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Useful Books
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In December 2009, Corwin published A Gendered Choice: designing and implementing single-sex schools and classrooms.
Mr. Chadwell is the only person in the United States whose full-time job is to coordinate and support single-sex programs in public school across an entire state: the state of South Carolina.
In this book, his first, Mr. Chadwell provides a wide range of information about how to launch and sustain single-gender programs in public schools.
This information is essential for any public school administrator or district administrator involved in single-gender public education.
He answers common questions, such as "The real world is coed; so shouldn't school also be coed, in order to prepare kids for the real world?" He provides a chapter on
how to address concerns raised by the ACLU and the National Organization for Women. He provides questionnaires and surveys for every phase of implementation of single-gender programs,
including the required two-year follow-up. Mr. Chadwell is a member of the NASSPE Advisory Board and was a featured presenter
at NASSPE conferences in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. More
information about Mr. Chadwell, and about A Gendered Choice, is available at Mr. Chadwell's web site.
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In July 2009, Corwin published Teaching the Female Brain: how girls learn math and science. This is the second book
by Dr. Abigail James, who is a member of the NASSPE Advisory Board. This book includes many useful strategies for engaging girls in grades K-12 in mathematics and in the sciences. Almost every page
has concrete strategies which teachers can deploy in the classroom TODAY. There's also lots of fun quizzes and even cartoons! More
information is available at Dr. James' web site.
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In August 2007, Basic Books published Boys Adrift:
the five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men. An expanded and updated softcover
edition was published in January 2009. Boys Adrift is the second book by Dr. Leonard Sax, executive director of NASSPE. The book includes many
strategies used in the all-boys classroom to engage and motivate boys. There's also information about the harm of medications
such as Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, and Metadate; and the dangers of video games for boys.
For more information, check out the Boys Adrift web site.
In the spring of 2007, Dr. Abigail James, a member of the
NASSPE Advisory Board, published her book "Teaching the Male
Brain." Dr. James' first book was more than 30 years in the making, because she has 30 years of classroom experience
as a teacher - plus her doctoral work in education at the University of Virginia. Dr. James' book
provides an up-to-date review of sex differences in the human brain, but her book is especially
valuable for the many practical strategies she outlines, strategies which can
be employed in the all-boys classroom to engage every kind of boy. (Some of her strategies can be
employed in coed classrooms as well.)
In March 2004, Penguin Books published Where Girls Come First, a history of all-girls schools in the United States. The author is journalist Ilana Debare, who herself is a co-founder of the Julia Morgan School for Girls in Oakland, California. Her book is a thoughtful and provocative history, showing how all-girls education began as a subversive, countercultural movement in the early 1800's -- empowering young women at a time when the larger culture was denying equal rights to women. Unfortunately, the movement ossified in the early 1900's, as many girls' schools became elite, exclusive bastions of privilege. Debare provides a thoughtful analysis of the "surprising revival" of girls' schools in the past 20 years. You can read more, including extended excerpts from the book, at the book's home page.
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 In 2003, the French publisher Renaissance Press (Presses de la Renaissance) published Les Pièges de la Mixité Scolaire (The Hazards of Coeducation).
This book is a bold critique of the whole idea of putting girls and boys together in a classroom. But the author, Michel Fize, is not a lunatic or a reactionary; on the contrary, he is a progressive thinker on the staff of the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, i.e. the National Center for Scientific Research.
Fize presents substantial evidence that the decades-long escalation in problems such as sexual violence in the schools and boys losing interest in school - both of which were rare in France 40 years ago but are common today - can be attributed directly to the introduction of coeducation over the same period. As Fize observes, prior to World War II most French schools were single-sex; now almost all are coeducational.
If you took high school French, you can read this book! The French is very accessible and readable. You can order your own copy at
the book's amazon.fr Web site.
In 2003, Yale University Press published Same, Different, Equal: rethinking single-sex schooling, by St. John's professor of law Rosemary Salomone, J.D., Ph.D.
The book is now seriously out-of-date: it was written when there were only about a dozen public schools in the United States offering single-sex classrooms, and it was published three years before the 2006
regulations which legalized single-sex education in American public schools. But it is a useful review of the history of single-sex public schools in the USA from colonial times through the 1990's.
Professor Salomone led a panel discussion on single-sex public education at
NASSPE's first international conference,
which took place in Washington DC on August 22 2003.
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