Just the Facts, Please!!! – or, how the New York Times got this story all wrong
By Leonard Sax, MD, PhD
March 2, 2008 (with addenda March 3,
2008)
The New York Times is
a newspaper which enjoys considerable influence and prestige in the
· Misrepresenting my position; portraying me (Dr. Sax) as a ‘gender essentialist’
· Misrepresenting the relevant brain research
·
The narrow focus on
· The artificial tension which Weil invents between NASSPE and the YWL Foundation
· Unbalanced (and unfactual) criticism without any rebuttal
Let’s consider each of these in turn.
Misrepresentation
of my position; portraying me as a ‘gender essentialist’
One of the most irritating aspects of Ms. Weil’s story is her studied and deliberate neglect of my constant emphasis on variation within sexes, and the importance of these variations. She portrays me (Dr. Sax) as a superficial “gender essentialist” who lumps all girls into one pink box, and all boys into one blue box. Weil asserts that I tell teachers that “Boys covet risk; girls shy away.” I repeatedly emphasized to Ms. Weil that these differences are differences in average tendencies. Not all boys ‘covet’ risk; and many girls are risk-takers. The longest chapter in my book Why Gender Matters (chapter 9) is devoted specifically to girls and boys who don’t fit the usual stereotype. Some girls despise Barbie dolls and would rather play soccer. Some boys don’t care for football or soccer; they would rather sit quietly and read a book, or write a poem. She quotes me, correctly, as saying that “human nature is gendered to the core.” She neglects the rest of the quote, when I told her that “how we express our gender is a big piece of who each of us is, as a person. The girl who prefers to wrestle hogs, rather than play with dolls, is truly different from the girl who loves to play with Barbies, and that’s a key feature of her individuality.” Ms. Weil cites my book Why Gender Matters, but it seems clear that she has never read it. If she had, she would have known that I am continually emphasizing the importance of variation AMONG girls and variation AMONG boys.
Likewise, if Ms. Weil had read the opening page of the NASSPE web site, www.singlesexschools.org, she would have read this in the opening paragraph:
Advocates of single-sex education do NOT
believe that "all girls learn one way and all boys learn another
way." On the contrary, we cherish and celebrate the diversity among girls
and among boys. . . Educators who understand these differences can inspire
every child to learn to the best of her or his ability.
Misrepresentation
of the relevant brain research
Ms. Weil spoke with Dr. Jay Giedd, lead investigator of the
NIMH study on brain development in children.
She mentions that Dr. Giedd was a keynote speaker at our 2007 NASSPE
conference in 
conference,
despite my repeated invitations to her throughout the summer and fall of
2007. She explained that the New York Times would not pay for her to
make a trip to
Ms. Weil repeatedly creates a straw man – a misrepresentation of what advocates of single-sex education believe – and then shows how silly that position is. So, she asks Dr. Giedd about the wisdom of using “gender alone to assign educational experiences for kids. Yes, you’ll get more students who favor cooperative learning in the girls’ room, and more students who enjoy competitive learning in the boys’, but you won’t do very well.” Of course not! The straw man here is the notion that “girls are cooperative, while boys are competitive.” This notion is precisely one of the gender myths which I personally am most adamant about deconstructing when I do my presentations. Notice that Ms. Weil doesn’t actually attribute this belief – that “girls are cooperative, while boys are competitive” – to me personally, or to anyone in particular. Ms. Weil simply assumes that this silly stereotyped notion is something which advocates of single-sex education believe.
She quotes Dr. Giedd as saying that “there are just too many exceptions to the rule” for single-sex education to work. Dr. Giedd is responding to Ms. Weil’s leading question about whether it would make sense to push all girls into “cooperative” classrooms and all boys into “competitive” classrooms. I would have responded precisely as Dr. Giedd did: there are too many exceptions to the rule for that sort of “pink and blue” stereotyping to be effective. That’s why our training workshops are important: to help teachers accommodate variations within each sex. But Ms. Weil has built her article on the premise that I put all girls in one stereotyped box, and all boys in another. Dr. Giedd is then put in the role of the reasonable scientist who points out the importance of variation within each sex – precisely the role which I usually play! But Ms. Weil has assigned each of us to play the roles she wants us to play: and she has cast me (Dr. Sax) in the role of ignorant zealot.
The narrow focus
on Foley Intermediate School
On October 19, 2007, Ms. Weil called me (Dr. Sax) to ask for
my suggestions about schools for her to visit:
public schools which have successfully implemented the single-sex
format. I quickly listed about a dozen
schools, but I particularly encouraged her to visit the Detroit International
Academy, an amazing all-girls public school which had at that time received no
media coverage whatsoever. Ms. Weil
wasn’t interested in that choice (I understood why, after reading the finished
article; Weil must have already decided to paint me as an opponent of all-girls
high schools). I next suggested
“Has anybody else written about that school?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “
“We want a school that hasn’t been covered in the media previously,” Weil said.
I next suggested Stewart Elementary School, an all-girls school in Toledo, Ohio, which has achieved amazing results since adopting the all-girls format. Weil wasn’t interested.
Finally, I suggested
Ms. Weil explained that the New York Times would only provide funds for her to visit ONE school
outside of
Ms. Weil ignored my advice. She described the success at Foley reasonably enough, but concluded that the “data are compromised, as [the] highest-performing teachers and most-motivated students have chosen single-sex.”
