BOYS ON THE SIDE
A Dallas girls school - like other single-sex schools - explores different learning styles
By ALYSON WARD
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
The bell rings - a polite tone, not a noisy clang - and dozens of girls are suddenly, instantly in the hallway. They wear uniforms - plaid skirts and red sweaters - even knee socks. They chatter and giggle and slam locker doors; they lug oversize backpacks filled with books and laptop computers. And as they hurry off to their afternoon classes, the girls are probably unaware that they're on the cutting edge of what might be the next new thing in education.
A magnet for girls
The Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women's Leadership School, a public school in the Dallas Independent School District, is housed in a historic building in the city's Oak Lawn district, but the concept behind it - a single-sex public school for girls - is a brand-new experiment for the district.
The school, which started as a seventh- and eighth-grade center in 2004, will add a class each year and graduate its first group of seniors in 2009. For now, its whitewashed halls and spacious classrooms contain 214 girls who applied to attend the new magnet school. More than half of them are Hispanic; 30 percent are African-American. They are bused here from all over Dallas, and most don't come from wealthy areas; the majority live in south and southeast Dallas, in the Oak Cliff and Pleasant Grove neighborhoods.
The girls take pre-AP classes; they're encouraged to excel in science and math, to master technology. They talk about college in their seventh-grade classes. They all jumped through several hoops to gain admission to Rangel, and that ad mission gives them a front-row seat to what may be the biggest educational issue of their generation.
Because here's what's happening: The girls of Rangel are excelling in their all-girl environment. In its first year, the school outshone the rest of Dallas ISD on the statewide TAKS test: 100 percent of eighth-graders and 97 percent of seventh-graders passed the test's reading section (the district passing rates were 72 and 67 percent). And in math, writing and social studies, the Rangel girls surpassed the district's passing rate every time, generally by a remarkable margin.
What has made the difference?
The school's supporters say the boy-free environment gives the girls confidence, attention, focus and drive they might have lost if they'd stayed in coed middle schools.
Going public
The single-sex classroom has long been the domain of private schools. All-girl or all-boy classrooms have a sort of Dead Poets Society mystique, a certain prestigious-prep-school aura that seems exclusive, maybe a bit unnecessary. But educators and analysts are starting to take another look at what happens to boys and girls in the traditional coed classroom, and many are pushing to separate the sexes in schools of all kinds.
Experts have long believed that girls suffer in coed classrooms, that they are overshadowed by boys' rambunctious behavior and that, intimidated by male confidence and dominance, they lose faith in their own abilities - especially in subjects such as math and science. And this may still be true. The girls at Rangel are all eager to talk about how much more they can accomplish without the guys around.
Molly Brewer, an eighth-grader, tries to explain what it's like. She talks to her friends from coed schools, and they all just want to talk about the boys. Molly feels like she's living in a different world.
"We're not, like, not interested in guys," she says. "It's just kind of different."
Her classmate, Yadira Perez, steps in to clarify: "Here, you don't have guys, so you pay more attention to your classes and you're more focused on what you're doing."
Bianca Williams, a ninth-grader, agrees. Guys, Bianca says, are "not as big a priority" at Rangel.
They're not around to flirt with or talk to, which - at least, among the older girls - is considered sort of unfortunate. But they're also not around to primp for or stress out about. Which, according to their principal, Vivian Taylor-Samudio, is perhaps what contributes most to the girls' success.
"I think middle school is the pivotal point in a lot of girls' educational careers," she says. "In middle school, you don't want to appear too smart, or the boys won't like you. You don't find girls raising their hands and participating in class at that point."
Not so at Rangel, Taylor-Samudio says.
"Here, the girls don't have to worry about impressing a young man," she says.
There's the attraction factor - watching boys, impressing boys, worrying about boys. But there's also the distraction factor in coed schools: Boys, at this age, can be a real pain in the classroom.
"We still have our class clowns," Molly says, even in a girls school. "But not as many."
Boy trouble
The "class clown" stereotype - the funny, fidgety boy who disrupts and interrupts - has given boys a bad reputation for decades. But there's evidence now that boys can't help it - that they have extra energy, their brains and bodies don't respond to typical classroom structure, and they're being asked to complete tasks and control impulses when they're simply not wired to do so.
What does it all mean? Recent studies suggest that in today's schools, boys are getting lost in a system that's now set up to help girls succeed.
Girls, who lagged behind for years, are catching up to boys in standardized test scores, outperforming them in areas such as reading and writing. Boys are twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and they're three times as likely to be put on Ritalin or other drugs for attention-deficit disorders. Boys get involved in extracurricular activities less often than girls do. They're more likely to commit suicide in their teens. And - here's the most recent indicator that boys are losing their way - the population of college undergraduates in the United States is now nearly 60 percent female.
More than 30 years ago, the balance was tipped the other way; then, men were the 60 percent majority on college campuses. (Both now and then, the general population for ages 15-24 was approximately 51 percent male and 49 percent female.) Girls lagged far behind in test scores. Since then, studies have been funded. Teachers have been trained to teach girls. In 1972, Title IX became federal law and demanded equal opportunities for girls in school. And now educators and analysts are wondering whether it all worked too well. They're taking a good long look at the American educational system, wondering what went so wrong for boys.
Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, has been studying "the problems of boys" for years. Although some of these problems are anything but new, she says, "something has happened, and it's a bad thing."
Through her research and other projects, Kleinfeld says, "I'm trying to figure out what has changed."
So are a lot of others. Newsweek devoted a cover story last month to unraveling "The Trouble With Boys," exploring whether the education system has started sacrificing boys' success in order to focus on girls.
