Feature > Investigative Report, Part II

The Child Left Behind: BUSH & THE NEO-CONSERVATIVE AGENDA
By Jeanne Lenzer . Illustration by Milan Trenc

[PART 1, PUBLISHED IN THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF CHRONOGRAM, EXAMINED CLAIMS THAT SINGLE-SEX CLASSES IMPROVE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE.]

Despite the lack of empirical evidence that single-sex education improves academic performance and classroom behavior (as reported in Part 1 last month), why are so many jumping on the gender segregation bandwagon?

There are as many answers to that question as there were odd bedfellows supporting Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 that gave the green light to single-sex education. It was President Bush’s education campaign, with the NCLB as its centerpiece, that arguably won him the election—the question of vote rigging in Florida notwithstanding.

The ad hoc alliance supporting gender-segregated classes includes conservatives seeking to maintain clear-cut role distinctions between boys and girls, as well as some feminists who see single-sex classes as a safe space away from boys, allowing girls to learn unencumbered by male harassment. The single-sex provision of the NCLB was endorsed by former Texas Governor Ann Richards, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Hillary Clinton, and lauded by Oprah Winfrey.

Another sector supporting the move is not necessarily ideologically committed to either of the above stances; they simply believe—or hope—that boys and girls will learn better when segregated. Frantic parents and desperate teachers worried about student performance and behavior are ready to try anything. So when someone comes along saying he has scientific evidence that boys and girls will do better when segregated, they are all too ready to believe.

While these various sectors create a motley crew in support of gender segregation, Bush and his neo-conservative allies have an important reason to exploit these ideologies and hopes: At a time when Bush and the neo-cons continue to slash social spending in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy and soaring military expenditures, quick cures for educational woes provide cover for politicians who promise solutions without having to ante up for substantive changes.

LOTS OF STICK, LITTLE CARROT
The NCLB Act has testing and accountability at its core. That may not sound too bad at first blush—but the devil is truly in the details on this one. First, testing is itself non-standardized. Second, the funding necessary to aid under-performing schools and students is already being slashed. One month after Bush signed the act, he cut $90 million from its funding, according to Congressperson Stephanie Tubbs Jones, of Ohio’s 11th District, who said Bush “left behind the funding necessary for every child to receive a quality education.”

Proposed cuts will rise to $20 billion to NCLB funding over the next three years, according to North Carolina Congressperson Bob Etheridge, who introduced the “Fully Fund the No Child Left Behind Act” in June 2003. The FF-NCLB calls for suspension of many of the NCLB provisions if NCLB is “not fully funded.”
According to the National Education Association (NEA), the NCLB Act is aggravating budget cuts at a time when:

States and local communities are struggling with the worst budget shortfalls since World War II, and many have cut back on instruction time or laid off quality teachers and school staff. Parents and students are holding bake sales to pay teachers and save music, art, and other student activities. It will be impossible for our public schools to meet the strict federal demands of the new “No Child Left Behind” Act if vital school services continue to be cut.”

The nationwide problem of budget shortfalls has left many school systems under funded and others in a state of near-collapse. Locally, the Rondout School pulled out of a financial tailspin this past year after being forced to resort to an austerity budget.

“The NCLB is coming on the heels of budget cuts. It has lots of sticks and not enough carrots,” says NEA spokesperson Daniel Kaufman. This comes at the expense, Kaufman says, of tried and true methods known to improve educational outcomes.

The NEA issued a biting commentary on the NCLB single-sex education provision on July 8, 2002, which reads in part:

“[E]xpanding the use of single-sex education is bad educational policy because it will have significant adverse consequences, including: the diversion of resources from educational practices that already have been proven to improve student achievement for both girls and boys (e.g. smaller class size, quality teachers, and parental involvement); the elevation of the discredited doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ to official government policy; the promotion and legitimization of harmful and false sex stereotypes of both boys and girls; and the creation of an artificial single-sex environment that will ill prepare students for life in the real world.”

Calling gimmicks like single-sex classes “magic-pill solutions,” NEA’s Kaufman adds that restoring budgets and reducing the more punitive aspects of NCLB would go a long way toward offering real support to students and teachers.
But in the world of Bush and the neo-cons, gimmicks are far preferable to anything requiring actual commitment. However, since money and educational commitment, not gender segregation (see Part I for a discussion of this), may be the reason for improved scores at certain demonstration schools, one might reasonably wonder what’s in it for the Bush administration and the neo-cons if they really have to ante up the money anyway.

