Bush administration on single-sex education

Kenneth Marcus of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is on C-SPAN right now talking about the new option of allowing public school districts to offer single-sex education options. A number of options would be possible, including completely separate schools for boys and girls, or single-sex “school within a school” programs.

The Department of Education will allow schools to provide single-sex options if they can provide substantial academic justification for such separation. They want to offer educators a “diversity of options” in coming up with “creative solutions” that work for their communities.

So I’m wondering, if they truly believe that a diversity of options is best, why are they limiting this to gender? I’m sure people could come up with academic justification for separating races in the public schools. Perhaps students could concentrate better if there were no students of another race. Perhaps a community has more white students going to college than minority students. They could offer college prep classes to white students, and vocational education to minorities.

Of course this is a bad idea. You can come up with lots of rationales for separating people into subgroups. But it’s still better to integrate people, in any type of environment. It allows all subgroups to receive equal resources, equal attention and a more equal chance of success.