Single-sex public schools are opening across the country, reports New York Times Magazine. It started with reports that girls lose self-esteem in adolescence. Then people noticed that boys earn lower grades than girls and are much less likely to complete high school or college.
Some argue that boys and girls should be educated separately because they learn differently. Others “favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs.”
Research doesn’t tell us much about what works. A 2005 meta-analysis found only 40 usable studies.
. . . 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.
Single-sex schools do seem to benefit poor and minority students.
According to (researcher Cornelius) 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 anti-academic 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.â€
I like to see more choices available to parents. Some will want a boys’ school that provides role models to boys growing up without fathers; some will choose a school that shields girls from sexual come-ons. Other parents will prefer co-ed environments. Those co-ed classes will be more effective if teachers work harder to engage students who crave activity, competition and adventure, whether they’re boys or girls.
Update: Language Log looks critically at the science behind sex segregation.
More important than the school’s structure is the content of what is to be taught.
I’ve several times tried to initiate a conversation in the school where I work about why boys do so much worse on our state tests at grade 10 than do the girls. The principal always turns the conversation to the possibility of gender segregation.
What shall we teach boys about how to be men? What shall we teach girls about how to be women?
Scary questions in these times. Better to talk about schedules and grouping and budgets. . .
I strongly believe that a gender specific classroom is a bad idea. The children need to interact with a wide range of people around them!
While I have had no exclusively-single sex classrooms, I have taught classes where there have been 1 or 2 of one sex amongst 15+ of the other, and I have to say that I’ve had a much easier time with management.
I know its a stereotype, but I have found that the two sexes do generally respond to various styles of classroom management differently.
Boys and girls learn differently *on average* but we know that the differences between individual boys and the differences between individual girls are greater than the overall average difference between boys and girls. If we want to separate classes according to learning style, why not use a better measure of learning style than gender?
Went to a sex-separate Jewish day school – we were definitely different than the girls classes. I hear the stories in the new about how boys are being sedated so they’ll be quiet like girls… they would have had to use those tranquilizer guns from the zoo on us.
We also had almost all male teachers – perhaps that is a key.
There is a tier of High Schools for gifted kids in the New York City school system – Bronx Science, Stuyvesant (previously all boy), and Hunter College High (Stuyvesant’s “sister school”).
My sister was one of the last all-girl classes at Hunter. The girls bemoaned the plans to desegregate the school – they predicted that the girls would not be as intellectually forthcoming or take leadership roles, due to social pressure.
Researchers went back a few years later – and found boys in all student leadership positions, and in the top academic slots.