Should the US be giving more attention to ideas like single-gender classrooms to improve education, or focusing on basics?

Good education begins at home and if it isn't there, it won't matter how the classes are set up.

I asked that question to a group of pre-k children, ages 5 and 6. We were reading an article from Time Kids. 1 Boy said yes, 1 girl said no, 6 girls said yes, and 7 boys said no to seperating boys from girls. They all had different reasons about their decisions. Sum it up..the boys thought having the girls around was nice, and the girls thought the boys were a pain.

I don't see why they need to be mutually exclusive. I think education overall is completely lacking.
I attended a coed high school, but opted to go to a single-sex (because it is not single-gender) college. Women from same-sex institutions reap many benefits. I also knew many students at single-sex high schools while I was at a coed school - they were much more academically prepared than many, although, granted, they were all private schools.
Under the current legal system we can't really HAVE single-sex schools in the public education system, but experimental classrooms might be possible - and worth pursuing.
Additional note that might not have been considered: Gender is not a binary for all, and this could greatly affect any transgender or gender-variant students.

They should disband the Teacher's Unions and make the teachers accountable to the parents and the community.

Single sex schooling is not as bad as some are making it. I grew up in St. Louis and the city is covered with single sex, catholic and private schools. I happened to go to a very challenging all male Jesuit school, SLUH (just as a side note, I believe the major religions are a complete farce because of my education there). I am just saying from personal experience that the single sex environment did make it a lot easier to just concentrate an academics. But, on the other hand, it is not allowing the students to develop in a more holistic manner. I don't think segregating sexes for all school systems would at all be advantageous though. Curriculums should be updated and emphasize math and science in a more interesting manner. Believe it or not, math and science can boggle your mind (in a good way) and teach you to look at the world in a different, more realistic manner. If students can be shown that, a step in the right direction would have been taken.

I think this is a terrible idea, not because it will effect learning in any way but mainly because most of the time you spend with the opposite gender is at school in your adolescent years so i think the suicide rate would rise just from that.

I'll tell you exactly what the educational system in the US needs.
It's incredibly obvious, and every honest teacher will tell you the same thing:
QUALITY PARENTING

In my opinion, talking about things like single gender schools to increase performance is a waste of time, because it doesn't address the real problem.

You can have the best teacher's in the world with the best materials money can buy, but they won't be able to effectively educate children if parent's don't hold their children accountable for their educational performance.

Go to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or even Thailand and you'll see that the public schools are just as crappy as ours- overcrowded, jaded teachers, etc. But, their students perform much better than ours because education is a value over their. Education is not a value in America. I mean c'mon, Obama was actually criticized for his intellectualism, lol.

II don't mean to be a bummer, but it's an awful time to be a teacher in k-12 right now. Education has become way too political. No successful politician is going to tell the honest truth because it would make him unpopular. Parents don't want to hear they're doing a bad job, so it's much easier just to blame the teachers.

The idea of going back to single-sex gender classes is archaic and old-fashioned. The worst is composed of diversity; raising and teaching children in an environment composed of others of the same sex, race and so on is only begging for disaster. Keep classrooms diverse and allow children to be exposed to others of different race, creed and culture instead of a provincial environment.

It's time to go back to the basic-remember them-reading, writing and arthmetic. My nieces don't even know what cursive writing is. What if something happens to your computer and you might have to" write" something, they don't know how!!

This is going to be a moot question anyway.

More and more business can be done at home over the computer.
Education will follow suit through cost effective cyber school and virtual classrooms.

As society advances you are going to have to interact with hardly anyone in the traditional face- to- face sense .

Physical classrooms will become mostly irrelevant and colossal a waste of money.

Hell no to single gender, single race, or any other kind of isolation.

One of the most important things children learn in school is how to interact with people different from them.

What we need are qualified teachers, and a school curriculum that teaches Math and Science in a way that is interesting and engaging to students instead of making them fall asleep from boredom.

I don't know. But Let's not try to shut the door by dismissing the idea as just "segregation."

Let's get some more studies and empirical evidence before we make a decision.

Single-gender schooling? That's a horrible idea. I agree with Dejan_Croatia. Segregation is just fucking stupid. Reading that article is depressing. People are so god-damned easily led and stupid it is unbelievable!

no. sadly the opportunity for bias and discrimination grows when you attempt such things. how about just making sure everyone gets a quality education and educators are rewarded for excellence

i dont belive single gender is gonna help, if we have learned anything its that segregation is just fucken stupid.