Carlianne+Hayes

=My Notes=

Same Sex Classrooms  [|same sex classrooms] Dr. Leonard Sax, director of the National Association of Single Sex Public Education, a nonprofit organization that supports the availability of same- sex educational programs when appropriate, said segregating classes without extensive teacher training and parental input can quickly backfire on administrators. "You can engage girls in computer science. You can engage boys in art and creative writing. But that doesn't happen automatically," he said. "Just putting girls in one room and boys in another accomplishes very little. In can actually have adverse effects if teachers don't have appropriate training." Without the proper training and without enough parental and administrative involvement, Sax said, the classes can reinforce society's gender norms, not circumvent them. Also, Thompson said, the program potentially could pose a threat to students' notions of what the real world has in store for them by only placing them in classrooms with the same gender, a situation they're unlikely to find upon entering the workforce. "I do know that in adolescents, both males and females are trying to figure out who they are, and a lot of that is their gender roles," he said. "They not only need to know how to act within their gender, but how to act with others and make it so they don't have myths about how others think of them. The only way to do that is by having interaction with more people."

Online Courses [|online courses] Critics are concerned that certain subjects, like leadership training, lose impact without student-teacher interaction. A few studies have suggested students retain less material in an online class."Self-paced students don't have the same motivation," Mr. Brennan says. "They aren't likely to go as far into the material. We hear of classroom completion rates as low as 10% in some online settings."Jon Meyer, vice-president of e-learning at Raleigh, N.C.-based Productivity Point International Inc., a training firm with Chicago-area offices, says "the results of online learning are generally subpar compared with classroom training. People get bored quickly on their own and don't finish classes."

School Uniforms

[|school uniforms] For the most part, districts allow schools to decide whether to impose dress codes or require uniforms. School officials I interviewed sought their constituents' buy-in, asking parents and students to vote on the issue and typically requiring about 75 percent approval to proceed. That leaves the 25 percent who don't approve, and disapproving parents certainly influence their children's attitudes, which adds to the difficulty in administering the rule. Then there are parents who opt their children out of the provision. At Montgomery's school, only about 1 percent of parents officially opt their kids out, "But there is a huge problem with about another 30 percent who do not sign a waiver and do not abide by the policy…. There is not enough meat in the policy to actually require families to abide by the uniform, which makes it very hard to enforce." Every day, teachers must try to remember which students who are not in uniform have turned in waivers signed by their parents allowing them to opt out, or they must take up valuable class time checking each child's status against a list. The task can be complicated by students who show up out of uniform without a waiver and students in only partial compliance — wearing the proper pants with a nonstandard shirt or, in a school that prohibits prints, wearing socks embossed with the image a Winnie-the-Pooh character. (Napa Valley Unified School District is appealing a trial court judge's ruling that its restriction on prints violates students' freedom of expression.)

[|school uniforms 2] Opponents argue that there is no firm evidence for any of these claims. In fact, they say, a uniform dress code creates resentment and conflicts with the administration, leading to an erosion of discipline. In cases where scholastic achievement rose, it's hard to find a dear link between test scores and what the children were wearing. Some opponents insist that uniforms squelch free expression and self-esteem that children need for healthy development. Others argue that dress codes, often applied in urban schools, are an undue burden on the poor, including many minority families An often-cited 1998 study by David L. Brunsma, and Kerry A. Rockquemore published in The Journal of Educational Research found no apparent correlation between uniform use and " school commitment variables, including absenteeism, behavior or substance abuse... In addition, students wearing uniforms did not appear to have any significantly different academic preparedness, pro - school attitudes, or peer group structures with pro - school attitudes than other students.".

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