

And here:

Educators, parents, and policymakers should therefore be skeptical of simplistic proposals aimed at fixing the boy crisis, such as expanding single-sex schooling, implementing gender-based instructional techniques, or funding new federal programs aimed at improving boys’ achievement.

But in her latest post she says:

...believe in giving children and their families more educational choices, and I think the bar for excluding an entire category of choices (such as single-sex schools) ought to be quite high, and that critics of single-sex education haven't met it yet.
Its what I have been saying for a while:

Any single sex education program in the country should be optional and benefit both genders.
Of course she doesn't come around completely... she is still skeptical about the application of gender differences to education, of course I am guessing that she doesn't have children or any long term experience in a classroom... but we hold out hope. The first step is always the hardest.