WASHINGTON — Spencer Holland doesn’t imagine that his simple idea would transform public education, write an end to poverty or bring peace in our time. But he does think that it might make a significant, perhaps even profound, difference in the lives of some youngsters now growing up in the nation’s ghettos. The idea: put kindergarten and primary boys in all-male classes headed by male teachers.That was the lead of a column I wrote just over 15 years ago.

Last week, the Department of Education made a tentative half-step toward implementing Holland’s idea: It is proposing to change the way Title IX is enforced, not merely allowing but actually encouraging experimentation with single-sex education.

It shouldn’t expect smooth sailing for what, to some of us, is an eminently sensible idea. Already the gender-equity industry is setting its machinery in motion.

Holland, a Washington educator and psychologist, hopes something good will come of the latest proposal. He knows something good can come from the idea.

A Miami elementary school principal who saw that 1987 column asked me to put him in touch with Holland, invited him down and enlisted his help in putting the idea in motion. Later the principal, Willie Wright, had this to say:

“It was a total success, academically and socially. There were no fights, no kids sent out for discipline. They not only improved academically, they became their brothers’ keepers, something not generally found in low socio-economic schools. Not a single parent complained. In fact, virtually all of the parents of boys wanted their sons in the classes.”

The special arrangement — men teaching boys — lasted for two years. Then someone decided it was a violation of Title IX (of the federal Civil Rights Act), and that was the end of the experiment.

The Bush administration proposal of last week would allow such programmes to go forward.

And why should that be controversial? The reasons range from the reasonable to the reflexive, from sensible to silly.

One set of reasons is based on the logic that any time you treat people differently based on their gender or race, you introduce the possibility of racial or sexual discrimination. In the Miami case, for instance, there was the fear that whatever calming effect the Holland approach had on boys, girls were being denied the advantage of male-headed classrooms.

A different set of reasons derailed a Detroit effort to establish all-male public academies as a way of retrieving young African American males who were being lost to the lures of crimes, drugs and machismo. Not only would boys be getting special treatment, the argument went, but the treatment was a libel against girls. Why? Well, if all-boy schools are the solution, girls must be the problem.

Some of the opposition will come from those who fought long and hard to enact Title IX in the first place. They are likely to view any modification of the measure the same way the NAACP views proposals to modify desegregation orders: not as problem-solving but treachery.

And some will put the proposal in the same bag as the recent Justice Department decision to modify the government’s position on the Second Amendment to support the view that the right to bear arms applies to individuals, not merely to “a well-regulated militia.” In other words, they will view it as part of a conservative agenda and, therefore, to be opposed.

All of the opponents will question whether there is any academic value in the single-sex proposal — and they’ll have no dearth of studies and reports and analyses to underscore their doubts.

Holland, whose Washington-based Project 2000 has been celebrated for its success in nurturing inner-city boys and girls through school and into college, won’t be dissuaded. He’s seen it work, and he welcomes the Bush administration initiative.

So do I.

William Raspberry’s e-mail address is willrasp(at symbol)washpost.com.