Single-sex schools are hot these days. A few years ago, separating the sexes was supposed to help girls preserve their confidence; now the concern is focusing on boys’ needs. AP quotes Leonard Sax, director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, who says the number of public schools offering single-sex classes has risen from four in 1998 to 223 today. New federal regulations due this summer should make it easier to offer single-sex programs.

I’m very nervous about some of the ideas behind single-sex education. It’s one thing to try to shield middle schoolers from raging hormones. It’s quite another to treat boys and girls as different species.

Backers of single-sex classes say that in elementary school, girls’ vision and thought processes have developed to respond better to color and detail, while boys’ brains are more apt at processing motion and direction.

“If you don’t understand those differences and you teach boys and girls as if they were the same, the end result is a kindergarten classroom where the boys tell you drawing is for girls and a middle school classroom where girls tell you computers are for boys,” Sax said.

Under the proposed federal rules, it would be possible to create a single-sex schools for boys, for example, without creating a comparable school for girls.

When I was in Philadelphia plugging my book, I met David Hardy, who’s trying to start a rigorous college-prep charter school for boys, focusing on improving the dismal academic performance of black males. The web site says:

Teachers in an all boys’ school can teach effectively in ways which reach boys and appeal to their learning style. This allows a young man more ease in developing his full potential.

The charter proposal was rejected in January, even though Philadelphia has two all-girls public charter schools.

I think it makes sense to focus a charter school on students who share specific needs or interests. But I worry about many of the theories of gender difference that are out there. Would directing more teaching to active, assertive, competitive students be so bad for girls? I have a feeling girls and boys would benefit from a rethinking of the elementary curriculum. What about Lisa Simpson?

Via Alexander Russo, who also links to an influential New York Times column on gender differences.

A 14-year-old Texas girl assaulted by a 19-year-old boy she encountered online is suing MySpace for $30 million for not screening out underage users or sexual predators. From the Austin American-Statesman:

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 “utterly ineffective.”

. . . In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, (the 19-year-old) picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said. He was arrested May 19.

It’s hard to imagine a world in which trusting 14-year-old girls can be protected from harm.

College students also need to learn that MySpace is a public place, observes Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.

I’m getting a little tired of reading all these “exposes” of Facebook and MySpace.

Hardly a week goes by without some newscast or newspaper discovering that it can be hazardous to the college or professional careers of young people to post pictures of themselves engaged in drinking, drugging, loving or other racy activity that might be frowned upon by some adult in a position of authority.

Okay, we get it. Hasn’t dumb judgment always been hazardous to your professional health?

Even politicians’ children, who you’d think might be used to public scrutiny, have been acting out on social networking sites. It’s not clear whether voters will condemn the political parents or sympathize.

Via Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine. Like me, Jeff comes from the era when it was possible to act like a fool without sharing the photos with millions of people around the world or preserving youthful folly for posterity.

The new Carnival of Homeschooling has gone to the birds.

The defeat of the universal preschool initiative opens the door to better-designed proposals that target needy children, writes Sara Mead of Education Sector in the San Jose Mercury News. (I’m on vacation in Oregon, so I heard about the column on Eduwonk.)

Proposition 82′s supporters made a lot of promises: Universal preschool would close academic achievement gaps between poor and affluent students, improve California’s dismal public school performance and be a boon to the economy. A failure to deliver these promised results quickly would have had devastating consequences for the preschool movement, both in California and nationally.

California doesn’t have the infrastructure for a huge preschool expansion, Mead writes. For the future, she urges preschool backers to support a mix of programs to serve children with diverse needs.

I think there’s considerable support for expanding preschool opportunities for disadvantaged children, very little for subsidizing preschool for children from affluent families.

With school out, things are a bit slow for education bloggers but the Carnival of Education goes on. Submit your entries by Tuesday at 7 pm Pacific time to Henry Cate at cate3@panix.com. This could be your chance to be a star.

EIA Intercepts has fun with the slogan of the National Education Association, which is: “Every Child Is A Public School’s. Basic, Right? Great.” Well, something like that. There’s more from the advertising slogan generator. I tried the generator for “public schools” and got “Moving at the Speed of Public Schools.” Which makes you think.

British students are learning to “think like a terrorist” in citizenship class, reports The Times.

Teaching packs entitled 9/11: The Main Chance, which invite pupils to imagine organising a terrorist attack, have been distributed to schools running the Government’s much-vaunted citizenship classes.

One worksheet asks the pupils to imagine what terrorist targets there are in their neighbourhoods. They have then to suggest what weapons and methods should be used to ensure the most effective results.

The worksheet includes many links to web sites on 9/11.

Many of the sites propound outlandish conspiracy theories on the atrocity including the suggestion that the American military shot down flight United 93.

Another link takes pupils to a website which suggests that Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, directed the attacks, while another “news” website the worksheets encourage pupils to visit includes references to images of Satan appearing in smoke over the Twin Towers on September 11.

