How many layers of the onion do you want to peel back? Originally Madison’s Urban League proposed a charter school only for young men. When sex discrimination charges were leveled at the proposal, the League modified its proposal to include young women but to educate all students in single-sex classrooms. Last month the Madison School Board voted down the proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy. The League charged the school board with racism. I wish it could be that simple.
Madison’s teachers opposed a charter school staffed by non-union teachers. Teachers were the main opponent to the proposal. Citizens who supported the charter said that the teachers’ union was putting its own self interest ahead of the students.
But the charges of elitism by the Urban League cannot be discounted. The League pushed for a school that would help some minority students but not all minority students. Critics said the charter was designed to weed out undesirable students and less active parents. The school, with its longer school day and year, would be costly taking away funding from other needy students. The Urban League countered that is was better to save some black students than none.
The charges of racism should not be discounted. Madison is still a city dominated by white, middleclass, well-educated citizens. It is having a hard time coming to grips with the influx of lower-income blacks that have populated much of Madison in the last twenty years. The largest educational gap between blacks and whites is not in Milwaukee; it is in Madison. So after the school board’s vote, Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad told the Wisconsin State Journal that he was bringing to the board a plan to address the achievement gap within a month. One can only ask, “What took you so long?”
Whether single-sex education even works may have been a deciding factor in the school board’s decision. There is no evidence that single-sex education works according to Janet Hyde, an expert in gender studies at UW-Madison. She recently co-authored “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling” in the September 23rd issue of Science. This article couldn’t come at a worse time for the supporters of single-sex education in Madison.
A December article in American Journalism Review picked up on the issue declaring that the news media peddles the “junk science” of single-sex education.
Both articles declare that the overwhelming research shows little if any benefit to single-sex education and that these programs may be harmful because single-sex education feeds upon gender stereotypes. Such programs may solidify those stereotypes in the minds of those involved.
While there may be excellent single-sex schools, their success is not dependent upon their single-sex identity say the authors. The much touted Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men has a well documented success rate for entering its graduates into college – and an equally well documented weeding out process for young men who may not meet its standards.
The Madison School Board found itself in a no-win situation. If it approved the single-sex school, the ACLU was threatening to sue over sex discrimination. If it didn’t approve, the Urban League was going to court claiming racial discrimination.
So the single-sex school may be a flawed model for education, and the Madison Public Schools may have every right to have turned down the charter proposal. But now the school system must address the black-white achievement gap, otherwise the community can say that the school system is using its opposition to this model as an excuse for doing nothing.
