FEATURES: By Peter Meyer The case for single-sex schools Susan Vincent reached into the cage and pulled out a small yellow bird, saying, “This is Kiwi. He loved us, but he was lonely.” It is a lovely spring day in Spanish Harlem on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Vincent, a former children’s clothing designer turned award-winning high-school science teacher, is explaining some facts about the facts of life. “We had to get Kiwi a mate. It was a perfect way for the girls to learn something about nature, about birds, about”—she smiles, holding little Kiwi up—“about the birds and the bees.” It was, as they say in the field, “a teachable moment.” And for Vincent it was much more teachable because all of her 10th-grade students were girls. “There was no giggling and whispering, no holding back,” she recalls. “The girls gathered round and we talked about the mating habits of birds and they asked good questions and learned a lot. Boys would have been a big distraction.” 
It seems so logical. Separate boys and girls so they can get their work done. It was clear to me and my classmates 40 years ago, as we gazed out the window during English class in our all-boys high school (a Catholic seminary) and watched the teenage kids from town “making out” on a stone wall; at least it was clear to Father Ignatius, who would threaten a “bastinado with salt rubbed in the wounds” if we didn’t focus on the sentence that needed diagramming. “We can concentrate a lot better without boys,” is a comment I heard dozens of times in the course of researching this story. Boys seem less sure of the benefits. “Yeah, it’s okay,” says a student at the private all-boys Roxbury Latin School, outside of Boston (see sidebar). But the headmaster, Kerry Brennan, is certain: “Young men are able to focus much more ably on academics without the girls.” Rosemary Salomone, professor of law at St. John’s University and author of the 2003 book Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling, agrees: “Many students in single-sex classes report feeling more comfortable raising their hands and expressing uncertainty regarding a lesson or topic without fear of embarrassment or teasing from the opposite sex.” The fact that researchers like Salomone are talking about single-gender education represents a sea change in attitudes—and policies and practices, a change that was formalized by the historic rewriting of Title IX of the federal Education Amendments in 2006. The new rules give local districts the option of offering single-gender public schools and programs for the first time in more than 30 years. The regulations permit single-sex classrooms when districts “provide a rationale,” “provide a coeducational class” as well, and “conduct a review every two years.” Districts may operate a single-sex school as long as they provide equal services either in a coed school or a school for the opposite gender. Charter schools are exempt from all restrictions. Prior to these changes, educators lived in a vague legal world, at the mercy of a Supreme Court decision (the 1996 Virginia Military Institute [VMI] case, United States v. Virginia), which required an “exceedingly persuasive justification” of anyone wanting to set up single-sex schools or classes. As late as 1990, James Coleman remarked that that it was considered suspect to even study the question of single-sex schooling. The famous University of Chicago sociologist noted that there were times when “a societal consensus” dictates that “one institution is right” and, he concluded, “coeducation is such an institution.” At the time, Coleman was writing to introduce a pioneering book on the subject, Girls and Boys in School: Together or Separate? by Providence College sociologist Cornelius Riordan. The questions Riordan was asking—“just what are the consequences of single-sex and coeducational schools for those who pass through them? Specifically, what are the intellectual consequences, the psychological consequences, and the social consequences?”—had not been asked, or answered, before. Coleman attributed the research failure to “the force of conventional values.” Riordan’s research compared outcomes for graduates of single-sex Catholic schools with those for graduates of coed Catholic schools. He found that single-sex schooling helps to improve academic achievement, with benefits greater for girls than boys, and that underprivileged children derived the most benefit. His book concluded that we had to “give students some measure of access to single-sex education.”
Going, Going, All but Gone While there are no reliable counts of single-gender schools in the first half of the 20th century, best estimates are that most were schools for white boys. Many of the girls’ schools that did exist early on served as “finishing” schools rather than preparation for college. Coleman wrote, “Single-sex school was, at the outset, schooling for boys. Schooling for girls was an afterthought, either in single-sex institutions of their own, or with boys, where small numbers made single-sex institutions inefficient. Boys’ schools, however, were dominant, and the elimination of single-sex schooling could be seen as elimination of that dominance.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights and feminist movements combined their equality crusade fervor to “open” previously exclusive men’s schools to women, and white schools to blacks. Public single-gender schools were all but eliminated in the process. Boston Latin, one of the oldest and most prestigious public schools in America, succumbed to coeducation in 1972, the same year that Congress passed Title IX mandating equal education for the sexes. Central High School in Philadelphia, founded in 1838, may have been the last all-boys public school in America when it finally went coed in 1983. Although insulated from laws governing public schools, private schools felt the pressure as well, and many single-gender institutions, often fighting for economic survival, opened their doors to both sexes after 1970. For example, the Nichols School for boys in Buffalo, founded in 1892, accepted girls in 1973. Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts, began in 1876 with male and female students, was a school for boys by the 1950s, and became coed again in 1979. Yale went coed (in 1969), as did dozens of colleges and universities. The wave of coeducation sentiment was intense: even institutions that had arisen to offer women opportunity they couldn’t get in a man’s world were closed. In barely more than two decades, from 1960 to 1980, over half of the 268 women-only colleges in America closed, and many others went coed. By 1993, according to the National Institute on Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning, there were just 83 women-only colleges. “Single-sex schooling seemed to be dying a slow but certain death,” writes Salomone. Coeducational institutions were considered “more socially appropriate, liberating, and enlightened.” There was ample evidence to justify feminists’ skepticism about single-gender education, since for many decades (even centuries) such schooling was meant only to reinforce gender stereotypes and prejudices. “Only in recent decades have societies seriously begun to unlock the full potential of girls,” wrote David Von Drehle in Time magazine last summer, “but the cultivation of boys has been an obsession for thousands of years.”
