ATLANTA
In Travis Brown’s sixth-grade class, they’re making robots — more than a dozen boys standing around work stations, chatting among themselves as they chop cardboard with scissors or glance at comic books for inspiration.
Down the hall, a room full of girls sit in near silence at their desks, working independently to put final touches on the same project.
The scenes last month at Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, are likely to become more common in coming years as a change in federal regulations is expected to make it easier for public schools to experiment with single-gender schools or classrooms.
Supporters argue boys and girls learn differently and that single-sex classrooms can help both genders perform better. Critics, meanwhile, compare it to “separate but equal” segregation-era classrooms.
At least 223 public schools across the country, from New York to California, already offer some single-sex classrooms, according to Leonard Sax, director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. He says that’s up from just four in 1998.
Sax predicts thousands more public schools will join the movement once the U.S. Department of Education finalizes new Title IX regulations first proposed in March 2004.
