Says Kevin Drum, on single-sex public high schools:
As with so many issues in education, my first reaction is thatexperimentation is a good thing. Give it a try and see how it works. Ifit turns out as badly as Brad suggests, we can always kill it later.
I'm concerned that Brad Plumer is right, and that the goal of the experiment isn't going to be test scores going up or girls becoming scientists. What the authorities in some parts of Louisiana seem to want from single-sex education is character education designed to generate aggressive boys and meek, submissive girls. The Happy Feminist had the goods on this issue a while ago, when she described the theorizing behind some of their single-sex education proposals.
