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Summit County community notes: 9-28-13
Summit Stage stop closing
The Summit Stage will be closing the southbound Tiger Run stop until further notice. It is on the bus route going to Breckenridge.
Take the Summit Daily News Reader Survey
The Summit Daily News' mission is to connect our community. Please take a few minutes to provide feedback on how we are doing in 2013. The purpose of this survey is to gain a deeper understanding of how locals, visitors and second-home owners access and use our newspapers, magazines and websites. In August 2012 over 700 readers participated in a survey that has shaped some of the changes we made over the last year to our editorial content and advertising programs. This survey is shorter and asks specific questions on which we are seeking additional details. We value your opinions and thank you in advance for your input to this important process. One survey per person, please. The survey will take about 10 minutes to complete and you could win a iPad mini! Visit Summitdaily.com/readersurvey today!
Thank you, Keystone Ranch
The High Country Conservation Center would like to thank the entire staff at the Keystone Ranch for the Garden to Table fundraiser on Sept. 19. The event raised over $2,000 for the Summit Community Garden Network, benefiting five community gardens across Summit County.
Apple iMac and MacBook advanced class
The session will assume attendees participated in the Apple Basics class or at least that the user is comfortable with OS X interaction and personalization. The class will continue with more innovative handling of documents and files. Topics will also delve deeper into OS X 10.8 with its discussion of how to download and update software, and backup options for your computer. Our mail discussion will review sending and receiving photos and attachments. Advanced photo and document organization and manipulation will be covered in this class but it is not a substitute for a dedicated photo class. Attendees are encouraged to bring their computers and follow along. The seminar will run on Saturday, Sept. 28 from 9-11 a.m. at the Senior Center in Frisco. The cost is $5 and the seminar is limited to 20 so please call the Senior Center to pre-register, (970) 668-2940.
Infectious disease lecture
Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology invites the community to spend an evening with acclaimed immunologist Dr. David L. Woodland at the Silverthorne Pavilion on Wednesday, Oct. 2 from 7-8:30 p.m. Dr. Woodland will present on the topic of "Facing the Challenge of Emerging Infectious Disease." Learn more about West Nile virus, new influenza strains and other emerging viral diseases. Formerly president of the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake, N.Y. (the nation's first tuberculosis research facility), Dr. Woodland is now chief scientific officer of Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology, a Silverthorne-based nonprofit that convenes 50-plus life science research conferences annually, many of which are held in Summit County. His own research at the Trudeau Institute, and before that at National Jewish Health and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, has been focused on T cell response to lung infection. Dr. Woodland's free talk will be followed by audience Q&A. Light refreshments will be provided. For more information, visit http://www.keystonesymposia.org or call (970) 262-2676.
Caregiver support group
The Summit County Caregiver and Memory Loss Support Group will meet Tuesday, Oct. 1 at 1 p.m. at the Senior Center. Drop-ins welcomed. For more details, call Sandy, (970) 584-0311
Local Harvest Dinner
Make your reservations today for the fifth annual Local Harvest Dinner on Friday, Oct. 4. Enjoy a locally sourced and beautifully prepared four-course meal while supporting the High Country Conservation Center. Join us at Vinny's Euro American Restaurant for an evening of gourmet seasonal dishes. $50 per person, drinks and gratuity not included. Reservations can be made by calling the High Country Conservation Center at (970) 668-5703 or by emailing email@example.com.
Thank you from Alpine Bank
This year's Alpine Bank Tools for Schools donation collection was very successful! We collected six bins of school supplies and delivered them to local Summit schools. A special thanks to our community, Walmart and Alpine Bank for their generous donations and to all of the Alpine Bank employees who helped out to make this possible.
Tax planning seminar
The Peaks Society of The Summit Foundation is pleased to host Hope and Change – a Tax Planning Seminar for 2013 on the morning of Thursday, Oct. 3. With the passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 and the implementation of several key revenue raising provisions of the 2010 Health Care Act, change in taxes is a certainty for 2013. This free workshop will help you learn how you will personally be impacted in 2013. On the morning of Oct. 3, the tax experts from Eide Bailly, LLP will be covering the following topics and more:
– The Medicare Contribution Tax
– 2013 Individual Tax Rates
– Capital Gains Taxes
– Itemized Deduction Phase Outs and Limitations
– Maximizing Charitable Deductions and Other Tax Planning Opportunities
The Summit Foundation Trustee Steve Smith will moderate the discussion. This will be an interactive workshop using comprehensive illustrations to highlight how tax law changes will impact individual taxpayers in 2013. The workshop will emphasize practical strategies for managing your tax liability and how charitable deductions can play into those strategies. Don't miss this opportunity to take the fear and apprehension out of your 2013 tax return. To learn more about the workshop, which will be held at Beaver Run Resort from 9-11 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 3, or to RSVP, call The Summit Foundation at (970) 453-5970 or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
Hug a hunter/conservationist
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation fundraising banquet will be held at the Silverthorne Pavilion on Friday, Oct. 4. Doors open at 5:30. A three-meat buffet will be served. Cost is $35 for adults, $20 for kids 12 and under. Call Anton for questions or reservations, (970) 485-2296. Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has protected land in nine states, improved habitat in 19 states and restored elk in numerous states. In Colorado, the RMEF has funded 564 projects involving 392,000 acres.
FIRC Bag Shop open
The FIRC Bag Shop will be open Saturday, Oct. 5 from 1-4 p.m. in La Riva Mall in Dillon. Volunteers make a variety of unique bags, aprons and more out of donated material and 100 percent of the sales help the Family & Intercultural Resource Center's emergency assistance and food bank programs. Anyone interested in volunteering can stop by during these hours.
Bilingual Story Time
Join the Family & Intercultural Resource Center Monday, Oct. 7 for Bilingual Story Time at the Silverthorne Library from 10-11:30 a.m. This is a year-round program that takes place the first Monday of the month. A children's book is read in English and Spanish and then followed by an activity and snack. The event is free. Visit summitfirc.org for details.
Colorado Mountain Club seeks volunteers
The Colorado Mountain Club needs volunteers to assist in closing a network of unauthorized trails on Tenderfoot Mountain, just north of Keystone on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 5-6. Volunteers will help in rehabilitating trails that the White River National Forest has decided to decommission by de-compacting soils, creating sustainable drainages on steep slopes and blocking the trails with debris in an effort to restore native vegetation and prevent unauthorized use. The project site is located between 11,000 and 12,000 feet and is weather dependent. Volunteers should be prepared for a steep, albeit beautiful, 2-mile hike to the project site. Refreshments and a light snack will be provided after each day's work. The event is open to the public and you do not need to be a CMC member to participate. All participants are asked to register by visiting http://www.cmc.org/stewardship or by contacting Josh Kuhn, email@example.com or (303) 996-2759.
Cooking volunteers needed
Are you passionate about cooking food and eating healthy? Cooking Matters is a national program designed to teach youths, teens, adults and families how to cook and eat healthy and nutritious foods. If this interests you, think about becoming a Cooking Matters volunteer with the Family & Intercultural Resource Center (FIRC). We will be holding a volunteer training and information session on Wednesday, Oct. 9 from 5:30-7 p.m. in the Blue River Room in the Silverthorne Library. To RSVP or for more information, contact Matt Madsen at FRIC, firstname.lastname@example.com, or call (970) 380-1275.
Hunter education course
The Colorado Department of Parks and Wildlife will be hosting an internet-based Hunter Education course on Monday, Sept. 30, and Tuesday, Oct. 8. Students must attend both nights. Hunter Education certification is required in order to purchase any hunting licenses in Colorado for individuals born after Jan. 1, 1949. Course material will cover firearm handling and safety, hunter responsibilities, game management, conservation, ethics, and many other outdoor-related topics. Students of all ages are welcome. There is a $10 fee for the course. Preregistration is not necessary, as there is no course size limit for this class. Schedule is 6:30-9:30 on Monday, Sept. 30. Class starts a little earlier on Tuesday, Oct. 8, and we will begin at the public shooting range. More information will be provided the night of the 30th. Class is being held in the Buffalo Mountain Room in the County Commons Building in Frisco. For more information, call Joe at (970)453-0392, or Greg at (970)468-6139.
Thank you from Alpenglow
Thank you to our community, sponsors, volunteers, contributors and advertisers for making the 16th season the best ever. The festival's board of trustees appreciates the enthusiastic response of Summit County music lovers to a most exciting season under the artistic direction of Rieko Aizawa and Jesse Mills. Concertgoers welcomed the six outstanding professional musicians whose performances both thrilled and challenged listeners. The ensemble presented outstanding performances of classic repertoire as well as newer works at each of the four concerts. Thank you to our audiences for supporting this extraordinary music. We especially appreciate our soiree hosts, Wayne and Mollie Brunetti, Kevin McLane and Mike Ragsdale, for generously offering their homes and providing the intimate settings in which this music is meant to be played. We are most grateful to Lord of the Mountain Church for allowing us to use its facility for our public concerts.
