What If It's True?

I don't know enough on the topic to state categorically that it's either true or not true.  But what if it is?  What would that mean for education?

On one side of the debate are gender-based learning advocates pointing to research they call indisputable — brain scans so clear on male/female differences that the only reason for protest is political correctness. Opposing them is a group of academic scientists and women’s rights advocates, desperately raising their hands to publicize the harm caused by gender-segregated classrooms. By collaborating with the ACLU, these researchers and lawyers hope to stem the tide of neuro-sexism, the term they’ve coined to describe the co-optation of brain science as a vehicle for gender-based treatment...

Michael Gurian is one of the most prominent advocates for gender-differentiated learning: the belief that males and females must be taught differently to account for disparities in their brain chemistry. According to its website, the Gurian Institute has worked with 2,000 schools and 60,000 teachers across the country. Gurian has written over two-dozen books, including some titles that have become New York Times bestsellers, though he doesn’t conduct his own primary research.

In many of his books and speeches, Gurian voices his belief that contemporary education fails to accommodate the male brain, setting boys up at a disadvantage that lubricates the school-to-prison pipeline. The solution he preaches is intense teacher training in gender-based behavior...

Despite what Gurian says, an abundance of hard data shows the dangers of gender-segregated schools. Rebecca Bigler, a psychology professor at University of Texas, has run multiple experiments on gender bias in the classroom. One study found that children in all-boys or all-girls classes were “more likely to rate occupations as appropriate for ‘only men’ or ‘only women.’” Another study, with a sample size of 367, “found that for both boys and girls, the more [gender-segregated] classes they took in the fall, the more gender stereotyped they were in their responding in the spring (controlling for initial levels of gender stereotyping).” A meta-analysis of over 1,000 similar studies concluded that no benefits come from single-sex education...

In 2011, Eliot and Diane Halpern, an academic and former president of the American Psychology Association, co-authored an article in Science called “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling.” They directly cite Leonard Sax as a pseudoscientist teaching harmful single-sex practices. Eliot has no hesitation using the word “pseudoscience” to describe Gurian and Sax. After all, Judge Joseph Goodwin used that terminology, too, when he ruled “against the single-sex classes at Van Devender Middle School in Wood County, West Virginia.” Judge Goodwin claimed specifically that the school district had been “led astray by the teachings of Dr. Leonard Sax,” and “referred to brain sex rationales for single-sex education as ‘pseudoscience.’” And regardless, the law about stereotypes and education is clear: sex classification cannot be based on stereotypes or generalizations about the way boys and girls learn.

I'm thinking that the science isn't settled.