AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
SHOULD SINGLE-SEX SCHOOLING BE ELIMINATED?
MODERATOR:
S. E. CUPP, CNN'S “CROSSFIRE”
DEBATERS:
LISE ELIOT, CHICAGO MEDICAL SCHOOL OF ROSALIND FRANKLIN UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE AND SCIENCE
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, AEI
5:30 PM – 7:00 PM WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2013
EVENT PAGE: http://live.aei.org/Event/Should_single- sex_schooling_be_eliminated
TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY: DC Transcription – www.dctmr.com
KARLYN BOWMAN: Good afternoon. My name is Karlyn Bowman and I’m a senior fellow here at AEI. And I’d like to welcome all of you and our online audience to this debate. We’re very pleased to be co-sponsoring the debate with the Independent Women’s Forum, an organization that I believe is influencing and infusing competition into the Washington ideas factory on many topics, including the topic of today’s debate.
AEI is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year and we’ve been in the debate business for a very long time. I look back to our first debates, more than 40 years ago, in 1967, and the first debate series we had, the very first debate – the very first three debates included Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger, and Paul Samuelson.
The earlier debates were serious and they were spirited and I’m confident that today’s debaters will carry on that tradition. It’s a special pleasure to start things off by introducing Sabrina Schaeffer, who will introduce our moderator and also the debaters.
Sabrina is the executive director of the Independent Women’s Forum. Before that – before coming to the IWF, she was the managing partner of Evolving Strategies. She’s been a speechwriter. She’s been director of the White House Writers Group. And I first met Sabrina many years ago, when she was a young assistant at AEI, working for Jeane Kirkpatrick, who many of you know Jeane Kirkpatrick’s work from her work on foreign policy, but she also wrote the first full-fledged study of women in politics called “Political Women” many years before.
So, Sabrina, I’ll turn it over to you.
SABRINA SCHAEFFER: Thank you, Karlyn, and to AEI for reaching out to IWF to help host this debate tonight. I’m sorry Dan Rothschild is not here. I think he’s enjoying Hong Kong, but we owe him a big thanks as well.
And as Karlyn mentioned, I got my start here in Washington on the 11th floor. And Karlyn actually helped me – helped secure my second job. So, always good to be back here with friends.
I’m Sabrina Schaeffer, the executive director of the Independent Women’s Forum. This is our 21st year in operation. We are the leading women’s group on the right that is focused on economic liberty, free markets, personal responsibility. And for two decades, we have been working to broaden women’s understanding of how policy set here in Washington affect women and their families.
So forgive me if I take just a quick minute to tell you about some interesting research that I happened upon about a year ago out of the University of Manchester in the UK that found that men and women are so different that they are practically different species. Psychologist Paul Irwing and his colleagues administered a personality test to more than 10,000 people here in the United States, between the ages of 15 and 92, and measured for 15 different personality facets – warmth, emotional stability, liveliness, on and on. And the results found that about 18 percent of women share similar personalities with men and 18 percent of men share similar personalities with women, but that the majority of women have personality traits that are quite distinct from those of men and vice versa. So the bottom line is that we are finding that, yet again, from this research, the differences between the genders has a lot to do with the choices they make, the way they learn, and the professions they choose to go into.
And I mention this only because IWF believes very strongly in gender equality, but we also like to talk a lot about the very real and serious differences between men and women. So I am eager to hear the debate tonight. And to help us get started, I would like to introduce our moderator, S.E. Cupp.
S.E. recently became the host of CNN’s “Crossfire” – congratulations – which will begin airing in September. She is a conservative columnist, author, and commentator. She’s the author of “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity.” And she’s the co-author of “Why You’re Wrong about the Rights.” She is a regular columnist at the “New York Daily News,” a contributing editor at “Townhall” Magazine. She’s been published in numerous outlets, from the “Washington Post” to “Human Events,” to Fox News, CNN.
You have probably seen S.E. on many, many different programs, from Bill Maher to Larry King. Her face is quite familiar to all of us. And we are thrilled that she is here to help moderate this fascinating debate. (Applause.)
S.E. CUPP: Thank you. Thanks to AEI and Karlyn and IWF and Sabrina. Thanks for that introduction. Welcome to the debate “Should Single-Sex Education Be Eliminated?” How’s that for provocative?
Full disclosure, I am the product of an all-girls education, at least for four years of high school. That should not tell you where I come down on this issue. And in fact, I am looking forward to hearing from both of our debaters to sharpen my opinion on the issue.
Let me introduce our guests here that you’re going to be hearing from. Many of you will be familiar with Christina Hoff Sommers. She is resident scholar here at AEI. Before coming here, she was a professor of philosophy at Clark University, where she specialized in moral theory. She’s the author of several books. I’m sure you’re familiar with some of these titles, including “Who Stole Feminism,” “One Nation Under Therapy,” and “Freedom Feminism.” Her most recent book is entitled “The War Against Boys.”
Lise Eliot is an associate professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. She is also the author of numerous books. One is called “What’s Going on in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life.” And another is called “Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps – and What We Can Do About It.”
Now, let me establish some ground rules and tell you about our format. Each of the debaters will give a brief opening statement that highlights the key features of their argument. After those opening statements, both will have a chance to respond to each other. Then, there will be a short two-minute break, during which I will receive questions from the audience. If you have a question, please write it down on your card and complete that question before the opening debates are done.
I will also be taking questions from Twitter and our friends online. So if you’d like to tweet in a question, please use the hashtag #AEIDebates.
After that two-minute break, we will return and we will have question and answer portion, and then, the debaters will give a final five-minute conclusion and closing statement.
The rules. We’d like you to limit your opening remarks to eight minutes each, and then your responses to each other to five minutes each. You’ll be able to see two-minute, one-minute, and 30-second warning cards in the front row. And at the end of your allotted time, a light bell will ring. Can we hear that? There you go.
Don’t make me John King you. I will cut you off. (Laughs.) So finish your remark as quickly as possible when you hear that bell. And after the debate is over, of course, the audience is invited to a wine and cheese reception in the registration area.
So with that, I’d like to invite our first debater, Lise Eliot, to the floor, and let’s begin. Should single-sex education be eliminated? Thank you. (Applause.)
LISE ELIOT: I have to put that up there. And – so thank you very much. I’d like to thank the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum for hosting this event. And of course, I also want to thank Christina Hoff Sommers for bringing the issue of gender and education into the public eye. I look forward to our discussion.
I don’t normally read my remarks, but eight minutes is kind of a challenge, so I’m going to – I’m going to do it that way. And so why is a neuroscientist – excuse me – why is a neuroscientist here debating single-sex education? I was honestly agnostic on the topic when I started researching my book “Pink Brain, Blue Brain” about gender development. But any discussion of gender differences in children inevitably leads to this debate. So I felt compelled to dive into the copious research on single-sex schooling.