Wine Dinner raises $52K for FIRC
The Hearthstone Restaurant's 20th annual Wine Dinner was the most successful in event history, as over $50,000 was raised for the Family & Intercultural Resource Center. Thanks to the generosity of the 80 guests in attendance and a $20,000 match by Grand Lodge on Peak 7 and Tom and Nancy Keltner, the guests stepped up to the challenge of raising over $21,000 in donation matches to help with the construction costs of FIRC's new Silverthorne offices. FIRC purchased the old Silverthorne post office through a low-interest USDA loan. The new office space will provide Summit County with a larger food bank, multipurpose space for parenting, life skills and cooking classes, and space for FIRC's growing staff and programs. FIRC hopes to move into the new space by January 2014. For more information please visit SummitFIRC.org.
Teens in for a spooky treat
The Summit County Library invites all Summit County Teens, from middle school through high school, to celebrate Teen Read Week, beginning Sunday, Oct. 13, and running through Saturday, Oct. 19. This year's theme is "Seek the Unknown @ Your Library." Come and join the creepy fun on Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 5:30 p.m., at the North Branch Library, Silverthorne, as we "Seek the unknown" with LeeAnna Jonas of Spirit Realm Investigative Project. She and her all-girl team specialize in the mining towns of Colorado. They use scientific equipment and metaphysical sensitivity during investigations. LeeAnna and her team have done over 50 investigations and have been featured on the "Paranormal Challenge" and "My Ghost Story." They will talk about their experiences with the paranormal and demonstrate the equipment they use. This event is free to the public. For more information on Teen Read Week, check out http://teenreadweek.ning.com/. And for more information on this or other upcoming events or programs, please call Janet Good, at (970) 468-5887 or contact her by e-mail at janetg@co,summit.co.us; visit our website at http://www.summitcountylibraries.org ; "like" us on Facebook; follow us on Twitter (@summitlibraries); or simply come by and check with us at any of our three locations, in Frisco, Breckenridge and Silverthorne.
Open House at Lake Dillon Preschool
Lake Dillon Preschool is having a Back to School Open House Tuesday, Sept. 24, from 5-6 p.m. Families and the Community are invited to tour our newly painted classrooms and sample menu items from our upcoming Food Program.
School needs board member
Little Red Schoolhouse is seeking a new board member with financial expertise and or fundraising knowledge. If interested, please email email@example.com.
'Stepping On' fall-prevention workshop
When: Fridays, Oct. 11-Nov. 22 (with the exception of one Thursday instead of Friday on Oct. 24). Where: St. Anthony's Summit Medical Center Classrooms. Bristlecone Home Health Foundation and Summit Medical Center Health Foundation are sponsoring a free fall-prevention workshop. The seven-week workshop is for seniors who have a fear of falling or have fallen in the last year. The "Stepping On" program has been researched and proven to reduce falls in older people. The workshops are led by health professionals. Information is provided on exercise, vision, safety and medications. To RSVP and for questions: (970)668-6980
Stress-free holidays workshop
Most people can't even think about the holidays without using the word "stress." Join us on Sunday, Oct. 6, and learn five simple steps you can take to make life less stressful through the upcoming holidays, and beyond! By starting now and practicing these simple techniques, you'll find yourself gliding through the holidays with ease and grace! Please bring a notebook or journal. 11 a.m., Hair Harmonies, 101 N. Third Ave, Frisco. Call (888) 870-4411 for more info. Presented by Tanya Lelo, certified professional life coach with River of Opportunities LLC.
LDTC is looking for volunteers
Help professional live theatre thrive in Summit County! The Lake Dillon Theatre Company is seeking patrons and volunteers to become Lake Dillon Theatre Company Ambassadors. Ambassadors are not merely patrons or volunteers (although they are often both.) Ambassadors are the people IN THE KNOW about all things Lake Dillon Theatre Company. Please join us for a fun and informative training at the theatre on Saturday, Oct. 12, 1-4 p.m., to get the inside scoop and learn more about how you can help the Lake Dillon Theatre Company. RSVP required. Call Mari at (970) 513-1151 x 107 or email firstname.lastname@example.com
Dialogue Over Dinner
Join the Family & Intercultural Resource Center (FIRC) on Wednesday, Sept. 25 for Dialogue Over Dinner at the Summit Middle School from 5:30-7:30 p.m. We will be discussing homework and study skills: how to avoid the struggles, presented by Mindy Regner, behavior specialist/special education, Summit High School. Cost is free and includes dinner and child care. Students are welcome to attend the presentation or a homework room is available. Dialogue Over Dinner is a monthly meeting for parents and experts to share experiences and gain valuable parenting advice. RSVP with Kerri at (970) 262-3888 ext. 330 or email email@example.com
Free Healthcare Act seminar
The Summit Chamber of Commerce, Colorado Mountain College and Arrow Insurance are sponsoring an educational seminar on the new federally mandated health care legislation on Wednesday, Sept. 25, from 11:30 to 1 p.m. at the Breckenridge CMC campus. Light snacks and drinks will be served. This new legislation will affect virtually every American citizen and business owner. Learn about how it will affect you by attending this free seminar. Larry Stone of Stone CPA will address the tax considerations for business owners. The seminar is limited to 40 people so RSVP's are recommended to insure you a spot. Call Cindy at 668-3811 to reserve a seat.
Healthy relationships seminar
Free seminar: "How to Be Happy, Healthy and Confident in All Your Relationships," Wednesday, Sept. 25, 6:30-8 p.m., Frisco, Community Center, 85 Nancy's Place, Frisco. For Information, contact Barbara at (970) 513-7242 or at email@example.com.
Breckenridge Dining Passports
The Breckenridge Restaurant Association (BRA) is offering fall dining specials at participating restaurants as a fundraiser for Summit County Cares, a collection of organizations that includes the Care Clinic, Family & Intercultural Resource Center, Advocates for Victims of Assault and Social Services. The restaurant community wants to give back to the organizations that help many of its employees, patrons and community members. Breckenridge Dining Passports are each valid for two people and are valid now through Nov. 14. Passports are available at the Breckenridge Welcome Center, the Summit Foundation and participating restaurants.
Brain Injury Support Group
Brain Injury Support Group, which meets the fourth Thursday of every month will meet Sept. 26, from 5:30-6:30 p.m., at St. Anthony Summit Medical Center, Frisco, in the classrooms on the first floor. Cynthia E. Parker, with Adult Mental Health Services LLC, will be the guest speaker and will be doing a presentation on "Fatigue — What Can Help the Struggle after a Brain Injury?" This support group is for survivors of a brain injury, their supporters and friends. Please join us! For information, please contact Kim Ramey or Melissa Chang in the PT/OT/ST Department at St. Anthony Summit Medical Center at (970) 668-6980, or at Avalanche PT and Sports Rehabilitation at (970) 668-0888.
Summit County's new seed library
High Country Conservation Center is working with community gardeners and Colorado Mountain College students to develop a new community seed library. The seed library will offer free access to seeds and seed-saving education to everyone in our community. Saving seeds specific to Summit County is an important step in strengthening our local food system. Locally adapted seeds are more resilient and regionally adapted to our soil and microclimate. We need your help to raise $1,000 to launch this program. To support the Summit Seed Library Campaign and to find out how you can get involved, please visit ioby.org/project/summit-county-seed-library or contact Jen Santry at (970) 668-5703.
Optimist Club ski pass raffle
The Summit-Lake Dillon Optimist Club is now conducting its annual ski pass raffle. A $2 ticket (or six tickets for $10) buys a chance to win a season pass to Copper Mountain, Loveland, A-Basin or the Vail Epic Pass. Your local Optimist Club supports a wide variety of activities for the youth of Summit County, including basketball, volleyball, oratorical and essay contests and chess tournaments. The proceeds from the ski pass raffle are used to provide scholarships to graduating seniors at Summit High School. The drawing is Oct. 16 at 12:30 p.m. at the Summit Community Center and you do not need to be present to win. Tickets are available at any Alpine Bank or First Bank location, Dillon Ridge Liquor, or the Edward Jones office of Mark Nunn in Frisco.
Volunteer for Summit County Teens
The Summit County Library would like to invite all middle and high school students to the North Branch Library, 651 Center Circle, Silverthorne, every Monday after school from 3-5 p.m. to do community service to help meet any requirements you may have for school or other organizations with which you are involved. Volunteer work can count toward the schools' IB program, Scouting, etc. No need to call ahead. Snacks provided. For more information on this or other upcoming events or programs, please contact Janet at (970) 468-5887 or janetg@co,summit.co.us; visit our website at http://www.summitcountylibraries.org ; "like" us on Facebook; follow us on Twitter (@summitlibraries); or simply come by and check with us at any of our three locations, in Frisco, Breckenridge and Silverthorne.
Teens needed for Teen Advisory Board at library
If you are a Summit County teen, grades six to 12, then the Summit County Library needs your help! We are seeking new members for our Teen Advisory Board (TAB). The TAB meets once a month during the school year to plan events for middle and high school students, decorate the teen area, suggest books to add to our growing collection, and have lots of fun! Our next meeting is Monday, Sept. 16 from 3-4:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 651 Center Circle in Silverthorne. Please join us at our upcoming meeting to help plan a party for Teen Read Week in October. Snacks will be provided. If you have any questions, please email Janet, at email@example.com or call (970) 468-5887.
