The ACLU launched a national campaign

The ecs012915 ACLU launched a national campaign, Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes, in May and sent cease-and-desist letters to school districts in Maine, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia. The group also asked state officials to investigate single-sex programs in Florida, while sending public record requests to schools in another five states, including to Gilbert’s school in Idaho. Doug Bonney is legal director of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri, where he successfully challenged single sex classes in Missouri’s Adrian R-III School District. He argues there’s no proof single-sex classrooms work while there’s plenty of evidence they actually enhance gender stereotypes and lead to sexism. “This isn’t the right step to address ecs011532 higher dropout rates by boys,” Bonney said. “They promote false stereotypes about sex-based differences that don’t exist. Promoting sex stereotypes can harm both girls and boys.” Both sides agree the idea is not new and has a long history in private schools. But Galen Sherwin, staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, said its history in public schools is much darker and has roots in the South, where it was broadly instituted in an effort to evade the desegregation requirements of Brown v. Board of Education to try “to prevent black boys from being in the same room as white girls.” “In the wake of Brown, many schools in the south integrated racially but segregated on the ecs011148 basis of sex,” Sherwin said.