See UPDATE Toronto School Board considers specific school for underachieving male students

Update:
By Heather Mallick, Toronto Star, November 17, 2010
Toronto District School Board trustees have told Education Director Chris Spence, a man well-versed in the crisis in American schools that doesn’t match our own difficulties, that they first want to know if such schools will work before they start quizzing parents about whether they’ll send their children there. Good for them.

Single-sex schools are based on junk science — actually it’s not science, it was a 2005 Newsweek cover story titled “Boy Brains, Girl Brains”— and a lazy notion, fuelled by the U.S. Christian right, that became a theory.
Now many parents think boys and girls have different learning styles and that classrooms are becoming excessively “feminized.” The theory is now a conspiracy. In fact, it was all nonsense to begin with.
Boys do learn differently from girls at some stages — they have to be told to sit down and be quiet more, for one thing — but these differences hardly overshadow the similarities between male and female children who all have to learn to read, write, add, and talk intelligently. Turning schools topsy-turvy to accommodate an entirely unscientific schema about which gender has more oxytocin flowing in their brains in reading class is absurd.
According to the CBC, as revealed on their crawl, October 17, 2010, The Toronto District School Board is giving active consideration to the establishment of a specific secondary school for underachieving male students.
In the national media, and in the large scheme of national issues, this may seem like very small potatoes.
However, with the director being as committed to the successful education of all students, including male students as their director is, and with the size of the problem of underachieving male students, there much be considerable pressure from a variety of directions, to make such a historic decision.
For one thing, the principals and the teachers' federations, if not the parents and the school councils, must be looking at the non-development of many male students, who face the rather high risk of dropping out, and the often inevitable ensuing drama of unemployment, 'negative influences' and potential risk of crossing the line into legal infractions...and demanding "something be done."
The bottom 10% of the student achievement scores belong mostly to male students, and some, if not all of these would become elegible for the new experiment. That would take a large load off the shoulders of principals and teachers who now have these students in their classrooms, halls, cafeterias and buses every day. The achievement records of each school relieved of the burden of these students would immediately rise. The working conditions of the faculty and staff in each of these schools would improve significantly, and fairly quickly.
Furthermore, the parents and guardians of these students would know that the likelihood of their son, foster son, adopted son.. getting a high school diploma would rise. And that fact in itself would give hope to these custodial guardians.
There is also something known by social researchers for several decades called the Hawthorne effect. This involves the level of participation and achievement of those involved in what they know to be an experiment. The very fact of the experiment apparently engenders enhanced enthusiasm for the participants, whose performances improve, whose attitudes improve and the documenting of these results can be attributed, in part, to the experimental conditions themselves.
While there are and will continue to be many adjustments in scheduling, busing, staffing and a reallocation of resources in such a monumental change to the system, it could well prove to be more than worthy of the effort of all participants.
At the end of the day, if such an experiment were to prove to have positive results, measured in all the appropriate ways, including scholastic testing, attitude and behaviour records, relationship building both between students and between students and the school authorities, enhanced parental participation in the daily school life of the students, and in a significant drop in the numbers of "drop-outs" from the cohort of initial enrollees...imagine how that single experiment might impact other boards of education across the country, and the story of the next decade could prove quite different from the one unfolding under the current strategies and tactics.
The Journal of Male Education will continue to watch this pending development, and others dedicated to similar results.