Reading is a team effort for teens
The Summit County Library is looking for teen readers, from the middle and high schools, with active imaginations and a sense of fun for a missing-ending book club. This is a book club with a twist … each reader gets a book with the final pages of the story stapled closed. Please pick up your free book and a special surprise package throughout September at the North Branch of the Summit County Library, 651 Center Circle, Silverthorne. Read the book all the way up to the stapled pages (the missing ending), then join us for the meeting on Monday, Oct. 7, at 3 p.m. We'll provide the snacks, games and even a craft, and you provide the ending! Finally, the author's ending is revealed, and the reader with the best guess at the ending will win a prize! For more information on this or other upcoming events or programs, please contact Janet at (970) 468-5887 or janetg@co,summit.co.us; visit our website at http://www.summitcountylibraries.org ; "like" us on Facebook; follow us on Twitter (@summitlibraries); or simply come by and check with us at any of our three locations, in Frisco, Breckenridge and Silverthorne.
Coats for Kids campaign
The second annual Knights of Columbus "Coats for Kids" Campaign was jump-started with a significant donation by Century 21 Realty. Your monetary donations will enable the Knights to purchase new warm winter clothing for cold children in need. Please support this priority cause by sending your tax-deductible donations payable to: Knights of Columbus, P.O. Box 3673, Dillon, CO 80435. Call (970) 468-6566 for info.
Go2Work free workshops for job seekers
Drop in any time on Tuesdays between noon and 4 p.m. Colorado Mountain College in Dillon in the Computer Lab, Room 11. Services available: computer access, Internet job searches, job application and resume assistance, interviewing skills, interest inventories, computer-based work-skill enhancement, skill assessment and certification through ACT WorkKeys. Earn the new CareerReady Colorado Certificate and skill training through Career Ready 101™, a web-based study program. Also: information on CMC classes and financial aid; information on other training and educational resources; online registration for Colorado WorkForce Center; information regarding WIA (WorkForce Investment Act) benefits; and referrals to additional services. All services are free and no pre-registration is required! Contact: Jason Read at (970) 468-5989 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Support Local Journalism
Support Local Journalism
As a Summit Daily News reader, you make our work possible.
Summit Daily is embarking on a multiyear project to digitize its archives going back to 1989 and make them available to the public in partnership with the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. The full project is expected to cost about $165,000. All donations made in 2023 will go directly toward this project.
Every contribution, no matter the size, will make a difference.


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Now that the buzz from Tron Legacy has come and gone, what lingers is a lot of unanswered questions. Like why did it rain inside a computer? Let's hope the rumored "soon-to-be-greenlit" Tron sequel will answer any remaining queries.
Ain't It Cool news is reporting that Disney is mere moments away from announcing that they're going back onto the grid with a third Tron movie. Granted, this has always been the plan for Disney, and even though the movie was met with mixed reviews, it's still made nearly $300 million worldwide.
So, what will the plot be for the second film? [Spoiler Talk] According to rumor a while back, Cillian Murphy's cameo in the first film — as the son of original Tron villain Ed Dillinger — was intended to set him up as the next big villain. Besides that, we can only assume the next film will include some sort of hilarious "getting to know you"-style musical montage of Quorra in the real world.
What would you like to see in the third Tron film?

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Tag Archives: Credit Monitoring
Best Credit Monitoring Service for 2014
With identity theft on the rise, now is the time to find the best credit monitoring service so you can protect yourself before it happens. According to the most recent "Victims of Identity Theft" report published by the Bureau of Justice in 2013, approximately 16.6 million persons (7% of all U.S. residents age 16 or older) were victims of one or more incidents of identity theft in 2012.
If you don't think that's very much, consider that losses from ID theft were $24.7 billion. That's $10 billion more than all other property theft combined.
With ID theft on the rise, and sparked by a recent ID theft scare experienced by a close family member, I conducted some serious research on the best credit monitoring services available today. My focus was mainly on comprehensive credit monitoring with ID theft protection, but I also found some great options that work well for low-cost credit report monitoring.
The Best Credit Monitoring Service
My research led me to choose Identity Guard as the best credit monitoring service because it is a comprehensive program that monitors changes in your credit score and provides some of the best ID theft protection in the industry.
Identity Guard has many different package options to fit any budget. Any plan you choose comes with:
- Social Security number monitoring
- ID theft victim's assistance
- Lost-wallet protection
- $1 million ID theft insurance
In case Identity Guard is not for you, several other strong companies worth looking into emerged from my research.
Here is my full list of the 5 best credit monitoring services:
- Identity Guard
- LifeLock
- Identity Force
- Experian
- TransUnion
What exactly does credit monitoring entail?
There are two main reasons you'll want to use a credit monitoring service:
- You're concerned about identity theft and want to protect against it.
- You need to improve or repair your credit score, but you're not as concerned about ID theft protection.
Credit monitoring tracks your credit reports and notifies you of any significant changes. Since all things financial flow to your credit report, including loans, credit cards, and payment histories, your credit report is a major factor that financial companies use to extend you any type of loan.
Many times, people are unaware of derogatory reports that show up on their credit report until they actually apply for a loan — when it's already too late. Knowing what's in your credit report is extremely important for this reason. Derogatory reports like a delinquency from a creditor can affect your credit score for years. You'll also want to know your score prior to applying for any credit cards so you know you'll be accepted.
The other important way people use credit monitoring services is to prevent identity theft. Any financial account that is opened in your name with your Social Security number will show up on this report. Identity thieves prey on unsuspecting people by taking information about them and using it to use or open new financial accounts in the unsuspecting person's name. Credit monitoring services notify you any time a new account is opened so you can respond quickly.
There are a number of steps you can take to better protect yourself, but having your credit monitored by a professional team can give you the greatest edge by letting you know — in near real time — what is affecting your credit.
What are identity thieves looking for?
In a USA Today article, Phoenix-based cybersecurity expert Mark Pribish says identity thieves look for specific pieces of information.
Here is what identity thieves look for:
- User names, passwords, and PIN numbers
- Social Security numbers
- Phone and utility account numbers
- Bank and credit account numbers
- Employment and student identification numbers
- Driver's license and passport numbers
- Professional license numbers
- Insurance identification numbers
- College or university financial-aid form information
For most ID theft victims, having new accounts opened in their names is not the main issue, so credit report monitoring alone isn't adequate. The big problem is that ID thieves use the above information to gain access to and control current bank, credit card, loan, and other accounts, which is where more proactive measures come in handy.
According the Bureau of Justice, for 85% of identity theft victims, the most recent incident involved the unauthorized use of an existing account.
This key statistic has great ramifications for determining which of the best credit monitoring service features have the most impact when it comes to combating ID theft.
How can the best credit monitoring services protect my existing accounts?
Simply monitoring a credit report only shows you when a new account has been opened, but doesn't show you when your credit card has been used by someone else nor when your bank account has been accessed.
The best credit monitoring services that make this list protect your open accounts with:
- ID verification alerts
- Account takeover alerts
- Lost-wallet protection
- ID theft victim assistance
The Most Comprehensive Credit Monitoring Services
The first three products listed below will be able to provide full credit monitoring services, identity theft protection, and access to credit reports. If you're looking for the most comprehensive services to stay protected, these are your best options.
Identity Guard
For comprehensive monitoring, including proactive identity theft protection, Identity Guard is your clear choice.
They monitor all three major credit bureaus for changes to your reports, helping you make more informed financial decisions. On top of this, they monitor personal information like your name and Social Security number across thousands of databases.
ID verification alerts and account takeover alerts proactively notify you every time your online account information has been accessed or changed. This way, you can quickly take action if the accounts were accessed fraudulently. These services are included in the same plans as their credit monitoring service so you just pay a single monthly fee for both.
If you happen to become a victim of ID theft, Identity Guard has the services to get you back on your feet fast. A victim hotline gives you access to a trained expert who helps you through your stressful situation. Lost-wallet protection gets your credit cards cancelled and replaced fast, and $1 million in ID theft insurance covers all of your losses due to ID theft.
- Social Security Number Monitoring
- ID Verification Alerts
- Account Takeover Alerts
- Identity Theft Victim Assistance
- Lost-Wallet Protection
- $1 Million Identity Theft Insurance
- 3-Bureau Credit Monitoring
- ID Vault® Password Protection
LifeLock® identity theft protection helps proactively safeguard your identity and your credit. LifeLock actively monitors applications for credit cards, bank accounts, utilities, and other services within an extensive network for attempts to use your personal information. Whenever suspicious activity is detected, you receive an alert via email or phone. If your wallet goes missing, LifeLock helps cancel or replace the contents quickly.
LifeLock® monitors thousands of black-market websites where ID thieves buy and sell stolen information. If your personal information shows up there, you are alerted. They also work with the credit bureaus to reduce the number of annoying preapproved credit card offers by taking your name off mailing lists.
With LifeLock® Junior, you can also protect your child's identity, which makes LifeLock perfect for families. Children's clean credit is often a gold mine for thieves because they are largely unmonitored. If your child's information was stolen and used, it may go undetected for years and do lasting damage.