I read every study I could, weighed the evidence, and ultimately concluded that single-sex education is not the answer to gender gaps and achievement or the best way forward for today’s young people. It may have been in the past, but I don’t think it’s the way forward.
After my book was published, I became acquainted to several developmental and cognitive psychologists whose work was addressing gender and education from different angles, and we published a peer-reviewed education forum piece in “Science” with the provocative title “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education.” So “Science” has very tight space constraints. We were only able to present a small fraction of our evidence, but in a nutshell, we presented – oops – three lines of evidence and showed that all three failed to justify single-sex schooling. The educational research, the neuroscience, and the social psychology.
So the widely held myth – widely held belief that single gender – that gender separation is somehow better for boys or girls or both is really nothing more than a myth. First, we reviewed the extensive educational research that has compared academic outcomes in students attending single-sex versus co-educational schools.
I’ve no doubt we’ll be dueling over many such studies as this debate progresses and I’m prepared to do so. But the overwhelming conclusion, when you put this enormous literature together is that the findings are equivocal.
There’s no clear academic advantage of sitting in all-female or all-male classes, in spite of much popular belief. To the contrary, I base this conclusion not on any individual study, but on large-scale data reviews and syntheses and thousands of studies conducted in every major English speaking country – the US, Canada, England, New Zealand, Australia, et cetera.
Of course, there’s many excellent single-sex schools out there, private Catholic charter, but as these systematic reviews have demonstrated over and over, it is not the single-sex composition that makes them excellent. It is all the other advantages that are typically packed into such schools, especially the surviving schools, because many single-sex schools have gone co-ed now. The good ones are still single-sex.
So the advantages, including financial resources, quality of the faculty, pro- academic culture, along with the family background and pre-selected ability of the students who attend because there’s quite a lot of data to support that, that determines the outcome. When such factors are statistically subtracted from the equation, the advantages of such schools fade away and they’re indistinguishable from less selective schools or from equally privileged schools that also happen to enroll boys and girls.
A case in point is the study by Linda Sax, the last one, at UCLA – no relation to Leonard Sax; I’ll have a word to say about in a moment – who used data from a large national survey of college freshmen to evaluate the effect of single-sex versus co- educational high schools. Commissioned by the National Coalition of Girls Schools, the raw findings look pretty good for the funders – higher SAT scores, stronger academic orientation among women who had attended all-girls high schools. Men weren’t studied. However, once the researchers controlled for both student and school attributes measures such as family income, parent education, school resources, most of these effects were erased or diminished to the point that researchers found it reasonable to conclude that the marginal benefits do not justify the potential threats to gender equity brought about by academic sex segregation.
When it comes to boys in particular – and I know we’re going to talk about the boy crisis – the data showed single-sex education is distinctly unhelpful. Among the minority of studies that has reported advantage of single-sex schooling, virtually all of them were studies of girls. There are no rigorous studies in the US that find single-sex schooling is better for boys. And in fact, a separate line of research by economists has shown that both boys and girls exhibit greater cognitive and academic growth over the school year, based on the dose of girls in the classroom. So from zero to an improvement, both girls and boys improve the more girls there are in a classroom. Girls settle the classroom down. They create a more academic focus. And you can see boys are even more advantaged in reading.
So single-sex education really is not the answer to the boy crisis.
The second line of research often used to justify single-sex education falls squarely within my area of expertise, brain and cognitive development. It’s been more than a decade now since the brain sex movement, as I call it, began infiltrating our schools. And there are literally hundreds of schools caught up in this fad. And I’m just kind of quickly flash through the websites from some of these schools. It’s really quite startling for a neuroscientist to see these claims in the name of children’s education.
Here’s a school, 100 miles from my home, Janesville, Wisconsin. Brain-based research has proven the brains of boys and girls are built very differently. They’re genetically programmed, present at birth, hardwired differences. Well, read my book and hopefully you’ll get the data that corrects you on that.
Anyway, so we have Wisconsin. We have Florida. Differences in the way our brains process language, not so, the way we process math. So this is from Florida. And this general notion that boys and girls learn differently and that somehow research supports this.
Well, I’m going to challenge anybody to show me that research because there are not laboratory studies of research – or brain-based studies of learning that show reliable sex differences.
So we see this in Atlanta, Virginia – boys and girls learn differently, Florida, boys and girls learn differently, difference in hearing, difference in vision, and so on.
So where do they get this stuff? It’s been quite easy to trace among these hundreds of schools two books that are the source of almost all these claims. And they have been widely criticized by myself and many other academics, psychologists, neuroscientists, and so on.
Leonard Sax and Michael Gurian, both are really masterful at cherry picking extrapolating, and sometimes just making up claims about sex differences in the brain to validate their profitable teacher education enterprises. Both of them give a lot of teacher professional development. They run conferences using this so-called brain-based, gender- based learning.
So I dissected their various claims about vision, memory, math, stress, et cetera in my book and another peer-reviewed paper, “Single-Sex Education and the Brain.” I’d be happy to send it to anybody. In short, current neuropsychological research does not support the myth that boys and girls learn differently, even though this belief has become quite prominent among teachers in hundreds of schools. And you can even find students – this is a web – this is – two schools in Florida, in Tampa, a girls – Ferrell Girls Preparatory and Franklin Boys. They have videos of these children standing up – these 13 and 14-year-old kids saying – the girls are saying we have strong senses of smelling, hearing, and we can read facial expressions, and the boys saying things like our right hemispheres are better at map reading, mechanical skills, and measuring. We’re not so good at verbal communication, but we’re good at non – I mean, it’s really quite, quite distressing.
And so it’s not just me. It’s not just other psychologists. Even Judge Joseph Goodwin, who ruled in the case in West Virginia, called – said that the School District had been led astray by the teachings of Dr. Leonard Sax and concurred that the brain sex rationales for single-sex education are pseudoscience.
So is that my eight minutes? I will save part three, if I can, for my next turn.
MS. CUPP: Thank you. Christina, would you like to come up?
MS. ELIOT: Should I sit down?
MS. CUPP: Please, you can either stand there or sit, up to you.
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: OK, doesn’t start yet. (Laughter.)
Good evening. I want to thank the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum for hosting this event. And I’m grateful to Lise Eliot for participating – is this on?
OK. We’ll start over. Should single-sex schools be eliminated? Absolutely not. Millions of children have flourished intellectually and socially in these schools. As Senators Barbara Mikulski and Kay Bailey Hutchison recently wrote in the “Wall Street Journal,” to take single-sex education away from students who stand to benefit is unforgivable. They’re absolutely right.
