The product of co-ed schooling and an all-girls college, StudyBuddy's director has been surprised by the serious attention being given once again to single-gender schooling. In 1996 and 97 a pilot California program set up six such schools;but they were inadequately funded, and they were controversial. (The Feminist Majority and the National Organization for Women are opposed to Single-Gender schooling. The American Federation of Teachers is neutral: "They're not a cure-all, but they ought to be an option."

There is indeed a growing consensus and boys and girls learn differently. Certainly they operate differently in social situations and in the work place; and they respond differently to advertising (daughter Marti Barletta's well-researched book Marketing to Women is filled with funny instances of ads that miss by a mile).

The San Francisco Chronicle recently picked up an Associated Press piece on a middle school in Kimberly, Idaho, that's keeping literally everybody happy: kids, parents, teachers, and administrators. Art, band, and homeroom are coed. All other classes are single-gender. Content is the same for each gender. The kids love it, the teachers love it, test scores have gone up, disruptions have gone down, and not a single parent has complained.

Young Women's Leadership Charter School of Chicago has had similar results. Its student body comprises 325 inner-city girls, 260 of whom are black or Hispanic. It has a waiting-list of 400.

Now, a National Association for Single Sex Public Education is pulling together the research, the legal issues involved, and the experience of school districts that are trying it out. Its site http://www.singlesexschools.org/ is put together by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D, a family physician and research psychologist. Here's a snapshot of what's there.

There's a section on brain-differences and a section on learning styles. Both are worth noting. For me, the interviews with teachers are especially interesting. They do generalize from their experience in single gender classes with uniform content: context enhances learning for the girls. For the boys, it's boring. Usually academic difficulties seriously affect the girls' sense of self-worth. Boys are less likely to generalize from a difficulty in one area. Soft furniture, small groups, low-key presentation works well with girls. Classes for boys work better when the presentation is louder and the teacher keeps moving. Soft furniture puts them to sleep.

A Reference Information link touches on legal issues involved. Then there's a captioned list of the 46 public schools which offer some form of single-sex education: 17 single-sex public schools currently in operation, and 29 coed public schools that offer single-sex classes. Highlights, for me, were these: two very old public girls' schools, one established in Baltimore in 1844, and the other established in Philadelphia, in 1846. Both are still operating.

Then, there's Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Seattle, where discipline referrals dropped from 30 a day to one or two; and testing of reading and writing dramatically improved in both boys and girls. At Moten Elementary School in one of the poorest areas of Washington, D.C., where single-sex classes started in the Fall of 2001, SAT9 tests the following Spring put 88% of the kids in the top two categories in Math, and 91% in the top two categories in Reading.

The site has extensive quotes of kids at James Lyng High School in Montreal about the single-sex class experiment. This one's worth checking just for the fun of reading their comments: http://www.singlesexschools.org/montreal.html

The most recent experiment is in Houston: an all-black inner-city high school for boys from impoverished homes. The teachers are black men. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson sponsored the legislation that made this possible.

In California, the one survivor of the 1999 cuts is in East Palo Alto, a charter school for 90 girls and 90 boys in grades 5 through 8: The San Francisco 49ers Academy, http://www.49ers_academy.org/ 650-614-4300. Yes the San Francisco 49ers sponsor them. Players even visit occasionally.

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