- Identity Threat Detection and Alerts
- Black-Market Website Monitoring
- Lost-Wallet Protection
- $1 Million Total Service Guarantee
- Public Records Monitoring
- Sex Offender Registry Reports
- Monthly Credit Score Tracking
Identity Force
Identity Force is another top service for credit monitoring. They monitor all three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, and notify you by email if any changes occur on your reports. A monthly statement comes in handy to help keep you informed of what's going on with your credit files.
On the ID protection front, Identity Force also offers a variety of tools available to protect your personal information. Their comprehensive monitoring feature keeps tabs on any address changes, court records, credit reports, payday loans, and sex offender lists to make sure your information is not being used without your knowing.
In the event a problem occurs, you have 24/7 access to Identity Restoration Specialists who save you lots of time and headaches by completing all the paperwork, making calls, and doing all the heavy lifting to make sure your identity is restored.
Identity Force is another great choice for a families. Like LifeLock, this company can protect your children. Their Child Watch service delivers proactive credit monitoring, identity monitoring, and ID theft insurance for your kids.
- Identity Threat Detection and Alerts
- Lost-Wallet Protection
- ID Theft Insurance
- Identity Restoration Specialists
- Child Watch ID Theft Services
- 3-Bureau Credit Monitoring
The Best Credit Monitoring Services — Credit Reporting Bureaus
If you're less concerned with ID theft protection, credit monitoring services from one of the main credit reporting bureaus is a great place to start.
These options can be more affordable and have flat fees for one-time access to your credit report if you just want to know where you stand before applying for a loan. Here are the top two options:
Experian makes the list of the best credit monitoring services by offering triple-bureau credit monitoring with a variety of options for one-time access to your credit report. You can purchase your Experian credit report for $14.95 or get all three credit bureau reports for $39.95. This feature is great if you just need to check in on your credit score once in a while.
For more active monitoring, select the Experian Credit Tracker. For $4.95 per month, you get your Experian credit score and credit report, plus triple-bureau credit monitoring and dedicated fraud resolution support.
Experian does have some ID protection features, but they fall short of the more comprehensive services like Identity Guard. The Experian ProtectMyID® service takes the Experian Credit Tracker features and adds daily Internet ID scanning to look for your personal information that may be publicly available on the Internet.
Finally, Experian also offers credit reports and credit monitoring for your small business. This is a rare service only offered by the major credit bureaus.
- 3-Bureau Credit Report Monitoring
- Credit Report Change Alerts
- One-Time Access to Credit Report
- Dedicated Fraud Resolution Support
- Lost-Wallet Protection
- ID Theft Insurance
Like Experian, TransUnion is another credit reporting bureau that provides some of the best credit monitoring services. As a member, you have access to triple-bureau credit monitoring alerts, so you will be notified of any suspicious activity. TransUnion used to only monitor their own report. This flaw kept them from being one of the best credit monitoring services in the past.
If you're looking to get one-time access to your credit report, you can receive your TransUnion score for free and credit report for just $1 by signing up for a free seven-day trial. Cancel at any time during the seven days and you won't be charged the $17.95 membership fee. You also have the option to purchase your triple-bureau credit report for $39.95 without ongoing membership.
You can add some ID theft protection by signing up for True Identity. This service monitors many of the same public records as other services and alerts you if your information shows up there.
If you believe you've been a victim of identity fraud, the security freeze feature prevents lenders from accessing your TransUnion credit report entirely. This makes it less likely that a lender will extend credit to someone posing as you. Tools like these offer you peace of mind since they allow you a greater level of control over your account.
- 3-Bureau Credit Report Monitoring
- Credit Report Change Alerts
- One-Time Access to Credit Report
- Identity Restoration Services
- Lost-Wallet Protection
- ID Theft Insurance
- Security Freeze
Choosing the Best Credit Monitoring Services
Here's an outline of how I got to my final choices:
- Conducted research to find a list of all services
- Removed companies that did not belong on the list because they feed business to other companies
- Segmented the remaining companies based on their features
- Analyzed features deeper to select a top product
For a more detailed look into my process for selecting these services, continue reading below.
I started my research by compiling a comprehensive list of credit monitoring services from multiple Internet sources. I found 20 companies to investigate further.
As I dug deeper, I found that several companies on my list were actually lead-generation sites for other companies on the list. Two examples are FreeCreditReport.com and FreeCreditScore.com, both owned by Experian. I instantly eliminated these companies and don't recommend them.
The next step was segmentation. I found that while all the companies on the list provided some form of credit monitoring, some focused more on detecting and preventing ID theft while others were more focused on tracking your credit score and report to provide you with valuable information when applying for credit.
So, I segmented companies into two categories:
- Comprehensive: for those that provided a set of credit monitoring services with a heavier emphasis on ID theft prevention.
- Credit Reporting Bureaus: these companies are more focused on monitoring your credit changes and less on ID theft.
Once I had two buckets to place the services, I focused more on features. For the Comprehensive category, I focused on features that could protect existing accounts because, for over 85% of identity theft victims the most recent incident involved the unauthorized use of an existing account.
The must-have features for this category include:
- ID verification alerts
- Account takeover alerts
- Lost-wallet protection
- ID theft victim assistance
For the Credit Reporting Bureau category, there are really only three options to choose from: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.
In this category, the distinguishing features that made Experian and TransUnion the best are:
- Ease of monitoring credit reports from all three bureaus
- The alerting functions for changes to each report
- Best options for one-time access to your credit score and credit report
- Ability to add certain ID theft protection features
Making the Final Decision
Looking at everything that credit monitoring encompasses, I determined that Identity Guard was the best credit monitoring service.
Hands down, it has the most comprehensive features for not only monitoring changes in your credit report, but also for proactively combating the risks factors that make your identity vulnerable.
We do not


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This is probably one of my most favorite times of the yr. Outside the streets are lined w/ festive lights, people are bustling through the city from shop to shop, local cafe joints serving up their specialty drinks, and snowflakes falling making all things more merry! Inside, our Christmas tree is lit while we relax to X-Mas carols. And I must admit, I've indulged in more than my fair share of hot cocoa with loads of mini-marshmallows.
We are hosting our little holiday dinner party next weekend and that means a holiday dinner menu to prepare! I'm thinking a charcuterie plate and plum wine to start while truffles and tea will end the night. My husband will probably make some sort of butter seared duck dish for the main course and other tidbits in b/w.
So with all the holiday parties lining up…what's a girl to wear?! Thanks to Lulu's a few weeks back for sending me holiday-perfect pieces! The gold sequin top fits the bill for festive festivities… and paired with red gold cap toe pumps, it's an outfit made in holiday heaven!
My look of glam + casual.
These distressed Joe's jeans help balance out the glitz of the top and pumps. Kinda prevents you from being overdressed (nothing worse than feeling too overdressed!) but still appropriately dolled up for them parties!
The perfect sole for the season.
What is more beautiful and festive than the first snowfall?! PS. I LOVE my city (Boston)! It's absolutely GORG.
An accessories addict, yes I am!
If you are in the search for perfect holiday pieces, check out Lulu's! A shopping destination where you will not break your bank.
Also – stay tune for a FAB Fashion GIVEAWAY sponsored by Lulu's! You will not want to miss out!!


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Rick Perry and Stephen Colbert Have Something in Common
The comedian and politician share the same treasurer
Update: Following The Atlantic Wire's exclusive report, Salvatore Purpura has resigned as treasurer of Stephen Colbert's Super PAC "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow," citing a conflict of interest. "Obviously, there was a potential conflict of interest," Purpura told Politico. The Wire first identified Purpura's dual loyalties as treasurer for both Colbert and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry on Monday after discovering Purpura's name on newly-filed Federal Election Commission documents.
Original article Mark this down as an only-in-American-politics moment: today, Texas Governor Rick Perry filed his statement of candidacy papers with the Federal Election Commission signed by his treasurer, Salvatore Purpura. But Perry is not Purpura's only employer: he is also the treasurer of Stephen Colbert's Super PAC, "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow," The Atlantic Wire has learned. According to his LinkedIn profile, Purpura is a "Talented Finance Manager with outstanding credentials exemplifying an extensive track record of planning and directing accounting functions in an innovative way." And he has worked for a number of Republican candidates over the years including, John McCain's 2008 campaign, the Bush-Cheney in 2004 and 2000, Dole-Kemp in 1996 and Jeb Bush during his 1994 for Florida governor.
And now Purpura has two bosses who have already clashed. After it was officially-sanctioned by the FEC, one of the first notable actions by the Colbert Super PAC was to flood Iowa with ads urging attendees of the Ames Straw Poll last Saturday to vote for "Rick Parry" instead of Purpura's other employer, Rick Perry. It was a big joke for Colbert. But for Rick Perry supporters and the Iowa secretary of state staffers, it likely caused "Bachmann-sized migraines," according to The Daily Caller.
10 to 12 Secretary of State staffers have volunteered to serve as write-in officials... "My guess is that they will end up tallying Rick Parry votes separately from Rick Perry votes, and then make a decision about how to count them," said Rick Hasen, University of California-Irvine law professor and publisher of the Election Law Blog. "Whatever they decide, if there are a significant number of them, would be controversial."
Since the Ames Straw Poll is essentially a mock-election, there are no actual legal penalties for cheating.