Now, wealthy families have always had the option of sending their children to all- male or all-female schools. The parents of modest means rarely had that choice. That changed in 2001, when four female senators sponsored legislation that sanctioned single- sex classes and academies in the public schools. Today, there’re approximately 300 public schools that offer single-sex classes and about 116 public all-girl and all-boy academies. Many are in low-income communities and they have proved hugely successful.
Now, Irma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership – I’m sorry, the Irma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School in Dallas opened in 2004. It enrolls about 500 girls grade six through 12. More than 70 percent are from homes that are economically disadvantaged. And more than 90 percent are minority.
The school has been an enormous success. US News and World Report now ranks it as one of the best schools in Texas.
In 2011, Dallas opened a comparable academy for young men, the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy. At this school, the boys wear blazers and they study foreign languages, including Latin and Mandarin. More than half of the teachers are male. And there is a massive focus on areas where boys need extra help – organizational skills, time management, self-control, perseverance, and of course, academic achievement.
The principal, Nakia Douglas, has found that boys will go to great lengths to avoid letting down their team, so the academy is divided into houses that compete against one another for points. So students can earn points for good grades, reading books, community service. It’s still too early to document the school’s success, but students test scores are already well ahead of state averages.
Now, the single-sex academies like the two Dallas schools not only benefit the students fortunate enough to attend, but they may also be part of the solution to the boy gap in education and the girl gap in math and science.
Today, millions of boys are languishing academically. Boys in all ethnic groups and across all social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to attend college. Girls, by comparison, are thriving academically, but they still are far less likely to go into science and technology.
These academies provide important lessons on how to address these problems. Why would anyone want to eliminate them? I mean, today single-sex classes and schools account for about 1 percent of public grade and high school enrollment. There’re only about 4 percent private schools. There’s no prospect that single-sex education will become the norm. Some parents and students prefer them. Why not offer them the choice?
What explains the determination of critics to ban them? Well, you’ve heard several arguments from Professor Eliot, so let me briefly respond to her objections.
She says that when single schools are effective it is because of some other feature rather than the gender configuration. And she implies that there’s been no – you know – rigorous research that vindicates the single-sex model.
Well, this is – just isn’t true. There’re many well-controlled studies that support the single-sex, including distinct advantages for boys. They did that research at Stetson University.
What Professor Eliot should have said is that the research is a mix. One of the best and thorough reviews of single-sex education was carried out by the Department of Education, in 2005. What it found was a tangle of contradictory results. Some studies vindicate the single-sex models. Others do not. But keep in mind that is true of perhaps most research on classroom effects. A lot of it is unsettled. Look at the literature on longer school days versus shorter, more homework, less, small schools, large schools. Advocates of either side find vindication in the research.
I mean, what could be more obvious than the need to have small classes? Everyone agrees with that. Well, guess what, the literature on the value of small classes versus large classes is almost as polarized today as the research on single-sex education.
How best to educate children is not an exact science. The serious and objective education researchers know this and they warn against over interpreting their findings. And I would say that was true of everyone on the list she gave that argued against single- sex education.
The Department of Education rightly deemed the research equivocal and it drew no strong conclusions. It wisely suggested that the question of single-sex education may never be fully resolved by quantitative means because it involves basic issues of philosophy and worldview. It seems to me that Professor Eliot and her colleagues have set an insuperable evidentiary standard for a policy that they just don’t happen to like.
Now, what about the argument that single-sex education promotes sexism and reinforces gender roles? Well, defenders of single-sex education have observed that it does quite the opposite. After all, in such schools, girls can leave it to the boys to dissect the frog. The boys can leave it to the girls to edit the newspaper.
In 2007, a large-scale, well-designed British study found that, quote, “gender stereotypes are exacerbated in co-ed schools and moderated in single-sex schools.
But of course, you can find research that reaches the opposite conclusion, as in the case – just as we found in the academic benefits. The research literature is mixed, so why not leave it to parents to choose what they think is best for their children.
Now, Professor Eliot and some of her colleagues have claimed that these schools just don’t train our children for the adult workplace. It’s just not the – we should have it in this day and age. Well, there’s a long list of people who have attended single-sex schools, who would seem to refute the notion that it fails to prepare people for the modern age – Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, John Kerry, even Joe Biden. They went to single-sex schools. For generations, millions of Americans have attended Catholic and Jewish grade schools and high schools. They still do. And they’ve gone on – and they do go on to become active citizens and civil leaders in all walks of life.
In short, a school doesn’t need to be a microcosm of the real world in order to fulfill the essential, you know, function of educating young people. And we shouldn’t forget. The public schools today are hardly a model of effectiveness. Our schools are leaving millions of girls and boys, but especially boys, totally unprepared for the world ahead.
According to a 2001 report by the College Board, quote, “nearly half of you young men” – and they mean Hispanic and half of young men of color, Hispanic and African-American – “nearly half of young men of color age 15 to 24, who graduate from high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated, or dead.” This was the College Board.
Other research shows that the prospects for working class white boys are not much better. Schools like the Obama Academy are trying to improve those odds. They are trying to turn young men in their care – was that the bell, ok – they’re trying to turn the young men in their care into responsible, honorable, well-rounded, effective human beings. And it appears to be working. The parents think so.
There was a waiting list of several hundred parents desperate to get to this boys school that could only take 240.
Now, keep in mind, Lise Eliot wants to ban these schools. And as you’ve seen from her comments this evening, she believes that single-sex education is analogous to gender segregated schooling. That comparison is preposterous. Race and sex are different, as the Supreme Court has emphasized and as almost anyone real – understands.
Mandatory racial separatism demeans human beings. It forecloses life prospects. Single-sex education is freely chosen and it has helped millions of students to flourish intellectually and socially.
No sensible person thinks that Wellesley College or the Girl Scouts or the Obama Academy is the equivalent of some oppressive institution or a race-segregated school in the Jim Crow South.
These are centers of excellence and many young men and women – in which many young women and men are thriving. Thank you.
MS. CUPP: OK. Thank you. And you’ll have another chance to respond as well and I’ll give you some – a little extra time.
MS. ELIOT: Good, thank you. Great. So you’ve talked about individual schools and that’s where research needs to be done. US News and World Report is not a peer- reviewed journal last time I’ve looked. The Ann Richards Leadership Academy in Austin, Texas, fine girls school, the students are doing fabulous, largely Latino population. But it turns out, when you look at the students that enter – and this was a carefully done study – they’re already been selected for it, supposed to be random, but it turns out that they’re selecting students or already as qualified as the ones who are doing quite well at a comparable co-educational school.