Citizenship classes are supposed to instill a stronger sense of British identity. The kits are being used in a predominantly Muslim area, Hot Air observes.

Times columnist Mick Hume writes the terror lessons reflect a values vacuum.

The orthodoxy today is that all education must be made “relevant” to pupils’ own experience. Thus the section on “Tolerance and 9/11” ends with a quiz about how you would react if your mum burnt your toast, or your brother lent your favourite DVD to his mate. The lesson on conflict resolution suggests that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is like a family dispute about sharing.

No doubt this teaching pack was put together by well-intentioned educationists, despite the inaccuracies and omissions. Of course it is not “pro al-Qaeda”. But nor does it appear to be pro anything else. Instead it reflects the wider confusion and incoherence about these issues. We are unsure who we are or what we stand for as a society, and it is nonsense to expect citizenship classes to fill that vacuum. Government commitment to teaching “values” is worthless when we don’t know what those might be.

Via Little Green Footballs.

Via Charter Blog, here’s a Business Week interview with Bill and Melinda Gates, who talk about their focus on improving high schools. They’ve given $1 billion to education so far, with most of that going to create smaller high schools. But improving achievement is harder than they thought. Small alone doesn’t work. Improving curriculum and teaching are critical too, says Melinda Gates, who responds to a recent Gates Foundation study showing that “math results at schools receiving money from the foundation are lower than at traditional high schools.”

Melinda One of the things we have to look at is what is it about the teachers today and the curriculum today that’s making math not successful in these schools? We just recently had those results. The best thing the foundation can do is really look at that and talk with our partners and say: “Do we need to change something about how we’re helping teachers teach math? Do we need to help change the curriculum in the schools?”

But that is what I think the unique role may be with the foundation: We’re not afraid to take those results and publish them broadly and tell everybody: “Yep, here are some things we’re finding. Let’s have a conversation about it and now, let’s figure out how to solve it,” as opposed to hiding it and saying: “Well, let’s not worry about math and science and kind of act like it’s working.”

I think the Gates people charged ahead at first with the “small is beautiful” idea but have been good at looking at results and rethinking. Bill Gates plans to shift his attention from Microsoft to philanthropy in the next two years. He has the potential to do a lot of good.

Parents who’ve sent their kids to private schools may be enrolling them in low-performing public schools in the hopes of qualifying for a voucher — worth $4,250 for elementary students or $5,000 for high school — to pay private-school tuition. At any rate, the Ohio Department of Education suspects non-needy parents are signing their kids up for schools they have no intention of letting them attend.

In Columbus, enrollment is rising slightly in half the schools so bad that students qualify for vouchers. Kindergarteners or charter students in the school’s attendance area are eligible for vouchers, but what about older students who’ve been homeschooled or gone to private schools? Some of these students come from families of modest income who’ve sacrificed to pay for alternatives.

In Cincinnati, eight Catholic school students enrolled in a low-rated public school for the last two days of the school year. The local parochial school charges $2,475 for in-parish students and $4,850 for out-of-parish students, notes the Cincinnati Enquirer.

So far, only 2,500 students have applied for Ohio’s EdChoice vouchers; 14.000 are available.

No Child Left Behind has failed to close the racial achievement gaps, writes the Harvard Civil Rights Project in a new report.

It’s the culture, stupid, responds LaShawn Barber.

While there are no quick and clear-cut solutions to this cultural problem, it’s not as complicated as it’s made out to be, either. First, family stability does affect children and is correlated with life outcomes. Seventy percent of black children are born to unmarried mothers and tend to be raised in female-headed households. Such families, by definition, are unstable. . . .

This leads to my second point. There is a poisonous strain of “anti-intellectualism” coursing through the subculture generally speaking.

. . . For example, instead of facing enormous problems in the “black community,” including the epidemic of fatherlessness, the NAACP is “studying” tripe like the paucity of black characters on sitcoms! Does this sound like a people concerned at all about educational excellence and intellectual competitiveness?

Barber believes there’s lots of opportunity for people willing to seize it.

What is unique about the “African American” experience is that we live in a country that has bent over backwards to make amends for past injustices. That some people are “left behind” is not evidence of racism. I believe that in 2006, it is imperative that blacks understand this and embrace the idea of self-help, self-improvement, and accountability for our lot in life as individuals.

I don’t think No Child Left Behind calls for equal results: It says that all children can achieve proficiency — and the definition of proficiency isn’t all that high in most states. Some students who work very hard will go far beyond proficiency; only a few are intellectually incapable of learning to read, write and calculate at the (not very high) proficient level. The law has forced schools to focus on students who’ve been ignored and written off before, in some cases shifting resources from average and above-average students. I think the worst thing we could do is to give up on educating these kids. Yes, we need to find ways to motivate them to work much harder. We need to find ways to persuade parents to work harder to prepare students to succeed in school and support them as learners. We need to create school cultures that value responsibility, perseverance and learning. We shoul d not give up.