It's not clear what effect the stunt had on Perry's straw poll fortunes. For what it's worth, he ended up placing sixth with 718 votes or 3.62 percent. Unlike Tim Pawlenty, Perry's political hopes survived the poll. So did Colbert's Super PAC. Will Purpura have to choose sides eventually? We reached out to him but haven't heard back yet. We'll update if he responds.


text: All Condominium in Destin No Records FoundSorry, no records were found. Please adjust your search criteria and try again. Google Map Not LoadedSorry, unable to load Google Maps API. Food & Beverage Listings Events Entertainment Listings Lodging Listings Shop Listings SearchSearch Advanced Filters AddressIn-Room Amenities Air Conditioning Bathtubs Showers only Private Bathroom Community Bathroom Can accommodate large families Connecting rooms Sleeper sofa Non-smoking rooms Pack n Play Rollaway beds available In-room coffee or tea Hair dryer Iron Ironing board Microwave Dishwasher Refrigerator Kitchenette Wifi - free Wifi - paid Children books and toys (ages 0-2) Children books and toys (ages 2-5) High chair Children's dinnerware Board games Game console Piano Ping pong table Pool table Record player Baby bath Baby monitorCategory Hotels Bed and Breakfast Motels Condominium Resorts Private Accommodation All-Inclusive Resort Camping Timeshares Glamping Cabin / CottageLodging Food & Beverage On-site restaurant On-site restaurant - Kids Menu Accommodates Special Diets Free Breakfast Complimentary Snacks or Food Kids Eat Free Room Service Room Service - Kids Menu On-Site Cocktail Lounge Free Adult Drinks On-site Coffee Shop Vending MachinesProperty Features Pool - Indoor Pool - Outdoor Hot tub Waterslide Beach Access Water Activities Outdoor Activities Kids Stay Free Infant program Toddler program Pre-teen Program Teen Program Special needs Program Babysitting Service On-Site Gift Shop or Convenience Store Concierge Staff Laundry Facilities on site Fitness Center Suites Available Laundry Service Pets Allowed Shuttle Service - Airport Shuttle Service - Local Attractions Military Discount Senior Discount Special Offer for MFG Card Member SearchSearch View: Grid 1View: Grid 2View: Grid 3View: Grid 4View: Grid 5View: List Jetty East on the Gulf Address: 500 Gulf Shore Dr Destin Florida 32541 United States No Comments Favorite Silver Dunes Condominiums Address: 1030 hwy 98 E Destin Florida 32541 United States No Comments Favorite Kid Events Calendar Follow UsView myfamilyguide's profile on FacebookView @myfamilyguides's profile on TwitterView myfamilyguide's profile on InstagramView myfamilyguide's profile on PinterestJoin our FREE travel club! To receive more details about Group Travel Event, sign-up below: I want to receive more info about Group Travel Events * indicates required Email Address *


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Many Catholic or Christian mission schools and a significant number of private schools in Japan are single sex schools…a fact which suggests that enough educators and parents believe in the advantages of the single sex classroom environment over the coed one.
Below is a recent New York Times article examining afresh the whole issue. Since the pros and cons arguments are the same for parents in Japan trying whether coed or single sex schools are suitable for their kids, I am posting it here.
Teaching Boys and Girls Separately
By ELIZABETH WEIL
Published: March 2, 2008 NY Times.com
On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender's fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don't appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys' classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls' room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.
Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the school's principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called "Boys and Girls Learn Differently!" After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foley's lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences." Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Sax's book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls' drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls' artwork and make boys feel that they're drawing incorrectly. Under Sax's leadership, teachers learn to say things like, "Damien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it's going faster." "Now Damien feels encouraged," Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. "To say: 'Why don't you use more colors? Why don't you put someone in the vehicle?' is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, 'Well, this is nice, but why don't you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.' "
During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read "Boys and Girls Learn Differently!" and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boys' and girls' innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girls' and a boys' class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.
Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children's public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girls' crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America," which described how girls' self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a "man bites dog" sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught "by soft-spoken women who bore" boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school — where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys — discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.
In part because of these regulations and in part because of a mix of cultural and technological forces — ranging from the growth of brain-scan research to the increased academic pressures on kindergarteners and a chronic achievement gap between richer and poorer students and between white and minority students — new single-sex public schools and classrooms are opening at an accelerating pace. In 1995, there were two single-sex public schools operating in this country. Currently, there are 49, and 65 percent of those have opened in the last three years. Nobody is keeping exact count of the number of schools offering single-sex classrooms, but Sax estimates that in the fall of 2002, only about a dozen public schools in the United States offered any kind of single-sex educational options (excluding schools which offered single-sex classrooms only in health or physical education). By this past fall, Sax says, that number had soared to more than 360, with boys- and girls-only classrooms now established in Cleveland; Detroit; Albany; Gary, Ind.; Philadelphia; Dallas; and Nashville, among other places. A disproportionate number of the schools are in the South (where attitudes toward gender roles tend to be more conservative) or serve disadvantaged kids. Sax claims that "many more are in the pipeline for 2008-2009."
Among advocates of single-sex public education, there are two camps: those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs. Leonard Sax represents the essential-difference view, arguing that boys and girls should be educated separately for reasons of biology: for example, Sax asserts that boys don't hear as well as girls, which means that an instructor needs to speak louder in order for the boys in the room to hear her; and that boys' visual systems are better at seeing action, while girls are better at seeing the nuance of color and texture. The social view is represented by teachers like Emily Wylie, who works at the Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem (T.Y.W.L.S.), an all-girls school for Grades 7-12. Wylie described her job to me by saying, "It's my subversive mission to create all these strong girls who will then go out into the world and be astonished when people try to oppress them." Sax calls schools like T.Y.W.L.S. "anachronisms" — because, he says, they're stuck in 1970s-era feminist ideology and they don't base their pedagogy on the latest research. Few on the other side want to disparage Sax publicly, though T.Y.W.L.S.'s founder, Ann Tisch, did tell me pointedly, "Nobody is planning the days of our girls around a photograph of a brain."
The two camps face a common enemy in the A.C.L.U., which opposes all single-sex public education. (When I asked a lawyer at the A.C.L.U.'s Women's Rights Project why, she said, "Have you ever heard of Title IX?" referring to the 1972 Education Amendments that outlaw all discrimination in educational programs on the basis of sex.) But that hasn't brought the two sides together. "What kind of message does it give when you tell a group of kids that boys and girls need to be separated because they don't even see or hear alike?" asks Rosemary Salomone, a legal scholar at St. John's University School of Law. Salomone is especially invested in the debate, as she provided support to T.Y.W.L.S. before it opened in 1996 and was subsequently tapped by the United States Department of Education to draft the revised regulations that made it easier for districts to separate boys from girls. Those regulations now require that a district "provide a rationale," review its program every two years and ensure that enrollment in single-sex classrooms is voluntary. When Salomone revised the regulations, she thought they would usher in a flurry of schools of the T.Y.W.L.S. — not the Sax — variety. She was wrong. "As one of the people who let the horse out the barn, I'm now feeling like I really need to watch that horse," Salomone told me over lunch near her home in Rye, N.Y., last month. "Every time I hear of school officials selling single-sex programs to parents based on brain research, my heart sinks."
On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen's young-adult novel "Hatchet." Bender's voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, "don't want to be parents. They want to be their kids' friends." Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, "Are you going to make it, brother?" Then he kept reading. " 'The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .' What's abating, gentlemen?" The protagonist of "Hatchet" survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you're out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.
Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay's fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of "Always Sisters" and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you're doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.
Foley, population 11,300, is 10 miles from the Gulf Coast. Fifty-seven percent of Foley Intermediate's students are white, 24 percent are black and 17 percent are Latino; 70 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches each day. In the first year of Foley's single-sex program, a third of the kids enrolled. The next year, two-thirds signed up, and in its third year 87 percent of parents requested the program. Principal Mansell reports that her single-sex classes produce fewer discipline problems, more parental support and better scores in writing, reading and math. She does, however, acknowledge that her data are compromised, as her highest-performing teachers and her most-motivated students have chosen single-sex.
In his books and frequent media appearances, Sax holds up Foley Intermediate as an example of his theories put to good use. In his second book, "Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men," Sax credits Bender for helping focus a boy who was given a wrong diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder by telling him that his father, who had left the family, would be even less likely to return if all his mother had to report was the boy misbehaving in school. Sax also goes out of his way to note that Bender had this conversation with the boy "shoulder to shoulder," not "face to face." "Just remember this rule of thumb," Sax tells readers: "A good place to talk with your son is in your car, with you driving and your son in the passenger seat."
