Search

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, followed by the 2006 U.S. Department of Education regulations, represented a drastic change in American public policy by allowing for sex segregation in public schools-as long as it is voluntary, students are provided a substantially equal co-educational option, and the segregation substantially furthers an important governmental objective. Although existing federal and state laws explicitly ban sex segregation, the Courts have historically allowed single-sex schooling within higher education if it does not perpetuate gender stereotypes. Because of the recent public policy changes, there has been a rapid increase in single-sex education within the U.S. public elementary and secondary school system. Many of the now single-sex public schools, however, began segregating because they believe that boys and girls should be taught differently due to innate differences in learning styles and interests. The result is that many of these schools base their educational practices on gender stereotypes. This contradiction of existing laws and precedents has resulted in ongoing lawsuits. This paper offers a review of the legal issues and court cases surrounding single-sex education in the public school system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the residues of official segregation are widespread, affirmative action continues to meet resistance in both official and everyday life, even in such recent Supreme Court decisions as Grutter v Bollinger (539 U.S. 306). This is due in part to a governing ontology that draws the line between individual and collective. But there are other possibilities for conceiving the social, and I offer one here in a theory of affirmative action that is developed through close examination of sharing and promising as elemental qualities of equitable communal life. The nature and value of these actions are demonstrated in narrative formulations of fairness as exemplified in triage and the situation at the end of slavery; of the difference between equality and equity and how justice depends on their conjunction; and finally of theorizing how these may come together in the permutable, opaque, yet resilient interdependence of person and community that represents most deeply the Greek idea of two in one, that is, of one two, not two ones. In these respects the paper is successful insofar as it discloses the kinds of reasoning that underlie both resistance and commitment to affirmative action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]