"Reform" on the Cheap

A couple of weeks ago I saw a story on the evening news about a poor rural school district in, I think, South Carolina, that was going to switch to single-sex classrooms in the hope of improving student achievement. My first reaction was, "That won't work, but they're trying it because the school is failing and they have no money to actually fix the problem." And indeed, a virtue of experimenting with single-sex classrooms is that it's basically free.

Now, I promise I will actually read Sunday's NYT Magazine cover story on "gender-based education" soon, but the commentary I've seen online does give some credence to my snap judgment. Bottom line — there simply isn't any solid evidence to suggest it will improve student performance. Now, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, as they say, so by all means let's study the issue further. At this point, though, what we have appears to be some snake oil being hyped by a self-promoting huckster. Let's not overreact.