Tinkering Around the Coed Edges Once single-sex schools were knocked out of the ring, the gender fights occurred almost exclusively inside the coed arena. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) published a series of studies in the 1990s called Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, which highlighted the fact that girls aged 9 to 15 suffered from lower self-esteem, less willingness to stand up for their views with teachers, and lower interest in science and mathematics than boys. The AAUW report sparked an intense national debate, with its findings that girls were disadvantaged in classrooms by, among many inequities, being called upon less frequently and encouraged less than male students. Great efforts were made to make schools more girl-friendly—introducing new math and science curricula and teaching methods, for example—which seemed to succeed only in creating a “boys crisis.” “[B]oys rather than girls are now on the short end of the gender gap in many secondary school outcomes,” said Cornelius Riordan in 2000. “Currently, boys are less likely than girls to be in an academic (college preparatory) curriculum. They have lower educational and occupational expectations, have lower reading and writing test scores, and expect to complete their schooling at an earlier age” (see Figure 1). 
The problem has gotten so far out of hand—schools have become, some argue, anti-boy—that Time put Von Drehle’s report on the cover with the provocative headline, “The Myth About Boys.” The writer paints a bleak picture of the state of boys in our current school system. He recounts meeting Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys. “She ticked through a familiar, but disturbing indictment,” Von Drehle writes. “More boys than girls are in special education classes. More boys than girls are prescribed mood-managing drugs. This suggests to her (and others) that today’s schools are built for girls, and boys are becoming misfits.” In Same, Different, Equal, Rosemary Salomone concludes, “The data demonstrate that the prevailing system of education (overwhelmingly mixed-sex) is failing boys as well as girls, if in different ways, regardless of resource allocations.”
Back from the Brink Initial efforts to revive single-gender public education were done in by “conventional values,” buttressed by what was then a sturdy Title IX ethos. “During the early 1990s a number of school leaders tried to set up single-sex schools or single-sex classes,” Riordan recalls. “That was happening in Detroit, in Ventura, California, in Rochester, and other places. In all of those cases—it was a sad story—they were driven out or shut down by principals and teachers and parents. The one in Detroit went to court, but for the most part they were shut down by political pressure and threats of legal action.” Both Riordan and Salomone say 1996 was a turning point in the single-gender school wars. In June of that year, the Supreme Court declared VMI’s all-male admissions policy unconstitutional while noting the advantages of single-gender education. All the justices—from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Antonin Scalia—agreed that single-sex education offers positive educational benefits. In writing the majority opinion, Justice Ginsburg, a long and tireless advocate for gender equality, noted that “single-sex education affords pedagogical benefits to at least some students” and concluded, “that reality is uncontested in this litigation.” A few weeks after the Supreme Court ruling, Community School District 4 in New York City announced the opening of The Young Women’s Leadership School (TYWLS) in East Harlem (see sidebar). While it was the VMI case that got most of the nation’s attention by seeming to strike a final blow against single-gender schooling in the United States, TYWLS seems to have won the day. The girls’ school now has two schools in Queens, and one each in the Bronx and Philadelphia. “Twenty years ago, all-girl schools seemed headed for extinction, a footnote in the story of American education,” writes Ilana DeBare, author of Where Girls Come First, an account of public and private schools for girls going back into the 1800s. “Today they are experiencing an extraordinary renaissance. Between 1991 and 2001, more than 30 new girls’ schools opened throughout the United States from Harlem to Silicon Valley, Atlanta to Seattle.” According to Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, in 1995 there were just 3 single-gender public schools in the United States; by 2007 there were 86, with an additional 277 public schools offering all-girls or all-boys education programs within their coeducational buildings. This reversal of fortune has been spurred in part by “a growing body of research that single-gender, especially at the middle school level, works,” says South Carolina Superintendent of Education Jim Rex, who campaigned on a platform that included making single-gender schools an option in every school district in the state. Kathy Piechura-Couture, a professor at the Institute for Educational Reform at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, has studied children at the Woodward elementary school in Deland, which has had separate classes for boys and girls for three years. She concluded that boys and girls are different enough that they demand, or should be offered, separate schools. “We looked at gain scores and concluded that there is a significant difference for boys when put in separate classes,” says Piechura-Couture. Over the years, she explains, other researchers have discovered a significant number of differences between boys and girls that affect their learning abilities at any given time. “Girls have better hearing than boys, for instance,” she says. “So, if you have a room full of girls you don’t have to yell.” A research review undertaken by the American Institutes for Research in 2005 culled the most reliable studies from a decade of research on single-sex education. Most of the research had been done on Catholic schools and more on girls’ schools than on schools for boys. The review found that roughly one-third of studies favored single-sex schools on measures of short-term academic accomplishment. The researchers characterized most of the remainder as finding no difference or having null findings. They found little support, however, for coeducational schooling being more effective. This, argue proponents of single-sex schools, suggests that parents should at least be given a choice.