The answer is that single-sex schools allegedly don’t spend more per pupil than co-ed schools. But, as discussed in Part I, demonstration schools like the Young Women’s Leadership School receive additional funding, making them the top schools in per-pupil expenditures. In other words, the money to make single-sex education “successful” is hidden. The early projects are like “loss-leaders” at a supermarket: They serve to get buyers in the door. And now that people have bought the rules of NCLB, Bush has promptly requested budget cuts to his own program.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS—STRANGER “SCIENCE”
The person most responsible for providing the scientific basis for the movement is Leonard Sax, MD, a family practice doctor and psychologist. Sax is executive director of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education (NASSPE). He has appeared in national broadcasts on NBC and on the ABC Family Channel, and served as an advisor for a CNN report on the single-sex Moten Elementary School. Sax and the NASSPE have received mention in the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other newspapers, radio programs, and television shows. He is also widely quoted by school administrators seeking to convince parents of the benefits of gender segregation.

Sax, as a physician, makes claims rarely questioned. More than one administrator has trotted out Sax’s claims of brain differences as providing the basis for their initiatives. Glenn Bollin, principal of the Ellenville Middle School—which switched to mostly segregated classes in 2002—said: “Leonard Sax published articles using MRIs and research showing there are differences between male and female brains. I’m assuming that’s correct information.”

It doesn’t take a scientist to suspect something is fishy with the conclusions Sax reaches from the research he references. For example, Sax cites a study by Sandra Witelson, PhD, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, that he says shows profound brain differences between men and women: “You can tell just by looking at…brain tissue under the microscope whether that person was a woman or a man. That’s because neurons in that part of the brain are packed much more densely in a woman’s brain…. There is not even any overlap in the distributions between male and female. The brain tissue of every single woman in this study had a significantly higher concentration of neurons than any man had [original emphasis].”

Sax’s claims simply don’t pass the sniff test for most scientists. Scientists trained in genetics and neurobiology do not draw the same conclusions. Sujatha Byravan, PhD, executive director of the Council for Responsible Genetics, is a molecular biologist who specializes in neurobiology. She’s heard plenty of claims like this come and go.

“They made claims like this about black brains and homosexual brains—and they’ve been discredited,” Byravan told Chronogram. “Sure, if you take enough samples of men’s and women’s brains, there would be areas of both overlap and difference. But to prove difference, you have to have a really large experimental sample size. Even then, there’s a question of cause and effect. You know how people rely on certain senses more when they loose one sense? Well, that can affect the brain and you can see those changes.”

Dr. Barbara Crain, MD, PhD, FCAP, the chair of the College of American Pathologists’ Neuropathology Committee, says of Sax’s claims, “He’s taken one paragraph in a long complicated paper out of context.” Crain laughs and adds, “I’ve looked at a couple thousand brains and you can’t tell male from female—it’s not that straightforward. There is quite a literature on morphologic differences in male and female brains—but there’s a lot of overlap and it’s not easy to relate those [differences] to function.”

Although Sax quotes a number of other studies purporting to show the same outcomes, scientists versed in the history of flawed studies are less persuaded. Dr. Banu Subramaniam, an evolutionary biologist and assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts, says, “The context of these studies is there is a long history over the years of people who try to find sex differences or race differences. They’ve tried to locate it in different parts of the brain, and then it’s refuted and the claim dies and then a new location is described…. The whole history of medicine is a history of the results of those studies supporting the power relations in our cultures and the politics of that time, and whenever those results are found to the contrary they are turned around or ignored.”

Other claims made by Sax regarding hearing differences between boys and girls were disputed by Ken Satterfield, spokesperson for the American Academy of Otorhinolaryngology, who said there are no hearing differences between boys and girls.

But if Sax’s “science” is faulty, his ideas on gender are even more troubling. His view of women is apparent in an article he wrote for the December 2000 issue of Penthouse, “Guilty Until Proven Innocent.” “Women,” wrote Sax, “have taken over. Not everywhere, but everywhere that counts. Like an army seizing the strategic high ground, women have commandeered the schools, the colleges, the departments of psychology. Psychology is power.”