So – I mean, and urban prep – we have the urban prep system in Chicago, which we’re all very proud to see these students go on to college 100 percent. But you know how many students they kick out before they get there? The graduation rate is – of the students who actually start is no better than the graduation rate of the average high school in Chicago. And I can name many excellent co-educational public schools that happen – that have all the same features as these wonderful single-sex academies, such as Thurgood Marshall Academy. There’s one here in New York. In Milwaukee, we have the Rufus King, International Baccalaureate School. We heard this glowing report about PS 322 in the South Bronx because it had a very inspired principal. All of this can be done in single – in co-education, all of the wonderful pro-academic positive role modeling. It – there’s nothing magical about gender segregation. But there are some problems with gender segregation.
And so I’m going to continue with the last part of my argument, which is that when you separate people, there’s this inevitable tendency to stereotype and develop sexism. And so we need to be careful about any sort of separation that depends on overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females.
And that is exactly what every one of these schools is doing. Hundreds of schools around the country stereotyping, and then teachers end up teaching to the stereotype in a way that’s not going to prepare students for a gender integrated workplace and a gender integrated home, where we hope people will be equal partners.
So let me just tell you about a little social psychology. As I mentioned, this isn’t my field, but my colleagues’. It’s very well proven in social psychology that segregation promotes stereotyping and prejudice, whereas intergroup contact reduces them.
Children are particularly vulnerable to this. So – excuse me for one second. We can separate children, you know, based on race, age, gender, BMI, hair color, any other category. You don’t have to find evidence for the harmful effects of segregation on children, even in single-sex schools.
So here’s just a few examples. The first experiment in California, where the state had generous grants to six different school districts to set up male and female academies. They shut down within three years because of the dramatic stereotyping by the teachers. And the students themselves missed the buffering effect of their other sex peers.
In Arizona, recently, schools implemented single-gender classrooms. And it – the middle school students who had the higher dose of all-boys or all-girls, math, language, arts, et cetera, were more likely to express stereotype views such as boys are good at math and girls are good at English. Those who have fewer dose of single-sex schools were less likely to endorse those stereotypes.
And we even have evidence from Valerie Lee, who was one of the original researchers whose data seemingly supported single-sex education. When she actually went into these all-girls and these all-boys schools, she saw the most extreme versions of sexism were in the all-boys schools and particularly homophobia.
In all-girls schools there was a special kind of sexism, something she called pernicious sexism, a kind of dummying down or a softening of some of the harder fields.
Now, there certainly is sexist activity in co-educational schools as well, but single-sex schools are not by any means a haven for them.
All right. And so there’s also a completely different line of research that finds benefits of boy-girl interactions that I think as a parent of a daughter and two sons are very important.
So we know that girls with older brothers and boys with older sisters engage in less gender stereotypical play. Girls do more sports, do more building toys. Boys read more, do more art with older sisters.
And another large study of high school networks, social networks found that those with more mixed sex friendships actually showed lower levels of bullying and aggression among the boys.
And in our “Science” paper, we cite the finding that went who went to single-sex schools back in the ’70s were likelier to be divorced or suffer from depression as adults perhaps because they did not have the opportunity to interact with the other sex during that very important formative period.
So you know, whether we’re in nursery school or high school or the business world, gender segregation narrows our perceptions and understandings of each other, facilitates stereotypes and sexist attitudes. It’s very simple. The more we structure children and adolescence environment around gender distinctions and separation, the more they will internalize these categories as they seek to understand themselves and others.
MS. CUPP: Thank you, Lise. Your response, Christina.
MS. SOMMERS: Yes. I want to talk for a moment about the research. First of all, there are excellent studies. Just recently, Hyunjoon Park and colleagues published a study in “Demography” that showed significant benefits to the single-sex configuration. They were – it’s not easy to study single-sex schools because you can’t – in the United States certainly – order, you know, a group of students to go to co-ed schools and single-sex schools and then study them. You know, people are free to do what they want. But in Korea, it was not the case. In South Korea, they were randomly assigned to single-sex and co-ed schools. It was just a beautiful sample to study. The students were from – they could match, you know, socioeconomic backgrounds and prior academic achievements, and so forth. And they found that the single-sex school had higher scores and that the students were more likely to attend a four-year college.
Ursula Kessels and Bettina Hannover looked at 400 eight graders who were randomly assigned co-ed and single-sex physics classes in Berlin, in Germany. And the girls assigned to the single-sex classes were more engaged in physics. They were more confident and less likely than girls in co-ed schools to agree with statements that physics is for boys.
There was a carefully controlled study at Stetson University that compared single- sex classrooms and co-ed classrooms in Florida. And they found significant benefits for both boys and girls, but especially for the boys over four years of study. Fifty five percent of boys in the co-ed class were proficient in the Florida comprehensive assessment. And – compared to 85 percent of the all-boys class.
But here’s the problem. It’s not only that there’s good research in favor of sex education. Let’s look a little more carefully at the research that discredits it. For example, the California experiment. There was a study about that experiment that founded a failure, and you have cited it in your – you and your co-authors have cited as definitive evidence that that program was corrupt and encouraged sexism.
Well, that study was by Amanda Datnow and Lea Hubbard. And if you get that study, the first thing they announce is that they’re not going to use conventional methodology. They say, quote – and this is from the two researchers – “we draw upon feminist theory and we’re going to provide a critique that illuminates how power positions – positions subject within ideological matrixes,” on and on. And they found a male teacher that assigned “All Quiet on the Western Front” to the boys and “Pride and Prejudice” to the girls. And he just said, well, that’s what the kids like. And for that, then was like a shocking example of gender ideology permeating the school system.
The teacher – it was just a common sense remark by the teacher, which by these researchers turns into evidence of failure. And they say, oh, the single-sex classes are just inundated with ideology. The research against single-sex education – not all of it, some of it’s very, very good – but a lot of it is inundated with a gender ideology of its own.
Even using the word “gender segregation” is tendentious. You shouldn’t use it. And a circuit court judge got very angry at the ACLU it kept referring to the gender- segregated classroom. Segregation, especially in a legal sense, implies, you know, a deliberate and enforced arrangement. The single-sex education is voluntary. Nobody is forcing anybody into these schools. And nobody is denying access to co-ed schools.
So that is – that’s what bothers me about this debate. I don’t really think it’s about evidence and studies. I think that – that Lise Eliot and her colleagues, as I said, have made this – have made this conceptual error of thinking that segregating by gender is the same as segregating by race, as I said earlier. And that is simply misguided. And if you look at the students who have flourished and who are flourishing in these schools and tend to come and – professors – they organized a little group of professors and they’re working with the ACLU with great success to stop these programs.