Sax used to say that he was "uniquely unqualified to lead the single-sex public education movement," since, for among other reasons, he had never been a teacher. Now, he no longer says that, and he maintains that a school's teachers and staff need only 14 hours of training — two 7-hour days with him — to prepare to switch from coeducation to single-sex. Sax is 48, square-jawed and sturdily built, with a thick shag of side-parted brown hair and a relentless intellect and tireless charisma that leave even his critics exhausted and impressed. In the 1980s he earned an M.D. and Ph.D. (in psychology) from the University of Pennsylvania. Last year, he gave about 50 seminars and lectures on sex differences in children. The first time I met him, he was swinging through San Francisco to give a series of such talks at the Katherine Delmar Burke School, a private all-girls school. Speaking to a group of sixth graders, Sax explained his theory that girls' hearing ability is much better than boys', as is girls' sense of smell. The girls, just on the edge of puberty, sat utterly rapt, seeming to want to understand why their brothers, boy cousins, cute skater-dude neighbors and fathers were so weird. A few weeks after the lecture, Sax sent me a packet of color photocopies of thank-you notes he had received from the girls. One, from a girl with two fathers, read: "Dr. Sax, Thank you so much for coming to Burkes. . . . I had a smell in my room and my Dads couldn't smell it but I could. I thought I was going crazy. It ends up there was a dead rat in the wall. Hope you come back soon."
Sax comes off as a true believer and describes his conversion experience like this: In 2000, one of his patients, a 12-year-old boy, came to his medical office. For several years before then, the boy had been withdrawn, uninspired and on multiple medications, but he had recently made a big turnaround, which his parents credited to having enrolled him in an all-boys school. Upon hearing this, Sax said to the boy's mother, "With all due respect, I regard single-sex education as an antiquated relic of the Victorian Era." To which he says she replied, "With all due respect, Dr. Sax, you have no idea what you're talking about." After visiting a handful of single-sex schools, Sax threw himself into studying neurological differences between males and females, eventually focusing on how to protect boys from a syndrome he calls "failure to launch," which Sax often characterizes as caring more about getting a Kilimanjaro in Halo 3 than performing well in high school or taking a girl on a date. Among his early proposals was that boys should start kindergarten at age 6, a year later than girls, in order to ease the "sense of scholastic incompetence" that so many boys feel early on because they tend to develop later. Several friends quickly convinced Sax that American families would never go for this. So Sax started thinking it might be better for boys and girls to be in different classrooms.
Sax's official foray into single-sex public-school advocacy started in early 2002, when, he says, he applied for "a 501(c)(3) with the pretentious and improbable name of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education." In its first few years, N.A.S.S.P.E. didn't see much action. Then, in 2004, he was invited to give a seminar in Foley. His appearance there led to a workshop in Wilcox County, Ala., and over the next few years, Sax says, "things started to mushroom." Sax estimates that, at present, 300 of the 360 single-sex public school programs in the country "are coming at this from a neuroscience basis." Either he or one of N.A.S.S.P.E.'s board members has been in touch with about half the programs.
David Chadwell, one of Sax's disciples and the coordinator of Single- Gender Initiatives at the South Carolina Department of Education, explained to me the ways that teachers should teach to gender differences. For boys, he said: "You need to get them up and moving. That's based on the nervous system, that's based on eyes, that's based upon volume and the use of volume with the boys." Chadwell, like Sax, says that differences in eyesight, hearing and the nervous system all should influence how you instruct boys. "You need to engage boys' energy, use it, rather than trying to say, No, no, no. So instead of having boys raise their hands, you're going to have boys literally stand up. You're going to do physical representation of number lines. Relay races. Ball tosses during discussion." For the girls, Chadwell prescribes a focus on "the connections girls have (a) with the content, (b) with each other and (c) with the teacher. If you try to stop girls from talking to one another, that's not successful. So you do a lot of meeting in circles, where every girl can share something from her own life that relates to the content in class."
While Sax rejects the notion that he is a gender essentialist — according to Sax's own definition, "a gender essentialist is a derogatory term that arose in the 1970s to define someone who is an idiot, or a Republican, or both, who does not understand that gender is socially constructed" — he does say that "human nature is gendered to the core" and that "all that happens when you take a toy gun away from your son and give him a doll instead is that you tell him, 'I don't like the person that you are and I wish you were more like your sister, Emily.' " He opens "Why Gender Matters" with two cautionary tales: one about a boy who starts kindergarten at age 5, is given a diagnosis of A.D.H.D. and depression and ends up on a three-drug cocktail of Adderall, Wellbutrin and clonidine; the other about a girl who transforms "from chubby wallflower to outgoing socialite" in middle school, seems to have it all — friends, academic success — and then shocks her parents by overdosing on Vicodin and Xanax. The two anecdotes are capsule versions of the boys' and girls' crises, and depending on one's point of view, Sax effectively either addresses or exploits these parental concerns. After presenting the Adderall-doped grammar-school boy and the suicidal middle-school girl, Sax offers a possible cause of these sad stories. "The neglect of gender in education and child-rearing has done real harm." These tragedies "might have been averted if the parents had known enough about gender differences to recognize what was really happening in their child's life."
Among the differences Sax notes between boys and girls: Baby boys prefer to stare at mobiles; baby girls at faces. Boys solve maze puzzles using the hippocampus; girls use the cerebral cortex. Boys covet risk; girls shy away. Boys perform better under moderate stress; girls perform worse. Many academics and progressives tend to find Sax's views stereotyped and infuriating, yet Sax does not seem to mind. Sax told me that in 2005, he delivered a lecture at a conference at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. When the next speaker, Michael Younger, of Cambridge University, took the lectern, Sax says Younger threw down his speech and said, "I'm going to depart from my prepared remarks because I'm so annoyed by the sexist rubbish I just heard from Dr. Sax. Dr. Sax is trying to tell us that boys draw action and girls draw stasis. He might as well have said: 'Boys are active, girls are passive. Boys should go out and have jobs, girls should stay home and have babies.' " While Sax, a gadfly, enjoys telling this story, Younger calls it "a fiction," though he does concede "that certain aspects of Sax's work suggest an essentialism about boys and girls which is not borne out by reality as exposed in our own research."
A deluge of data has emerged in recent years detailing how boys and girls have different developmental trajectories and different brains. Sax has made a role for himself popularizing this work, though it's not yet clear what the research means or whether there are implications for single-sex education. For instance, among neuroscientists, motor skills are often used as proxies for assessing cognitive skills and social and emotional control in younger children. As Martha Denckla, director of the Developmental Cognitive Neurology Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Maryland, explained to me: "Looking at normal motor development in boys and girls — the ability to balance, to hop, to use your feet, to use your fingers and your hands — as a group, 5-year-old girls look almost completely the same as 6-year-old boys. The same is also true for anything having to do with speed of output: for example, how quickly you answer a question. Maybe you know the answer, but you just can't prepare your mouth to form the words." The gender gap in motor development shrinks through grammar and middle schools, Denckla says, disappearing once everyone has gone through puberty, around age 15. Yet Denckla doesn't see any need for single-sex public education; she thinks mixed-grade K-1, 1-2 and 2-3 classrooms are a better way to deal with the developmental differences among school-age kids.
Scans of boys' and girls' brains over time also show they develop differently. Analyzing data from the largest pediatric neuro-imaging study to date — 829 scans from 387 subjects ages 3 to 27 — researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health found that total cerebral volume peaks at 10.5 years in girls, four years earlier than in boys. Cortical and subcortical gray-matter trajectories peak one to two years earlier in girls as well. This may sound very significant, but researchers claim it means nothing for educators, or at least nothing yet. "Differences in brain size between males and females should not be interpreted as implying any sort of functional advantage or disadvantage," the N.I.M.H. paper concludes. Not one to be deterred, Sax invited Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch at N.I.M.H., to give the keynote address at his N.A.S.S.P.E. conference in 2007. Giedd spoke for 90 minutes, but made no comments on schooling at all.
One reason for this, Giedd says, is that when it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. "On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations." Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys' and girls' locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys' locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls' locker room. What would happen? While you'd end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place. Giedd suggests the same is true when educators use gender alone to assign educational experiences for kids. Yes, you'll get more students who favor cooperative learning in the girls' room, and more students who enjoy competitive learning in the boys', but you won't do very well. Says Giedd, "There are just too many exceptions to the rule."
Despite a lack of empirical evidence, a cottage industry has emerged working the "boys and girls are essentially different, so we should educate them differently" angle. Several advocates like Sax have been quite successful commercially, including Michael Gurian, a family therapist, who published the best-selling "The Wonder of Boys" in 1996, a work he has since followed up with 15 more, including "Boys and Girls Learn Differently!" Through the Gurian Institute, he provides trainings to teachers, "showing the PET scans, showing the Spect scans" (a Spect scan is a nuclear imaging test that shows how blood flows through tissue), "teaching how the male and female brain are different," Gurian told me. Like Sax, Gurian speaks authoritatively, yet both have been criticized for cherry-picking studies to serve their views. For instance, Sax initially built his argument that girls hear better than boys on two papers published in 1959 and 1963 by a psychologist named John Corso. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent a fair amount of energy examining the original research behind Sax's claims. In Corso's 1959 study, for example, Corso didn't look at children; he looked at adults. And he found only between one-quarter and one-half of a standard deviation in male and female hearing thresholds. What this means, Liberman says, is that if you choose a man and a woman at random, the chances are about 6 in 10 that the woman's hearing will be more sensitive and about 4 in 10 that the man's hearing will be more sensitive. Sax uses several other hearing studies to make his case that a teacher who is audible to boys will sound too loud to girls. But Liberman says that if you really look at this research, it shows that girls' and boys' hearing is much more similar than different. What's more, the sample sizes in those studies are far too small to make meaningful conclusions about gender differences in the classroom. The "disproportion between the reported facts and Sax's interpretation is spectacular," Liberman wrote on his blog, Language Log. "Dr. Sax isn't summarizing scientific research; he's making a political argument," he wrote in an e-mail message. "The political conclusion comes first, and the scientific evidence — often unrepresentative or misrepresented — is selected to support it."