Sax goes on to sound the alarm bell about rising female violence. Then he claims that feminists don’t care about female on female crime—only crimes committed against women by men. “Those are the facts,” says Sax, who concludes: “I’ll bet you haven’t heard them before—because women are taking over the media.”

In the same article, Sax creates a straw man to knock down: “Are women really more honest, more virtuous, more trustworthy than men? If not, why is the law written as though they are?”

LOSING WHAT CAN’T BE COUNTED
Richard Carr, PhD, a music educator in the Poughkeepsie city schools and the parent of a middle school student at Rondout, says the move to gender segregation is short-sighted. “It may improve some test scores in some places, but it’s not training kids for life. The rest of life isn’t going to be in a single-gender classroom. Public school is a place where you mix with all kinds of people, and kids need to learn how to deal with those kinds of distractions.”
As for the purported science behind the move, Carr says, “You can use the data to make any kind of claim you want.” Carr is equally unmoved by claims of improved academic test scores, saying, “Einstein said, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted.’ There are un-measurable outcomes that have to do with the character education of a kid. I think girls need to learn how to get in there and slug it out with guys, and we’re doing them a disservice by not giving them that experience.”

Carr says even if a slight improvement in test scores were proven, it’s not a good trade-off: “In my field of music—there’s a whole new perspective on music that comes from women and from people of color. We need that.”

Interestingly, of the youth interviewed for this article, many conflated sexism with racism. One young African-American girl (I confess, it’s my daughter) immediately reacted to the news that her school would be offering single-sex classes this way: “What are they going to do next? Separate us by race?”

That sense of danger, of a slippery slope being traversed, was reiterated again and again by students. Melissa Narvaez, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Rondout said, “Girls need boys and boys need girls. Some kids in my school think it’s kind of racist. Because what if they start teaching boys different things and what if they start thinking they’re better?”

Narvaez is on to something. Gender segregation for boys was lauded in one British school where they found that the boys “felt superior” to the girls—this was applauded as a way to boost the boys’ self-esteem. And to the degree that girls are led to feel they can’t hold their own with boys in a class, isn’t it natural to conclude that they are segregated because they are weaker, less capable?

Wendy Kaminer, a graduate of the all-female Smith College, writing in the April 1998 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, concluded that all-female schools are “models of equivocation” that reinforce stereotypes, fueling the problem of sexual objectification by hyping the other gender as objects of sexual desire rather than exposing youth to each other as classmates and colleagues.

Diana Zuckerman, a Spanish teacher at Rondout Middle School, incorporates multiculturalism in her teaching. She says she loves her job and Rondout school, but she is distressed by the move to single-sex classes. She sees why students make the connection between sexism and racism: “When parents say they don’t want boys with girls or girls with boys, it’s no different than saying, I don’t want my kid in a class with ‘those kids,’” says Zuckerman.

WHAT IS SEGREGATION TELLING YOUTH?
When the cure adults give for failing grades, violence, and behavior problems is to segregate boys and girls, a troubling message is sent to children—that it is the relation between girls and boys that is the source of trouble. Not poverty. Not bad student to teacher ratios. Not questionable curriculums. Not books that are too old to even mention the Vietnam War. Not teachers who don’t call on girls. Not lousy funding for public schools.

How children benefit from the presence of many different personalities and cultures is not as easily measured as test scores—but may be no less important. Even if test scores could be improved by segregation, larger questions remain: What other ways are there to achieve better scores (and do improved test scores always have value)? What is lost by segregation? What is gained by diversity?

In searching for solutions to the problems that beset schools, it is useful to come back to the basics. According to the NEA’s Daniel Kaufman, there are basic things that have been repeatedly proven to improve outcomes in schools. They are “high quality teachers, small class size, parental involvement, safe modern facilities, and a principal committed to improving quality of education for all children. Mandatory full-day kindergarten and pre-school help as well,” said Kaufman. At the heart of the matter is a simple point: Education costs money. What value can the Bush administration place on education if it cuts taxes for big corporations, offers them non-compete contracts (meaning higher profits) in Iraq, and then cuts education for students?

Jeanne Lenzer is an investigative journalist and a stringer for the British Medical Journal. She lives in Kingston and is currently working on a book about emergency medicine and the public health in an era of uncertainty.