thoughts on my reserch

So just to follow up I sent you a email in Sakai explaining that my computer crashed ( the week before the end of the quartered) and I had to start my research over. I chose to research single gender classrooms in American public schools. The reason I chose this topic is that it is very controversial and many civil rights groups such as the ACLU and feminist groups such as The National Council of Woman's Organizations and the American Association of University Woman vehemently protest single sex education. These groups cite Brown vs. the Board of Education and Title IX of the U.S. Department of Education, which states that public schools that receive federal funds most provide gender equal education. This applies to athletic programs which previous to 1972 were almost exclusively male dominated. Title IX is credited with turning the tide in the gender education gap favoring females.

The first source I used for my research was an article from the Washington Post "More schools trying Separation of Gender" the article discusses changes to the No Child Left Behind law that stated that single gender class rooms are an "innovative tool to boost achievement." The article discusses the two different camps surrounding the issue of single gender classrooms ( i.e. those who argue that it is boys who are being shortchanged and that single gender classrooms that are designed to be more "boy-friendly" have been show to raise achievement levels of male students).
On the other side of the argument national civil rights groups such as the ACLU and woman's groups protest single sex education arguing that it is "segregation" and that single gender education for females has a history of being "inherently unequal." This was my initial source and it provided me with a few really good sources. My working sentence was " Does single gender education provide equal opportunities for both males and females?

My next source was an interview from salon magazine which I found online. In this source I read about a study conducted by the American Association of University Woman, which was released in the early 1990s. The study was called How Schools Short Change Girls. This study along with feminist rhetoric that accused America's public schools of shortchanging girls by relegating them to gender stereo types had significant impact on public policy. This was the next step in my research. My research uncovered information about a law passed in 1994 which said that girls were an "undeserved population." A lot of debate followed this decision many critics pointed out that girls have been significantly outperforming boys in reading and writing for over 20 years.

This led me to my next source the U.S. Dept. of Educations National Achievement Statistics. This was an invaluable source because it has longevity studies of educational achievement since 1969. The web site also makes it really easy to get info. by separating categories by race and gender.

I got several books from the public library Real Boys and The War on Boys from two of the most outspoken advocates of the "boy crisis" and educational reform. Both authors discuss single sex classrooms as a way of combating gender stereo types for both males and females. Christina Hoff Sommers book The War on Boys provided the most detailed and comprehensive references. Many of her studies she mentioned I found on Academic Search Complete. I was off and running at this point. Many of the the studies I read revealed an almost universal theme and that is: that ethnic minority boys are in serious trouble. They are more likely to drop out of school ( confirmed by the Manhattan Research Institute and the U.S. Dept. of Ed.).

At this point I set out to research minority boys achievement I found several studies through Academic Search Complete that revealed that as early as kindergarten African American boys are underachieving and that teachers assign them low "social skills scores." The MRI study reported that 1/2 of African American and Hispanic boys drop out of high school. Whats interesting is that while boys are under achieving girls ( on the whole) are overachieving. every source I read confirmed that girls make up 58% of students on college campuses.

Most of the web sites I used were either government web site ( such as the U.S. Dept. of Ed) or web sites from major universities. The other approach I used in my research was to read scholarly articles and books from major proponents of single sex classrooms. I uncovered an interesting detail that unilaterally these sources fell on the "boy crisis" side of the argument. While the protesters that claimed that single sex education is unconstitutional were from civil rights or feminist organizations.

One consistent theme in my research is that advocates on behalf of boys ( psychologist and brain research experts) claimed that boys also suffer from gender stereo types in much the same way that girls did from 1950-1980. But by the early 1980s girls were beginning to equal boys on college campus and by 2004 they were out numbering them. This is an argument that the boy camps is using to promote single sex education. Another interesting aspect is that most of the advocates for single sex education cite brain research that suggests that boys and girls learn differently. This is probably the most controversial aspect of this issue. On one side some significant research does show differences in the brains' of males and females but the jury, but just how this effects individual cognition is not been proven ( although theories have been formulated).

What's interesting is that my research uncovered that single sex education is on the rise 249 schools in the U.S. are experimenting with gender separate classrooms, and the number is continued to rise.

I think that what this project taught me is to be flexible the irony is that I would have never discovered this info. if my computer had not crashed and I had to come up with a new topic. The Washington Post article was a great source of info. because it presented both sides of the case. And it gave me a lot of stats. that I could than look up and research for myself. Another thing I learned was that "studies" even those from prominent universities are not always peer reviewed and often times in my research I noticed that the methodology was questioned.