She went on to assert that single-sex education is growing
in popularity “despite a lack of empirical evidence.” Recall that I offered Ms. Weil more than a
dozen examples of public schools which have had tremendous success with this
format over the past five years, such as
The artificial
tension between NASSPE and the YWL Foundation
Weil creates an artificial tension between “those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs.” This division, and this tension, is entirely Weil’s invention. A moment’s reflection will reveal that one might easily believe that single-sex education is beneficial BOTH because girls and boys develop according to different developmental timetables AND because they have different social experiences and social needs. Indeed, I personally strongly endorse Emily Wylie’s comment that a girls’ school can foster ‘subversive’ girls who rebel against the narrow social roles prescribed for them.
Weil quotes me as saying that the Young Women’s
One
of the factors which motivated Ann Tisch to establish
TYWLS, as Ms. Tisch has herself explained on many
occasions, was her concern about teenage pregnancy. She believed that girls would be less
pressured to engage in teenage sex if girls were at an all-girls school. There is very strong empirical support for
this belief, which I share with Ms. Tisch. One of the great advantages of single-sex
education for teenage girls, without doubt, is a dramatic drop in the risk of
teenage pregnancy. But the basic idea –
that separating girls from boys will reduce the risk of pregnancy – is not a
new idea. In fact, one could reasonably
have made such an argument in 1977, or in 1957.
In that sense, the Young Women’s
Note that Weil takes ONE WORD out of a lengthy comment and
uses that ONE WORD to portray me as an adversary of the Young Women’s
Leadership Foundation. I understand that
journalists learn in Journalism 101 that a good article has to have
conflict. I expected her to focus on the
very real tension between advocates of single-sex education, on the one hand,
and opponents such as the ACLU and the National Organization for Women. She does indeed have a short segment on this
topic, when she discusses
Addendum March 3, 2008: I sent an e-mail to Ann Rubenstein Tisch, founder of the Young Women’s Leadership Foundation, apologizing for the way the article quoted me and assuring her that I have nothing but the highest regard and respect for the work of the YWL Foundation. Ms. Tisch sent me back a very friendly note assuring me that she took no offense, she realized that Ms. Weil was merely trying “to create more of an edge to her story.”
Unbalanced
criticism without rebuttal
Weil then provides Mark Liberman a platform on which to rehash his previous negative comments about me. Mr. Liberman wrote several blogs in 2006 attacking Why Gender Matters. He never made any attempt to contact me personally, preferring to post his negative comments online. When an acquaintance notified me of these blogs in 2007, I wrote to Professor Liberman, explaining how he had misrepresented my position, and rebutting each of his assertions point by point. Professor Liberman has never responded to my letters. You can read my letters at this link (scroll to the bottom of the page, under “correspondence”, or just look for “Liberman”).
Weil then moves on to Jabali Sawicki’s school. She asserts that Mr. Sawicki is “using some of what Sax has to offer while quietly refuting other claims.” She never states what “other claims” Mr. Sawicki is “quietly refuting.”
Addendum March 3, 2008: Mr. Sawicki was kind enough to call me, on his own initiative, today (March 3, 2008). He said that Ms. Weil was constantly trying to get him to say how he disagreed with me. He was very uncomfortable with her line of questioning, because (as he told me on the phone), he really believes, as I do, that we are trying to accomplish the same thing: namely, to expand educational opportunities using the single-gender format. Finally, Ms. Weil said to him “Dr. Sax thinks that five-year-old boys should never be taught to read and write. Don’t you teach your five-year-old boys to read and write?” Mr. Sawicki said that of course they do, that’s part of the state requirements. So Ms. Weil concluded that he was “quietly refuting” my position. But of course the notion that “five-year-old boys should never be taught to read and write” is not my position; that is Ms. Weil’s invention. If Ms. Weil had attended any of my workshops for teachers, or if she had read either my first book Why Gender Matters or my second book Boys Adrift, she would know that my position on this point is that asking five-year-old boys to SIT STILL and BE QUIET while trying to teach them to read and write is, for many boys, developmentally inappropriate – just as it would be developmentally inappropriate to ask 3½ -year-old girls to sit still and be quiet. Mr. Sawicki told me that his teachers understand this point completely, and that his school allows 5-year-old boys to stand, move around, etc. while they are learning. The only thing being refuted at Mr. Sawicki’s school is Ms. Weil’s lack of understanding of what NASSPE training is about.
Weil’s true feelings about single-sex education come out in her closing paragraph, when she writes the following:
.
. .with Sax’s model comes a lesson that our gender differences are primary, and
this message is at odds with one of the most foundational principles of
America’s public schools. . . Public schools were intended not only to instruct
children in reading and math but also to teach them commonality, tolerance and
what it means to be American. “When you
segregate by any means, you lose some of that,” says Richard Kahlenberg. . .”Even if one could prove that sending a kid
off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender
did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the
economy, there’s also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a
democracy.”
And that’s the end of the article! In other words, advocates of single-sex education are portrayed as the intellectual cousins of the advocates of Jim Crow segregation, putting White kids in one school and Black kids in another. Is Ms. Weil aware that Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Madeleine Albright, Dr. Sally Ride, Dr. Bernadine Healy, and Drew Gilpin Faust are all graduates of K-12 single-sex schools? Would she assert that these people are not “tolerant citizens”? Does she have any evidence whatsoever that graduates of single-sex schools are LESS tolerant than graduates of coed schools? The answers to these questions are surely no, no, and no. But this article is not about evidence. This article is about insinuation, misrepresentation, and political correctness.
One final point: Ms. Weil asserts that I have a “thick shag of side-parted brown hair.” My hair is not, and never has been, brown. It used to be black. Now it’s grey.
Leonard Sax, MD, PhD – March 2, 2008 (with addenda March 3, 2008)