Decline of single-sex classrooms in London leads to decline in boys learning, says London headmaster

The head of the City of London School said on Sunday that "a generation of boys has been let down by the decline of single-sex classrooms," according to an article in The Telegraph.

The article points out that the number of single-sex state schools has declined in the U.K. from 2,500 to 400 in the last 40 years, and David Levin says many boys have floundered due to a feminized curriculum with more coursework and less male primary school teachers. In the U.S., just 3 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers are male and 18 percent of elementary and middle school teachers are male, according to an article in the Deseret News last month about the lack of male teachers in the classroom.

"We believe that there's a problem across the English-speaking world with boys' academic underachievement," Levin told The Telegraph. "The education system is not giving them a good deal. We need some serious research into the pedagogical differences between teaching boys and girls to raise awareness of the fact that boys respond differently."

Another article appeared in the London Evening Standard on Monday called "Stop our schools from failing teenage boys." The author says that believing boys and girls learn the same and should be treated the same in schooling is "a lazy approach to education — and it is damaging."

"Boys respond well to form and structure, to clear expectations, to competition, to physical activity," the author wrote. "The point is this: we need to accept and understand boys and their development and work alongside them as they actually are, not for the convenience of a system nor the fulfillment of an ideology."

But while there has been attention given to the problem by researchers and the media, Lori Day, educational psychologist and consultant, wrote in the Huffington Post late last month that nothing has been done to combat the problem.

In fact, the push for reading and literacy early on and "hyper-focus on standardized test scores is worsening, not ameliorating, the academic struggles of boys, and subsequently increasing the number of boys who turn off to school and eventually drop out," Day claims.

She quotes the author of "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and in Life," as saying that "boys learn by doing and by moving their bodies through space. The more emphasis is placed on the development of early reading skills, and the less emphasis is placed on a healthy amount of movement and experiential learning, the more disadvantageous our schools will be for males."