So this isn’t merely an academic debate. It has consequences. And I think – I agree with Kay Bailey Hutchison and Senator Mikulski. It’s unforgivable.
MS. CUPP: Thank you, Christina. And thank you to Lise. And we’ll take a two- minute break. And if you’ve written down questions, please pass them forward at this time. And we’ll take some Twitter questions. And I’ve got a few questions of my own. So we’ll be back in a minute and a half. Thanks.
OK. Let’s start back into the question and answer period of this debate. I’ll ask pointed questions to one participant. If the other would like to respond, that’s fine. But keep in mind that the shorter our answers, the more questions we can get to.
We’ve got a number of good ones from the audience. I have some from Twitter. I will start with one of my own. It is for you, Lise.
Early 20th century education reformer John Dewey said what the best and wisest parent wants for his child that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely and left unchecked destroys our democracy. Why should the government be in charge of a family’s decision where they will school their child?
MS. ELIOT: Well, I’m not against all school choice. I never said there’s a problem with school choice. Frankly, I was glad to move to a district where there was no school choice because I saw parents driving all around Houston and I thought how am I going to deal with that. So then I left for Chicago in the suburbs. But anyway, no, we’re not saying – you know – that school choice is a bad thing. We just say that this choice isn’t fair in a diverse society. We do not allow voluntary separation by race. We don’t allow public schools to have single-race schools. We don’t allow public schools to have voluntary single-religion schools. And gender is just as salient for our diverse society and just as important for how we’re going to work together and govern together as different religions and different races. So this one dimension is quite inappropriate, especially that, you know, women and men are carrying out almost all the same roles, even in military combat we now share that role. So –
MS. CUPP: OK. Christina, I have a question for you.
If the results – and this is from our audience – if the results in studies are so mixed, why continue same-sex education if it may indeed lead to sexism as half the research seems to indicate?
MS. SOMMERS: The other half – but the other half of the research indicates that there are enormous advantages for children. And we – what we need in the United States right now is more options, more innovations, more flexibility, custom tailoring. Banning single-sex schools would not only destroy many clearly effective programs, like the Dallas academies, but it would undermine educational diversity. And I simply do not accept the assumption that it shows that these – there is proof that these schools lead to sexism and reinforce stereotypes.
There’s a lot of literature and people in single-sex schools will tell you that very often, in a single-sex environment, gender becomes less salient, not more. Boys are allowed to be less laddish and girls are allowed to be less girly. The gender differences are most salient in a co-ed school.
So I just don’t accept the verdict. And as I said, I find the research highly suspect.
MS. CUPP: Lise, as was mentioned, in 2001, Barbara Mikulski joined with three other female US senators, including Hillary Clinton, to amend the No Child Left Behind Act to allow states to operate single-sex schools. Why should we revisit this decision?
MS. ELIOT: I think it was just wrong decision. I think that they were looking back on their own education in a different era, when women really did need that empowering isolation. But girls are ripping the pants off boys now. They do not need to be isolated into single-sex schools. And boys who are struggling do worse in single-sex schools. So they’re just – you know, they didn’t look closely enough at the current data. They are from a different generation, quite frankly. And young women today generally don’t want it and I think don’t even need it.
If you look at the Fortune 500 companies, I think 50 of them are now headed by women and almost all but one went to a co-educational college. So Wellesley and so on aren’t exactly – the reason I looked that up was an NPR program said we’re going to do a show on why single-sex colleges are so good for developing women leaders. Well, you know what, it turns out they’re not anymore.
That was another era. And that’s actually been showing pretty nicely in the research.
MS. CUPP: So let me just ask you a follow up on that since you brought it up. Would you also eliminate single-sex colleges like Smith and Wellesley?
MS. ELIOT: Well, I wouldn’t eliminate any successful educational institution. If people are getting an excellent education, who am I to go shut down a school? That is – I’m talking about moving forward, do we really want to – as this new initiative – encourage parents to segregate their sons and daughters.
MS. CUPP: Christina, this is from the audience. How ironic that this debate lacks the male voice amongst the debaters. What’s to be made of this? (Laughter.)
MS. SOMMERS: Well, for one thing – for one thing, today, if you come down on the wrong side of the correct views on gender politics and academia, it can be career diminishing. So you don’t find a lot of men happily coming forward to defend, for example, sex differences and more conventional views about sexuality. It’s simply a thankless pursuit. So it’s been left to women for the most part. I mean, there are men involved. There’s certainly Leonard Sax and Michael Gurian.
MS. CUPP: OK, Lise, it struck me as interesting that you’re at this debate. We are talking about girls and boys as if they are homogenous. Should we be distinguishing between girls in certain economic strata, for example, or certain demographics and boys similarly, and what kinds of education might be good for individuals instead of the collective gender?
MS. ELIOT: Sure. That’s often been the argument is that we’re not saying single- sex education is good for all children, but there are some children who may benefit. Well, I would challenge you to tell me which children are those. Is this girls with especially low confidence or boys who are extra aggressive? Or how do we select – what quality of students makes them especially well suited?
You know, normally, when we send children to a special school, like an art school or a science school, we have a reason for doing so. But in this case, the only thing that’s determining it is which chromosomes they have. So.
MS. CUPP: OK. Christina, this is from Twitter. It sounds like this conversation contains one line of thought that is philosophical and one that is scientific. Where is the balance between these two ways of considering this question?
MS. SOMMERS: Well, it would be nice if as a philosophy professor of many years, I can tell you that a lot of philosophical debates are not resolved. And I suspect that this debate over single-sex education is more philosophical than empirical because I’m telling you. The research goes on and one. It goes in circles. And you can find everything and nothing. And as I said, the best researchers acknowledge not to take their findings too far, not to go overboard. And I feel that that’s what happened with Ms. Eliot. I think it’s fine that she’s persuaded by that evidence and would choose not to send her children to school. But then to take the next step and develop an organization that’s going to try to shut down schools. And her group, ACCESS, working with the ACLU has stopped programs all over the country. It’s working.
So that’s where I find it disturbing as not only philosophically, but I think it also runs – rush out over the state of the findings.
MS. CUPP: Lise, do you want to respond to that?
MS. ELIOT: Yes. Well, first of all, ACCESS, American Council for Coeducational Schooling – oh look, at this, I have a – (laughs) – the web page right there. We came together not to banish single-sex school, but we came together due to our distress about the gender essentialism, about these claims about boys and girls as being hardwired fundamentally different that just weren’t true with either the neuroscience or the psychology research.