One of Sax's core arguments is that trying to teach a 5-year-old boy to read is as developmentally fraught as trying to teach a 3 1/2-year-old girl and that such an exercise often leads to a kid hating school. This argument resonates with many teachers and parents, who long for the days when kindergarten meant learning how to stand in line for recess, not needing to complete phonics homework. Yet public schools are beholden to state standards, and those standards require kindergartners to learn to read. As a result, even leaders of single-sex public schools, like Jabali Sawicki, the principal of the all-boys Excellence Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, are using some of what Sax has to offer while quietly refuting other claims.
Sawicki is 30, lanky and mocha-skinned, with an infectious energy. He grew up in a tough part of San Francisco with a single mother who managed to get her son a scholarship for middle school at a private all-boys school. From there he went to a private high school and then on to Oberlin College. The Excellence School is part of Uncommon Schools, a small network of charter schools. Housed in a gracious building on a modest street, Excellence currently teaches children in kindergarten through Grade 4, and will add a grade each year for the next four years, up to Grade 8. Sawicki's office occupies an empty classroom slated to be overtaken by students as the school grows. There, he told me that educating lower-class black boys is "the new civil rights movement." He then walked me down the hall to one of his kindergarten classrooms, where a sign on the door read "Fordham, Class of 2024."
"Jacob," said Sawicki, folding himself into a tiny chair and pointing to a line in a workbook, "will you read that for our guest?"
Jacob, who is 5, straightened his tiny tie under his green cardigan and used his index finger to track his place on the page. "A rat and a rabbit went down the slide."
"Thank you," said Sawicki. "And can you tell our guest what you like about the Excellence School?"
"I like that I get to wear a sweater with buttons," he said, glancing down at his uniform. "And I like that I'm going to college."
While there's some dispute over whether there's an ongoing education crisis for white, middle-class boys, there's no doubt that public schools are failing poor minority students in general and poor minority boys in particular. Despite six years of No Child Left Behind, the achievement gaps between rich and poor students and white and black students have not significantly narrowed. "People are getting desperate" is how Benjamin Wright, chief administrative officer for the Nashville public schools, described the current interest in single-sex education to me. "Coed's not working. Time to try something else."
Wright was one of the first principals in the country to address the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps by separating boys from girls. In 1999, he was sent to the failing Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, in Seattle, to try to turn the place around. One of the first things he noticed was that three boys were getting suspended for every girl, "and for the most ridiculous things in the world — a boy would burp, or he'd pass gas, or a girl would say, 'He hit me.' " Nationwide, boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to be suspended, and more likely to drop out of high school than girls (65 percent of boys complete high school in four years; 72 percent of girls do). Boys make up two-thirds of special-education students. They are 1.5 times more likely to be held back a grade and 2.5 times more likely to be given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. So Wright met with his fourth-grade teachers and recalls telling them, "O.K., here's what we're going to do: how about you take all the boys and you take all the girls?" Wright says that in 2001, after Marshall's first year in a single-sex format, the percentage of boys meeting the state's academic standards rose from 10 percent to 35 percent in math and 10 percent to 53 percent in reading and writing.
Wright attributes this both to the insights of "brain researchers" like Sax and to what he calls "the character piece" — giving children a positive sense of themselves as students — which he says is easier to address in a single-sex setting. "Nobody cares about me, nobody really wants me — an African American or a Latino boy will tell you that in a hurry," Wright told me when we spoke in January. "Or a Vietnamese or a Cambodian boy, if you're in the right neighborhood. Don't nobody care. Teachers need to understand when it's time to stop teaching the content and start teaching the context."
Not all schools see great results from switching to a single-sex format. After transforming the Thurgood Marshall School in Seattle, Wright moved to Philadelphia to work on the district's single-sex programs, and the results were rather modest, a fact Wright attributes to working both with middle- and high-school students and with less-engaged teachers. Other districts have started single-gender programs only to shut them down, as major logistical headaches outweighed the small academic gains. Lori Clark, principal at Jefferson Leadership Academies in Long Beach, Calif., which in 1999 became the first public middle school in the country to convert to a single-gender format, is in the process of reverting her school to coed. "We just didn't get the bang for the buck we'd been hoping for with our test scores," Clark told me. "Our master schedule is like one of those old Rubik's cubes. It's hard enough to make sure each kid gets this level English class and that level math class — and then we need to account for if that student is a boy or a girl? We just couldn't have our hands tied like that."
When Sawicki first took the job at Excellence, he attended conferences given by Sax and others on single-sex education, and at all of them he'd stand up and say: "Tell me what is it that I should do? What's the magic dust that I should sprinkle?" Now, four years into the job, he's following Wright's lead, trying to take the best of all models. At Excellence, in a third-grade room, the teacher Roberto de Leon roused his students into calling out the two-dimensional sides of three-dimensional shapes while throwing around a big purple eyeball. But the Excellence school couples their games with serious discipline. By 7:30 each morning, 220 boys walk through the school's heavy double doors, each dressed, in the terminology of the school, as a professional scholar: in black sneakers, dress pants, a white shirt, a green cardigan, a belt and a tie. If a child arrives at 7:31 a.m., his parents will receive a call at 5:45 the next morning to make sure that boy will be at school on time. Excellence is a charter school — meaning the school is publicly financed but has been freed from some of the rules that apply to other public schools, in exchange for promising to produce certain results. Its halls are silent from 7:50 to 10:30 a.m. each day. "The school's sacred time," Sawicki explains. "Right now we have 220 boys who are reading. Just a few blocks that way" — he pointed toward Crown Heights, a nearby section of Brooklyn — "you've got 220 boys who are doing something that's not going to get them to college."
After meeting Jacob, Sawicki walked me over to a room labeled "University of North Carolina, 2024," where the kindergarten teacher Trisha Bailey was sitting with nine boys in a reading circle. Part of Excellence's strategy is to keep boys too busy to fall out of line. "Friends, who's sitting tallest?" Bailey said in her brightest voice. "Who has a smile on his face? Whose feet are flat on the floor? O.K., here were go." For the next two minutes, Bailey led the boys in a simple phonics exercise, sounding out together cat, kitten, kiss. Then she said, as animated as the host of "Blues Clues": "Good job for you! Good job for me! Good job everybody! O.K., next."
Under Bailey's guidance, the boys did two more pages of phonics, and then she jumped to her feet and announced: "Stand up if you need to get your sillies out! Put your hands on your belly. Ha . . . ha, ha . . . ha, ha, ha. Now get ready for a blastoff with me!" Bailey counted down from 10 to 1, crouched down into a squat alongside the boys and then exploded into the air. Then she promptly took her seat. "Sit up tall, fold your hands, three-two-one, here we go." Bailey held up a page and put her index finger on a red dot. "Boys, let's read together now. This . . . is . . . my . . . kitten."
The Young Women's Leadership School in Harlem is widely considered the birthplace of the current single-sex public school movement. This position of eminence stems from both its early beginnings and its success: since opening in 1996, every girl in every senior class at T.Y.W.L.S. has graduated and been accepted at a four-year college.
T.Y.W.L.S. occupies the top five floors of a commercial building in Harlem, on 106th Street near Lexington Avenue. Most of the girls come from the neighborhood, where they walk home so quickly that they often breeze by their own mothers before registering whom they've passed. One afternoon in January, Dalibell Ferreira, a senior, sat drinking a soda in the college counselor's office, where she sometimes stays until 8 p.m. because she finds her own home distracting. Ferreira is tall, poised, with wide-set eyes and her hair neatly pulled back around her fine Dominican face. When she graduates, she wants "to go to Wesleyan and study abroad, then travel, and then work for Unicef." When she entered T.Y.W.L.S. in the seventh grade, she mostly liked that the linoleum floor was so clean she could see her own face reflected on it. Then she started appreciating that people wouldn't snicker, "Oh, she thinks she's so smart" when she raised her hand in class. Then one day last spring, on the way home from a friend's house, Ferreira ran into a classmate from elementary school who was pushing a stroller and also pregnant. "I know that girl is smart, very smart, but now she just hangs around the block," Ferreira told me. "I want to be bigger in life. Maybe that girl had dreams, too, but you can just see: the lights have gone out in her face."
T.Y.W.L.S. was founded by Ann Rubenstein Tisch, wife of Andrew Tisch, the co-chairman of the Loews Corporation. Ferreira's is exactly the story Tisch, a former correspondent for NBC Network News, hoped her students would someday tell. Tisch first got the idea for a public all-girls school while on assignment in Milwaukee in the late '80s. She was interviewing a 15-year-old at a public high school that had just opened a nursery so teenage moms could come back and finish their degrees. "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" Tisch asked the young mother. The mother started to cry. "I said to myself: 'She's stuck, she knows she's stuck. And she's impacting three generations: her mother, her child and herself.' We need to get these kids on a completely different path, a path that wealthy girls and parochial-school girls and yeshiva girls are offered. Don't you think that might make a difference?"
