Search

By Galen Sherwin, ACLU Women's Rights Project Rick Scott, the Governor of Florida, signed legislation earlier this week that would provide professional development for teachers in "single-gender" classrooms. This may sound innocuous — Who doesn't want better-trained teachers? But the truth is that this is actually code for training teachers in the discredited philosophy that boys and girls are so fundamentally different that they need to be taught using radically different methods — methods that sound an awful lot like good old-fashioned sex stereotypes. Here are a few examples of the type of "training" we're talking about, plucked from a complaint filed on Tuesday by the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida against the state's second-largest school district:

By Ramya Sekaran ACLU Women's Rights Project Imagine you endure abuse in your own home, and are finally able to flee. You want to keep your children safe, and you are ready to start a new life. But your abuser continues to stalk you. You finally find a safe and affordable place to live. But just as you are about to finalize the paperwork, you are asked to disclose information about your children that could put all of you at risk of being found by your abuser. You are told that without that information, you cannot rent the apartment. In December 2010, this is exactly what happened to Hope, a survivor of domestic violence, who was denied housing by a property management company because she refused to provide the Social Security numbers of her minor children for safety reasons. Hope shared her experience in an earlier post.

"The