And so – and we realize that this brain essentialism was driving the single-sex movement and that it was bringing out sort of the worst. And then we really start to look at co-education. And you know, co-education’s not perfect. So the real mission of ACCES is to improve and foster co-education. We need to get rid of sexism and stereotyping everywhere, in single-sex, in co-ed. But we think that the opportunity is better. If you have boys and girls in the same classroom, can’t you address stereotyping? Can’t you address sexism in a way that’ll be meaningful for their adult lives?
It’s no good telling girls, you know, that they are going to be victims of sexism when they’re all by themselves. It’s the boys that need to hear that message. And similarly, boys need to be, you know, protected from male bashing and so on. By having a friendly collaborative conversation, boys and girls, men and women can work together very, very well if they just start considering each other as individuals and not as gender stereotypes. And that’s the kind of curriculum that we’re hoping to foster through ACCES.
MS. CUPP: Well, and let me start a new question to you –
MS. SOMMERS: Can I have a follow up comment?
MS. CUPP: Sure, of course.
MS. SOMMERS: I just want you to understand that when Dr. Eliot says sexism and stereotyping, she doesn’t mean what most of us mean. For example, if you go to her website, there’s a little test teachers can take to major – measure their gender inclusiveness. And you can get high marks if you – well, they’re supposed to avoid gender specific language. And teachers are asked do you say things like good morning, boys and girls, or let me have your attention, ladies and gentlemen. And any teacher that speaks that way will be given low marks for inclusiveness.
Now, good morning, boys and girls – and I heard another member of your group say to “Education Week,” good morning, boys and girls, is like teacher saying good morning, whites and Latinos. Well – because they view male and female as arbitrary and invidious distinctions that have to be left behind. But that – the gender distinction is not something arbitrary and invidious that most of us want to leave behind.
And when a teacher says good morning, boys and girls – I mean, if she did that to Latino students and said good morning, Latinos and African-American – that would be odd and distressing and frightening probably for the students. They’d be mortified.
If a teacher says good morning, boys and girls, at the beginning of the day, she’s being friendly and conventional and not invidious or oppressive.
MS. ELIOT: How about good morning, students, or good morning, scholars, or good morning, friends? What do we –
MS. SOMMERS: Oh. (Laughter.)
MS. ELIOT: The way – the label we use affect the way children think about themselves.
MS. SOMMERS: Well – OK.
MS. CUPP: Lise, let me – let me go off that train of thought and bring you an audience question that I think is relevant. Many single-sex schools, boys and girls, have been captured by a, quote, unquote “feminist ideology.” Could this not help affect studies?
MS. ELIOT: Schools have been captured by a feminist ideology. The schools themselves, the single-sex schools? Well, I think that a lot of all-girls schools do have a sort of girl power mentality. And I think that’s actually been beneficial and the schools – you cited the study from Germany about girls doing better in their math confidence and so on –
MS. SOMMERS: Physics.
MS. ELIOT: Physics. And there’s a study about special skills. And I think absolutely, if you have students under your tutelage for six years and you tell them you’re great. You can do this. You know, women are as strong in science and math as men are, they will benefit from it. So if you want to call that a strong feminist ideology, I think that’s fine. I think the all-boys academies are probably trying to do the same thing. But are we getting at why feminism is bad or I wasn’t sure really the point of that question?
MS. CUPP: I think – let me interpret. I think the point is that if feminist ideologies are operational in single-sex schools, couldn’t that affect your view that single-sex schools are necessarily discriminatory or ignorant of those kinds of ideologies.
MS. ELIOT: Well, I guess – you know – there’s really two schools of feminism. And some feminists just love single-sex schools. And so now, you know, we’re supposed to be the feminists that are against it. And I’m not sure if this is really a political issue in that sense. I really don’t think it falls into these, you know, left-right lines and I don’t think it’s productive to go there anyway to discuss it.
MS. CUPP: OK. Christina.
MS. SOMMERS: Yes.
MS. CUPP: According to Lise, students at selective single-sex schools often state that they choose their school in spite of and not because of its single-sex structure. What would you say about their take on it?
MS. SOMMERS: You know, I think there are so many reasons to choose a school for parents and for students. And you weigh all sorts of costs and benefits. And so I – but again, that seems to me to be an argument in favor of allowing freedom of choice to air on the side of diversity and academic pluralism. Because there – you know, there’s not a single reason.
MS. CUPP: I think that you both talked about the 2009 UCLA study. I know that you did. I think you might have responded to it or debunked it in some sense. But I just want to bring it up again because I think there’s an interesting aspect here. The study found that all-girls schools graduates were more confident and outperformed their co- educated female peers in math and public speaking. I will attest that was not the case when it comes to me and math. (Laughter.)
MS. ELIOT: It was in speaking, though. Yeah.
MS. CUPP: It was, however, the case with public speaking. But to both of you, to either of you, how would you prove or disprove that that was not the result of upbringing and not education?
MS. SOMMERS: As I was trying to say in the beginning, some of these things are not as amenable to proof as we would like. Of course we want evidence-based policies in the schools and we try mightily to get it. But I recently, in my new edition of “The War Against Boys,” I’m strongly in favor of character education programs. And as a professor of moral philosophy, I’m just certain that this is critical to a young person’s development. And then I looked at the literature where people try to measure, are these programs working? The government wanted proof. And it was exactly like looking at the single-sex education debate. The evidence was all over the board. There were – and what really happened is it was just very difficult to measure. And I think we can’t expect that kind of precision. And we have to know that at a certain point you just have to say, OK, it’s more of a philosophical difference. Some schools are going to do it better. Let’s figure out where they’re doing it very well.
A question keeps coming to my mind for Professor Eliot is why, when you found some schools doing it so poorly and sort of absurdly highlighting sex difference, why wouldn’t the – your argument be that we should improve those schools? Why ban them?
MS. ELIOT: Well, I mean, they can just go back to co-education. I’m not, you know –
MS. SOMMERS: They could be better single-sex schools.
MS. ELIOT: But there’s no benefit. I mean, I do actually believe – researchers have been at this for decades, decades, and if there was – I mean, I think most people’s impression – if you just ask the layperson on the street, oh, sure, you know, single-sex schools are better. I don’t know if I’d want to go to one, but absolutely they’re better for academics. That’s what most people believe. They believe the idea that you don’t have as much distraction and that there are learning differences and that there – you can teach in a girl specific or boy specific way. But you know, researchers have been at this since the ’70s, ’60s. I mean, there are thousands of studies and granted it’s very challenging work.
I mean, as a biomedical researcher, I wouldn’t want to deal with the quagmire that is a classroom. Let me tell you. But there are statistical methods for looking at these data. And the statistical methods, for example, the UCLA study found that before you corrected for individuals – an individual’s parents income, their father’s education, it turns out – you might not know this, but girls who go to single-sex schools, their fathers are more highly educated than girls who go to co-educational schools if you look at everyone across the country.