Tisch is 53 years old, with reddish hair and a strong, warm face. One of the first things she did when she got serious about trying to start an all-girls public school was to hire a lawyer, George Shebitz, to explore the legality of a single-sex school. Tisch started visiting elite Manhattan all-girls private schools like Brearley and Spence, and once she had a vision of girls in blue-and-white uniforms sitting in circles around tables instead of at rows of desks, Tisch met with Evelyn Castro, who was then the superintendent of New York City's District 4, the district that encompasses part of East Harlem and one known for its innovation. She then spoke to Rosemary Salomone, the legal scholar at St. John's. Salomone knew of a 1994 report by the New York City Department of Education showing a gender gap in math and science scores, which was particularly notable among African American and Hispanic females. Salomone knew that Title IX prohibits schools that receive Federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex, but she explained to Tisch that this gender gap could work to her advantage.
As the Supreme Court would rule in June 1996, just three months before T.Y.W.L.S. opened, the legality of single-sex schools depends on context. In United States v. Virginia, a case regarding females' exclusion from the all-male Virginia Military Institute, the justices found that the male bastion was in fact violating the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and that the state of Virginia's proposal to open an all-girls school wasn't a sufficient remedy because V.M.I. gave its students not just a good education but powerful connections within Virginia's military and political elite. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who earlier in her career had been a founder of the A.C.L.U. Women's Rights Project (a group that has been active in suing single-sex public schools), wrote the majority opinion, composing what some people consider a condensation of feminist thinking up to 1996. Ginsburg's opinion states that in some contexts, single-sex schools might be legal, as long as those schools worked to "dissipate, rather than perpetuate, traditional gender classifications." "The two sexes are not fungible," Ginsburg wrote, quoting a 1946 decision; the physical differences between the sexes are "enduring" and "cause for celebration." Yet, Ginsburg warned, those differences cannot be used to place "artificial constraints on individuals' opportunity."
News of an all-girls school opening in Harlem hit the press in July 1996 and started a firestorm of arguments about whether single-sex public education was illegal, regressive, anti-feminist and a nonanswer to the problem of how to educate both boys and girls well in school. As Salomone recalls, T.Y.W.L.S. "divided the feminist community right down the middle." Later that year at Fordham Law School, Salomone debated the merits of single-sex public education against Anne Conners, then the president of NOW-N.Y.C. According to Salomone, Conners evoked Brown v. Board of Education. Salomone countered that race is substantially different from gender, and, more important, that a child would end up at T.Y.W.L.S., or another single-sex school, only by parental choice. After the debate, Salomone says she asked Conners if she had lost members over the issue and that Conners suggested that she had. Salomone told her, "Well, you lost me."
Thanks to Tisch and the money she raises, T.Y.W.L.S. enjoys some significant advantages over an ordinary urban public school, most notably a health-and-wellness curriculum and a superheroic college counselor, Chris Farmer, who starts taking the girls on field trips to Columbia University in seventh grade and who once drove a student's entire Ghanaian family, Islamic music blaring, from Harlem to Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York so the father would feel comfortable enough let his daughter attend. Tisch's connections also make for priceless opportunities: Bill Clinton and Katie Couric, among other megawatt notables, have visited the school. But it was inside Emily Wylie's A.P. English class where the real social value of single-sex teaching was on display. Ferreira, among 20 other seniors, sat in a circle discussing "Pride and Prejudice." Wylie asked the girls to call out which characters had which vices and virtues. A serious discussion of whether lust — Lydia's lust — was a vice or virtue ensued.
"She's following her passions!"
"At least she's not sleeping with folks for money."
Wylie regretted to inform her girls that lust is one of the seven deadly sins, which prompted the thoroughly modern question: "But how is lust bad?"
Wylie says she believes she is a better teacher, and her students are better students, because they're in a desexualized — or at least less-sexualized — environment. "Sure," she says, "when they take pictures, they often present their backsides first. But I think I'm giving girls a better education than I could have if there were guys in the room. I'm freer. I'm more able to be bold in my statements. When I teach poetry and I talk about the sex in poetry I don't need to be worried about the boy in the room who is going to chuckle over the thing he did with the girl last week and embarrass her. Which happened more than once in my last coed environment."
Nearly everyone at T.Y.W.L.S. acknowledges that often parents' most pressing concern when enrolling their 11-year-old daughters is sheltering those girls from sexualized classrooms and sexualized streets. "Harlem's a very intense environment," says Drew Higginbotham, T.Y.W.L.S.'s assistant principal, who lives in the neighborhood. "You're constantly needing to prove yourself physically, to prove yourself sexually. Parents, when they come to our school, they sort of exhale deeply. You can hear them thinking to themselves, I can see my daughter here and she's going to be O.K. for six hours a day." Sax is not above or beyond this kind of thinking, either. In fact, after a nearly-two-hour conversation filled with scientific jargon and brains, he told me, perhaps wishfully, that really the most important reason to send a child to a single-sex high school was that those kids still go on dates. "Boys at boys' schools like Old Farms in Connecticut, or Saint Albans in Washington, D. C., will call up girls at Miss Porter's in Connecticut, at Stone Ridge in Maryland, and they will ask the girl out, and the boy will drive to the girl's house to pick her up and meet her parents. You tell kids at a coed school to do this, and they'll fall on the floor laughing. But the culture of dating is much healthier than the culture of the hookup, in which the primary form of sexual intimacy is a girl on her knees servicing a boy."
In the past few years Tisch's Young Women's Leadership Foundation has opened schools in the Bronx and Queens, as well helping start ones in Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas and Austin. Tisch wants to be careful about not overextending her network — "we don't want to become Mrs. Fields or Benetton" — but she says she also feels an obligation from her success. Last year, 2,100 students applied for the three open ninth-grade spots in the Harlem school. Many other schools make inquiries about how they might replicate T.W.Y.L.S.'s success. This coming year, for the first time, Tisch plans on holding her own conference on single-sex public education. Though she's meticulously circumspect about not disparaging Sax, her actions suggest that she is aware that if she doesn't engage with the many districts interested in starting up single-sex programs, there's a chance that Sax will run away with the movement.
Education scholarship has contributed surprisingly little to the debate over single-sex public education. In 2005, the United States Department of Education, along with the American Institute for Research, tried to weigh in, publishing a meta-analysis comparing single-sex and coed schooling. The authors started out with 2,221 citations on the subject that they then whittled down to 40 usable studies. Yet even those 40 studies did not yield strong results: 41 percent favored single-sex schools, 45 percent found no positive or negative effects for either single-sex or coed schools, 6 percent were mixed (meaning they found positive results for one gender but not the other) and 8 percent favored coed schools. This meta-analysis is part of a larger project by the Department of Education being led by Cornelius Riordan, a Providence College professor. He explained to me that such muddled findings are the norm for education research on school effects. School-effects studies try to answer questions like whether large schools are better than small schools or whether charter schools are better than public schools. The effects are always small. So many variables are at play in a school: quality of teachers, quality of the principal, quality of the infrastructure, involvement of families, financing, curriculum — the list is nearly endless. Riordan says, "You're never going to be able to compare two types of schools and say, 'The data very strongly suggests that schools that look like a are better than schools that look like b.' "
That certainly appears to be the case for single-sex schools. The data do not suggest that they're clearly better for all kids. Nor do they suggest that they're worse. The most concrete findings from the research on single-sex schools come from studies of Catholic schools, which have a long history of single-sex education, and suggest that while single-sex schools may not have much of an impact on the educational achievement of white, middle-class boys, they do measurably benefit poor and minority students. According to Riordan, disadvantaged students at single-sex schools have higher scores on standardized math, reading, science and civics tests than their counterparts in coed schools. There are two prevailing theories to explain this: one is that single-sex schools are indeed better at providing kids with a positive sense of themselves as students, to compete with the antiacademic influences of youth culture; the other is that in order to end up in a single-sex classroom, you need to have a parent who has made what educators call "a pro-academic choice." You need a parent who at least cares enough to read the notices sent home and go through the process of making a choice — any choice.
As T.Y.W.L.S. let out on a Friday in January and the girls spilled onto 106th Street, one such parent, a man in saggy jeans and a black parka, walked up the sidewalk clutching his daughter's dog-eared report card and hoping to secure her a spot for next year. "This where the school at?" he asked a security guard. The engagement of parents like this may be a major part of the success of single-sex public education. These schools are popular with many parents, who are happy to have an option that has long been available in private and parochial schools. And they are also attractive to teachers and administrators, who are offered a relatively easy and inexpensive way to try to improve some of the intractable problems in public education, especially for disadvantaged students.
But schools, inevitably, present many curriculums, some overt and some subtle; and critics argue that with Sax's model comes a lesson that our gender differences are primary, and this message is at odds with one of the most foundational principles of America's public schools. Given the myriad ways in which our schools are failing, it may be hard to remember that public schools were intended not only to instruct children in reading and math but also to teach them commonality, tolerance and what it means to be American. "When you segregate, by any means, you lose some of that," says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. "Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there's also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy."