
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 27, 1994                   TAG: 9403310002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: William Raspberry
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ROLE MODELS

THANK heaven it's not a public school, or St. Stephen's and St. Agnes would be in trouble. The private Episcopal school in Alexandria is not overcharging kids, or abusing them, or oppressing them. It's them kids very well indeed. But it is doing so by (among other things) operating single-sex classrooms for math and science in sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

The rationale for this gender separation is the well-documented fact that, in math and science, girls tend not to do as well as boys of equal intelligence. Whether the difference is the result of nature or merely of socialization, of male-oriented teaching styles or of lowered self-esteem for girls, the result often is that girls have their subsequent academic and career choices curtailed.

I've heard all manner of explanations: that girls learn more efficiently by listening, boys by mental and physical manipulation; that girls deliberately underperform in mixed settings to avoid the social cost of being as good as the boys; that teachers (inadvertently, of course) pay more attention to boys than to girls; that girls prefer cooperative learning, while boys turn learning - and everything else - into a competition.

Some of the explanations may not be true. This is: If the St. Stephen's and St. Agnes experiment were taking place in a public school, somebody would be out to stop it.

They just stopped one in Philadelphia, where John Coats, a teacher at Stanton Elementary School had initiated a model five-year program for a group of 20 first-grade boys who had had learning problems in kindergarten.

The program was working - indeed was the subject of a documentary, ``I Am a Promise.'' Nine of these erstwhile slow-learning boys made the honor roll. But the program is dead now. The American Civil Liberties Union threatened to file a lawsuit against it on the ground that boys-only classes are unconstitutional, and the school district folded.

Detroit's attempt to establish all-male academies as a way of rescuing boys at risk of becoming dropouts (and worse) ran into similar legal opposition, as did an earlier effort in Miami.

Spencer Holland, an educational psychologist now at Morgan State University in Baltimore, had a dream to establish all-male kindergarten and primary classes headed by male teachers. Particularly in the inner cities, where young boys may go for days at a time without directly encountering a literate adult male, he thought it might make an important difference.

In the fall of 1987, Holland and Willie Wright, a Miami elementary-school principal, implemented Holland'sthe idea. As Wright told me later, ``It was a total success, academically and socially. There were no fights, no kids sent out for discipline. They not only improved academically, they became their brothers' keepers, something not generally found in low socioeconomic schools. Not a single parent complained.''

But, after two years of unquestioned success, the Department of Education's regional office killed the experiment - said it was a violation of Title IX (of the federal Civil Rights Act) guarantees against gender discrimination.

Where do they get these people who are so solicitous of disembodied ``rights'' that they are willing to do demonstrable damage to actual children? The explanation, always, is that the way to meet the academic needs of these real-life children is not to segregate them by gender but to make the classrooms fair.

Of course. But it isn't entirely clear that the problem is classroom unfairness of a sort that can be readily corrected. Most elementary-school teachers (sixth grade is where girls' self-esteem begins to take a downward slide) are women and are unlikely to be deliberately undercutting the self-confidence of girls. Philadelphia's Coats, like Holland before him, thought the boys weren't learning because of the near-total absence of positive male role models in their lives. How do you make the classrooms fair enough to compensate for that?

There's a lot we don't know about educating children. That's what makes it so sad when these self-righteous monomaniacs are willing to kill a program that clearly works for actual children out of deference to the possibility that somebody's theoretical rights might somehow be damaged.

Where, I ask, is the societal gain if our children wind up academically dead to ``rights''?

Washington Post Writers Group

by CNB