This was in USA Today?!

It’s so reasonable! I read USA Today many days a week, in sweeping through news coverage, and get a good fix on some of the basic news items of the day. But this seems more cutting edge than they are usually willing to go.

A growing body of research shows that boys and girls learn differently.

Oh, really?!

Boys, in particular, suffer from a one-size-fits-all approach. And, as students reach middle school, they are increasingly distracted by members of the opposite sex. 

Did it take a growing body of research to convince anyone of THAT? I seem to recall a Time article from many, many years ago on this same subject, as if we didn’t know this — as a basic civilization — all along. But back to the article in USA Today, because it actually got good.

Poised to attack single-sex public schools are groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, that perceive them as discriminatory and ill-advised.

Sorry, that’s not the good part yet. It’s just predictable that the ACLU is poised to attack. Here’s the good part:

• A focus on literacy. Drop by the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms at Woodward and you’ll find very different books lying around. In the girls’ class there’s The Great Gilly Hopkins and The Chocolate Touch. In the boys’ class there’s Stealing Home:The Story Of Jackie Robinson and Dragons of Deltora. Giving boys books they prefer to read gets them more excited about reading.

• Boy-friendly classes. Tessa Michaelos’ all-boys kindergarten features a pile of Legos, hard hats and a balance beam used for a vocabulary contest. Michaelos’ boys soar academically. Many of the all-boys classes in other grades out-perform both the girls-only and mixed-sex classes.

Although boys, who lag behind girls in schools, stand to gain the most from these experiments, girls can also benefit. At Woodward, teachers are using their single-sex lessons to find ways to boost girls’ math and science performance.

Successful single-sex schools have everything to do with adjusting to different learning styles — and nothing to do with predators and prey. That’s a lesson for educators and the ACLU.

And it’s being highlighted by one of the mainstream media. Now there’s progress.