Michael Thompson, a child psychologist, co-wrote Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys (Ballantine Books, $15), a bestseller that was turned into a PBS documentary and aired last month. Thompson told Newsweek last month his theory about what has gone wrong in American classrooms: "Girl behavior becomes the gold standard," he said. "Boys are treated like defective girls." Boys can't learn, he says, in an environment that stifles their biological learning styles.
Dr. Leonard Sax stirred up a nationwide conversation last year with his book Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need To Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences ( Doubleday, $24.95). The book, which is released in paperback this week, examines the differences in the way male and female brains develop. Sax supports single-sex education because he believes that both boys and girls are being shortchanged by a coed system that ignores fundamental differences in growth and development.
Another book released last year covered similar territory: The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life (Jossey-Bass, $24.95) was co-written by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, who have founded an institute that trains educators nationwide to meet the different needs of girls and boys.
Stevens sees boys falling behind in the schools she visits, and it worries her.
"It's something that's definitely happening, and it's very scary," she says. "Those stats don't lie."
Separate but equal
So what's the solution? It's becoming an accepted idea that boys and girls learn differently. And for many, those differences suggest that maybe boys and girls learn better separately.
Schools like the Rangel Young Women's Leadership School are trying to find out. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, made it legal for public school systems to offer separate but equal schools or classrooms for boys and girls. And since then, at least 211 public schools in the United States have begun to offer some form of single-sex education, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
Some schools, like Rangel, are entirely for boys or girls. Others, including Truett Elementary in Dallas and a dozen middle schools in the San Antonio school district, give students an option: They can stay in coed classes or volunteer to take part in a program that divides up boys and girls for core classes such as math, science and social studies.
At Truett Elementary in Dallas, the entire sixth grade is divided up by gender. This is the first year for the experiment, but it has worked so well that it might expand to the third, fourth and fifth grades.
"It's been remarkable for us," says principal Eduardo Hernandez. Different reading lists and teaching techniques - not to mention the changed environment of a single-sex classroom - have improved grades already. Girls are improving in math (in fact, the school is starting an honors math class), and boys' verbal and reading skills are better, he says.
Hernandez has kept up with the discussion about boys' and girls' learning styles, and he especially wanted to give girls a good classroom environment. He says: "I always tell my girls: 'I did this for you. I want you to have an environment where you are able to show how smart you are, where you are able to articulate what you want to say.' "
But Hernandez and the sixth-grade teachers are well aware of the boy problem, too. In fact, the boys' classes read last month's Newsweek article together.
In San Antonio, the district's single-sex pilot program started at Poe Middle School a couple of years ago. Now, on a campus of 800, about 250 - roughly 85 students in each grade - have opted to enroll.
"Initially, the girls did much better than the boys," says Gwynne Mayer, the school's curriculum instructional coordinator, because the school's traditional teaching methods were geared toward girls' needs and behavior. The school had to do more than separate the girls and boys; it had to give boys a different classroom experience altogether.
Now the boys classes, she says, are set up to accommodate (instead of suppress) boys' energy and competitive nature. Learning is presented as a game, and there's always a sense of competition or challenge that keeps the boys engaged. The girls classes, on the other hand, emphasize working together and helping each other.
The plan seems to be working, though the school has only anecdotal evidence. (The district does frequent benchmark testing, Mayer says, but no separate data are compiled for the single-sex program.) Both groups of kids have begun to excel in their classes, she says, and more parents are starting to call about signing up their kids for the program.
No distractions
In a single-sex classroom, it's easy to see the benefits firsthand. At the Rangel school in Dallas, an afternoon robotics class is full of girls who have expressed an interest in science and technology.
All over the room, in groups of two and three, eighth-grade girls are huddled around battery-powered robot vehicles. They're trying to program their robots, constructed in class from a Lego Mindstorms kit, to travel in a perfect rectangle. It's not as easy as it sounds.
"OK, so it goes straight for 10 seconds, then it turns . . . um . . . for three seconds. Wait a minute."
Near the window, three girls are hunched over an IBM Thinkpad laptop. Pink-polished fingernails track expertly across the laptop's touchpad, rearranging and rewriting the program until it sends their robot shooting neatly across the black-topped lab table.
If you want to talk stereotypes, this classroom is an excellent place to prove a point. Everyone is behaving. The girls work together in groups. They do their project and turn it in to their teacher. Watching the girls work so quietly and systematically, you can easily imagine a group of boys programming their car to run off the table or flip over in a fiery crash, complete with sound effects. But whereas that behavior might be distracting to the girls, it might be exactly what the boys need to engage with the material and learn something new.
Multiple studies give a spectrum of opinions about whether single-sex classrooms work. In October, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that determined that gender separation wasn't conclusively beneficial. But anecdotal evidence seems to show that it's working. In school districts such as San Antonio, single-sex classes are popular at several middle schools; they've become as much a part of the system as gifted-and-talented programs. And the Young Women's Leadership School in Harlem - the inspiration and model for the girls school in Dallas - has maintained a 100 percent college acceptance rate since the school opened in 1996.
No one thinks single-sex education is going to replace the coed classroom entirely..
But more choice is necessary and inevitable, and schools are trying to figure out what works and offer students more options.
Questions remain
Back in the robotics class, the room is peaceful and happy as the girls work together. They seem to be in exactly the right place.
"We have success!" 14-year-old Jazmin Solis cries out as her group completes the assignment with five minutes to spare. Would she be as exuberant and self-assured in a class with boys? Would her male classmates be chastised for not working as efficiently as she does? Or would it be healthy and beneficial for Jazmin and her classmates to work with boys so they could all challenge and learn to accept one another?
Right now, no one knows the answers for sure. But educators, researchers, psychologists and people who care about education are on the case. And they're determined to find out.

Alyson Ward, (817) 390-7988
award@star-telegram.com