Boys' school

Boys are falling behind in the city's public schools, says the Toronto board's new Director of Education, who released yesterday an aggressive plan to launch an all-boys academy next fall and introduce 300 boy-friendly classrooms across the board.
"When we take a look at who we suspend, when we take a look at who's underachieving, it's disproportionately boys," said Dr. Chris Spence, who joined the board this year.
"I want us to explore better ways to serve our boys because I believe with differentiated support ... our schools will be safer and perform better academically."

I took this from the National Post, but it could have been from the Star, or the Globe, or possibly any daily across the country. Obviously the story touched a chord.

And why not? Dr. Spence’s is a seductive proposal. If we accept that there’s a problem, then it makes a kind of intuitive sense that isolating this problem so that it can be dealt with, solves it. It’s the kind of thinking that produces an all-black school in Toronto, or an aboriginal school in Saanich, or, for that matter, special schools for the mentally and physically handicapped.

The notion that it is beneficial to isolate classes of students in order to have them achieve their best makes me more than a little uneasy. It reminds me a lot of what one of my colleagues in London asserted in the staffroom one day – no room for doubt – while I was on exchange there: “Of course, comprehensive education doesn’t work.” Although I was a visitor to their system, I felt obliged to point out that he’d just denigrated all of North American public education. But that didn’t make a dent in his absolute certainty; people’s certainties are not so easily shaken.

And the boys’ project might just raise the academic achievement of some of the participants, although probably not for the rationale given. An illustrative anecdote: when my dad was a teacher in Victoria, he was part of a project to try to increase choice for elementary parents and students by introducing a more linear, instruction-based, discipline-oriented “traditional” school they could opt for, as well as one that would emphasize more child-centered, artistic, “progressive” methods. The latter was called “Sundance”, and is still in existence (it describes itself as “a small and gentle public elementary school"); I’ve forgotten the name of the former, which was ultimately less successful in catering to a clientele, and I gather relatively quickly reverted to being indistinguishable from the norm. In both cases teachers from across the system were asked to apply, and staffs were carefully selected.

It may not surprise you to learn (although I think my father, who very much favoured the Sundance model, was somewhat surprised) that both schools were equally successful academically in their first years. But it was predictable: it is one of the axioms of contemporary education that good administration and good teaching plus good parental and community support, makes the particular method of delivering a curriculum of secondary importance, if not pretty much irrelevant. (The fact that one school still survives and one doesn’t had to do with parental support, and is not a comment on the academic success of the students.)

So why would people like me care if this Toronto project appears to be a success? Well, that’s because there are dangers. Here's another instructive anecdote, by way of illustration: when middle schools became vogue, we in Canada very quickly started looking for models. Consequently, one year my district sent, at considerable expense, about 20 teachers to a conference in New Orleans to be indoctrinated, even though we had already been operating a quite-successful middle school in Campbell River for years, and had developed considerable local expertise. The “Middle School Philosophy” that was subsequently imported made a lot of experienced and effective teachers very unhappy, created a lot of upheaval, and ultimately did nothing to enhance student learning in our district.

Public education is pretty much constantly reacting to the educational enthusiasms of the moment, and if this project is considered successful, there will be calls and movements to emulate it, even thought it's a fantasy, based on a misapprehension. There’s no reason to think a widely-promulgated series of all-boy schools would solve anything. Here’s neurobiologist Dr. Lise Eliot quoted in the Globe:

This idea that boys and girls learn differently is misleading. They clearly have different interests and somewhat different needs as far as physical movement. But the idea that the process of learning how to read or do arithmetic is fundamentally different for boys and girls is wrong and probably even dangerous.
There has been a big push for single-sex schooling. I spent a lot of time looking at the research, comparing single-sex schooling to co-ed education. It's not very compelling.
It is very difficult research to do, but the data we have thus far suggest if there is an advantage, it is for girls. The largest body of data from many countries – Canada, the U.S. Britain, Australia – suggests boys do not benefit from single-gender education compared with co-ed. It leads to the conclusion that both boys and girls do better with girls in the classroom, that girls sort of settle a classroom down and provide good role models.

The only reliable solution for the statistically-significant fact that boys are falling behind girls in their basic skills is a public education system that makes good teaching both possible and realistic. Let’s put our money and effort into that.