When you correct for those factors, those advantages in math and so on and SAT scores, they went away. There was no longer any difference.
So research – I don’t know. I think research is important. I think we get answers. We stop wasting money on school fads and we can focus on things that actually work. I mean, we do know a lot of things that work in education. And a lot of things that are going on in these wonderful single-sex academies that would work for boys and girls together, like putting college posters on the wall and talking to freshmen inner city kids who have no – who would be the first generation to go to college, just have them start thinking about that process when they’re 14, to have mentors, to have after school tutoring, to have longer school days, to have Saturday tutoring. All of these wonderful things that the new, you know, many of these urban single-sex schools are doing would be good for boys and girls together. We just don’t need to do that in a segregated academy. All I’m saying.
MS. CUPP: What would you say to the argument, Lise, that this begins a slippery slope of encroachment into parental rights when you say that we can no longer send our kids to single-sex schools? What about Catholic schools or Montessori schools or any other kind of school that a parent chooses to send their kids to?
MS. ELIOT: I think it only – any of this only pertains to public schools. I think the Title 9 regulations only apply to public schools. So private schools can do – I mean, there are single religion schools. There are single gender – certainly many single gender private schools. And you know, I don’t even think that’s the scope of this discussion. I mean, I think that’s any individual family’s choice. But as a government, what are we trying to develop in our citizenry? And I think we’re trying to develop people that can appreciate and get along with diverse others and that includes the other gender.
MS. CUPP: Christina –
MS. SOMMERS: Can I just remark quickly?
MS. CUPP: Yes, of course.
MS. SOMMERS: It’s – you’re simply making the distinction that you’re not – legally will not hold up, is that we wouldn’t allow private universities that receive government funds to make them single-race. We wouldn’t allow to occur, but we do allow Wellesley and Bryn Mawr and the all-male school Wabash College, and so forth. And those kids can get student loans and so forth. But it seems to me that if you are consistent, you would have to come down against that because you believe that this single-sex arrangement is not working and presumably it’s not working at the college level for the same reasons if your arguments are right. And it violates some moral principle that you hold, which is it is an egregious form of discrimination.
MS. ELIOT: Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the courts go there eventually. I really wouldn’t, you know. That it’s somehow illegal for Wellesley to discriminate against men. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get there. It’s just not my personal mission today to do that.
MS. SOMMERS: OK. And the Girl Scouts and also –
MS. ELIOT: Oh, you know – scouting’s nice. My daughter would tag along at the Girl Scouts meetings. You know, I don’t know. I don’t care too much about scouting girls aren’t interested in Girl Scouts anymore, in case you didn’t notice. They’re too busy with all their sports and leadership activities. So I don’t know what’s –
MS. SOMMERS: What would you do with the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts?
MS. ELIOT: I’m not discussing the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts.
MS. SOMMERS: But no – but your arguments would imply –
MS. ELIOT: I don’t know. I mean, they’re letting homosexual kids in now. I think that’s great. I think our understanding of gender is really broadening and I think that we don’t necessarily need to draw lines between boys and girls. We certainly aren’t doing it in the military anymore. And I think if a girl wanted to join the Boy Scouts, if she wanted to join the boys’ football team, she should certainly be allowed to do so.
MS. SOMMERS: Oh, OK.
MS. ELIOT: You got that?
MS. SOMMERS: I’m a little – I’m not speechless, but I’ll just tell you to think it through a little more seriously. Look, for example, to Sweden, where they have taken your ideas and applied them. And they have, for example, a school called Egalia, where they’ve attempted to eliminate the category of gender. And children are not called boys and girls. They’re called friends and buddies. They do not “Cinderella” and “Snow White” and other gendered fairy tales. They read tales about two camels, two male camels who got married and adopted – they found a crocodile egg and they adopted it. (Laughter.) This, you know, excites the imagination of the children.
There was a wonderful article in “Slate” by a Swedish woman, who went – American Swedish – who went there and observed this classroom. And the kids are constantly coming back to gender. The boys are constantly trying to play like little boys and sex segregate. And the girls are trying to break – and it takes constant policing to police the children, to monitor. And this is why I think this is – this idea that this is a form of liberation is misguided. But you are – it’s actually a very intolerant idea. You’re not allowing the children to be themselves and who they want to be. And they do not mind teachers, as I said, who said good morning, girls and boys. They just not – they do not take offence at that. And if you are pushing us towards Egalia, it is a world few of us welcome.
MS. ELIOT: We’re actually talking about single-sex schools. You –
MS. SOMMERS: But I’m testing the principles and see – you were against single-sex scouting. And –
MS. ELIOT: I’m not against single-sex scouting. I’m just – I don’t care that much about it, I guess.
MS. SOMMERS: That’s clear, but a lot of people do. And so why don’t you just let them have it?
MS. ELIOT: It’s not my mission and I’d really stay – prefer if we stay on single- sex schooling because I think that has a bigger impact on society.
MS. CUPP: Well, let me ask one final question to you, Lise, then. Do you concede that boys and girls are different socially, physiologically, and perhaps learn in different ways?
MS. ELIOT: I wrote a nice long book on sex differences. And yes, there are differences, but they are small and statistical. When we’re talking about psychological differences, we’re not talking about height and weight.
MS. CUPP: Right.
MS. ELIOT: So actually, I have a nice little slide there. I can show you. Oops. Oh, my animations are included. But anyway, boys and girls overlap that empathy difference. Whereas our height differences are statistically a large effect, any difference in psychology is quite small, particularly math, reading, writing, empathy, even – even aggression in young children. You’d be surprised at how similar boys and girls are. See how much I didn’t get to show you?
There. Boys and girls – this is a study of several thousand toddlers or children in Canada and parents were asked to report if their child hit by or kicked another child. And you can see that two-year-old boys and girls in the left are pretty similar in the degree to which they will be physically aggressive. But then what happens is we have small differences at birth and there is a role for testosterone and I talk about that extensively. But what happens is that the differences magnify as the result of socialization. So boys get the message that – actually all children are socialized not to be aggressive. Luckily it gets trained out of most children by the time they start kindergarten, but girls learn faster. Girls learn that it’s not lady like. Boys watch football and they watch wrestling and they appreciate that there’s value in aggression and girls get a different message.
And so small differences grow into big gaps. That’s my thesis and I hope you read the book.
MS. CUPP: Great. We’ll go on to our closing statements. Christina, would you like to go first?
MS. SOMMERS: I thought I went last.
MS. CUPP: Would you like to go last?
MS. SOMMERS: Yes.
MS. CUPP: Lise, your closing statement.