More Is Equal The resurgence of single-sex schooling has also been the result of hard-fought battles to recapture the benefits of difference and take advantage of educational choice. The rewriting of Title IX addressed confusion created by the restrictions in the original 1972 statute and the support for single-sex education in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Among proponents of the changes were Senators Hillary Clinton, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Dianne Feinstein—women who have arrived, both Clinton and Feinstein via single-sex schools. Senator Hutchison, a product of coed schooling, in a 2001 American University Law Review article wrote, “Talk to students and graduates of single-sex schools (mostly private or parochial), and almost all will say with gusto that they were enriched and strengthened by their experience…. Study after study has demonstrated that girls and boys in single-sex schools are academically more successful and ambitious than their coeducational counterparts. Minority students in single-sex schools often show dramatic improvements in attitudes toward school, greater interest among girls in math and science, and dramatically fewer behavior problems.” It is true, as Salomone says, that sometimes “same is equal,” other times “different is equal,” and still other times, “more is equal.” Part of what single-sex schools do is redress historic and historical inequities; another part is minimizing the distractions that come from mixing the sexes; and a final ingredient is addressing gender differences in learning. James Coleman, who died in 1995, probably would have appreciated the cultural shifts that have made the single-sex school take on new meaning, since he was one of the first modern academics to propose that coed schools offered a false promise of equality. As those who have studied the racial educational gaps in our public elementary and secondary schools have noticed, throwing children together does not solve the problems of dominance; it can, in fact, exacerbate them. The two notions of peer effects—race and gender—have been joined as more and more attention is being paid to “black boys” and schools that cater to them. That is surely what Tom Carroll, chairman of the Brighter Choice Charter Schools in Albany, New York, has proved (see sidebar). Increasingly, the single-sex school movement is seen, as Martin Luther King III told an Albany audience celebrating Brighter Choice, as a means of “liberation—liberation from prejudice, liberation from socially imposed limitations, and liberation of the dignity, capabilities, and potential for excellence that dwells in the heart of every human being.” Choice is opportunity. The choice of single-sex education is affirmative action for the sexes. In a front-page story, the New York Times called the 2006 amendments to Title IX “the most significant policy change on the issue” in more than 30 years. The decision, of course, came with what Martin Davis of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute characterized as “a flood of criticisms from women’s groups and some civil rights organizations.” But the dire predictions about the resegregation of public schools and turning back the clock on civil rights gains for women never materialized. And while various groups threatened legal actions, none have materialized. It is a new world, especially for women, and serious educators seem to realize that single-sex schools and classrooms are not a threat, but another arrow in the quiver of education quality. Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer and contributing editor of Education Next. |
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Emma Willard - Founded in 1814 in Troy, New York, Emma Willard was
among the first schools in the country to offer girls an academic
curriculum. Emma Hart Willard, a teacher, principal, author, and
mother of four, determined to offer girls the same education as
boys then received in their schools, and over the ensuing 193
years, the school—renamed for its foundress in 1895—has
cultivated a reputation for serious academic study. Today the
school has more than 300 students in grades 9–12, 60 percent
of them boarders, from all over the world; an ample endowment of
more than $100 million; and a list of illustrious alumnae (from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Jane Fonda).
The school receives several hundred applications a year, accepts
some 150 and ends up enrolling 90 new students, favoring the bright
(61st percentile on the SSAT or higher) and the
extracurricular-inclined. Tuition is $24,500 for day students and
$37,300 for boarders, but 41 percent get aid of some sort. The
school has a $2.5 million financial aid budget.
Roxbury Latin - Sociologist
Cornelius Riordan didn’t hesitate when asked which single-sex
schools represented the best of the breed, “You have to see
Roxbury Latin. They’ve been doing it longer than anyone
else.”
The
Young Women’s Leadership School - The 
Brighter Choice Charter Schools - It has no endowment, does not pay any of its teachers $100,000, is
only five years old, and has a campus that is not much bigger than
the single building it occupies. The K–4 school that building
houses—along a corridor of poverty and despair in Albany, New
York, that would shake even the resolute bones of an Emma Willard
or John Eliot—is the best in the city. 