MS. ELIOT: OK. So I’m a biomedical researcher where admittedly the standards of proof can be higher than in the messy business of classroom research. Nonetheless, our educational system’s never going to advance if we continue to rely on myth, impression, and anecdote, like the Stetson study that’s only published on Leonard Sax’s website, to reform our troubled schools.
We have to use evidence-based practice. And in the case of single-sex schools, the evidence fails. I presented three lines of research: education, neuropsychology, and social psychology to show that boys and girls do not learn differently, nor do they learn better when segregated. And when it comes to their social development, girls and boys have far more to learn from each other than they could ever have learned if educated apart – learn about people educated apart.
Gender is an important issue in education. There are gaps in reading, writing, science, and achievement that should be narrower. There’re gaps in career choice that should be narrower if we really want to maximize human potential and economic growth.
But stereotyping boys and girls and segregating them in the name of fictitious brain differences is never going to close these gaps and more likely to end up exacerbating them.
Nor can segregation ever hope to eliminate sexism, gender-based discrimination, or sexual harassment. The only way to promote respectful positive relationships between different groups of people is through shared experience. In this vein I believe co- education could be dramatically improved. Just getting boys and girls into the same room isn’t enough to get them to work together and value each other as individuals. In other words, many co-ed classrooms are only nominally co-educational.
Parents, teachers, and schools could do much more to encourage positive gender interactions. And also to overcome the stereotype threat that we know compromises both genders academically.
So we didn’t even talk about stereotype threat, but it is a very real phenomenon and it’s something that we can – that single-sex groupings can minimize stereotype threat, but there’s a lot of other ways to eliminate stereotype threat. People who study it in the case of race, racial underperformance, have come up with lots of strategies for reducing stereotype threat that don’t require segregating groups of people. We can have role models. We can have education and implicit bias. And my favorite thing, we can teach children about neuroplasticity. We can teach them that how you use your brain determines what you’re going to be good at and what you’re going to be smart at, not – not what you were born with in terms of chromosomes.
OK. So let me just finish up. Gender equity isn’t about male bashing or female bashing. It’s about getting individual boys and girls to team up in purposeful collaboration.
If we can open children’s eyes to their shared humanness, rather than driving a wedge between boys and girls with fake claims about their differences in hearing and vision, it will be far more beneficial to their future and our society.
So Christina has called me and my co-authors activists and I guess I’ll accept that word on today of all days. I’m proud to be called an activist. Today, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of our nation’s greatest activist, Martin Luther King Jr. and his march on Washington for civil rights. Exactly 50 years ago, today, he stood in front of Abraham Lincoln’s statue and famously said – and I wish I could do the resonance, I can’t – “I have a dream. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
So to me it’s pretty simply. If you substitute the word “gender” for “the color of their skin” and you can see why all this emphasis on gender difference and segregation is deeply disturbing. When it comes to learning and social and moral development, which is what schools are all about, boys and girls are far more similar than different and the better we can truly integrate them in classrooms, the better for all. Thank you.
MS. CUPP: Thank you. Christina.
MS. SOMMERS: This evening’s debate on single-sex education is more than an intellectual exercise. As I told you, Dr. Eliot and the American Council for Coeducational Schooling, ACCES, along with the ACLU is going from district to district and trying to stop programs. And they are succeeding. Go to the ACLU’s website. They are celebrating it.
They’re not succeeding in court. When they get to court, the cases are usually thrown out. But they are intimidating schools who feel they cannot afford the extended litigation. And they’ve already stopped several programs.
When the US Department of Education reviewed the single-sex education literature, it found the research ambiguous and equivocal and it recommended tolerance.
Professor Eliot and ACCES and ACLU, her colleagues in ACCES and ACLU, looked at the same evidence and advised intolerance. Do not give parents the choice. In defense of this position, they say that – and Professor Eliot wrote this in the “Wall Street Journal,” the issue isn’t whether we should offer families choice in public education. The issue is which choices to offer. School districts must not waste resources on options already proven ineffective. No one has proven single-sex education ineffective. These schools offer parents – I mean, our schools offer parents all sorts of choices that lack rigorous scientific support. Show me rigorous scientific support for gifted and talented programs, for small classes, for after school activities, for field trips, school orchestras. To say that such programs are forbidden until all the research lines up in one direction would be a prescription for mediocrity and paralysis.
But this debate is really not about evidence. It’s not about research. Even if there were decisive evidence that gender specific education improves students’ performance, the ACCES and the ACLU would still be opposed. They have persuaded themselves that they are separated – that separating sex is comparable to separating by race. That is what’s driving this campaign. And that idea is spurious.
Segregated schools – and I remind you this and so we can see the distinction – it’s so important to draw it if we’re going to invoke Martin Luther King – segregated schools were motivated by a toxic belief that blacks were inferior to whites. And the outcomes were horrific.
They were horrific both to the African-American students and to American society in general.
Single-sex education, different motivations, the motivation is the desire to help students thrive with the – and the results are often superlative. Also worthy of mention, racially segregated schools were imposed on people, while gender specific education is freely chosen.
Indeed, because co-education is so widely accepted as the norm in the United States, single-sex schools are a happy vindication, not a suppression of minority rights. The effort to ban them has more than a whiff of intolerance for non-conformists.
Now, ACCES and the ACLU, they view male and female as arbitrary, invidious distinctions that should be left behind. But that gender distinction is not arbitrary and invidious. As I said, no one wants to leave it behind. Even Ruth Bader – Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in the context of defending the possibility of single-sex colleges and schools, she referred to the sex difference as a cause for celebration.
Girls are going to be hurt if the ACLU and ACCES succeeds in their campaign to shut down single-sex classrooms. But boys will lose the most. These activist professors and lawyers may believe that male and female are superficial distinctions best ignored, but here’s one glaring distinction that we ignore at our peril. Boys are seriously behind girls in school. We do a far better job educating our girls than we do our boys.
All-male schools, classrooms, all-male school academies, they may not be panaceas, and they are certainly not for everyone, but they have produced many substantial positive results. Turning a blind eye to real differences between the sexes, dogmatically insisting that masculinity and femininity are irrelevant, that – doing that poses risks of its own. The campaign to ban single-sex education being waged by ACLU and ACCES is misguided, coercive, and destructive.
So ladies and gentlemen – oh, I’m sorry – friends and buddies – (laughter) – if you believe in educational diversity, if you believe in pluralism and choice, then you must support the continued availability of single-sex education. Thank you. Perfect. Ah, I knew that was going to be –
MS. CUPP: Please join me in thanking both of our guests – (applause) – Christina Hoff Sommers and Lise Eliot for a really engaging spirited debate. Thank you to AEI and IWF for sponsoring and hosting it. And thank you all for joining us. And thank you for you watching on Twitter.
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