Separated for success
All-boy, all-girl classrooms pop up all over U.S. despite 1970s-era ban

Erika Hobbs | Sentinel Staff Writer 
Posted January 15, 2006 

In one year, Omar Miller changed from a bully who was flunking out of school to a smiling boy whose vivid essays hang in his Georgia public-school hallways.

Garrison Elementary Principal Karen Grant wanted to "save" the boy who was growing up fatherless in bat-infested public housing, so she swept him into an all-boys fifth-grade class she created a few years ago.

Was it the all-boys class that "saved" Omar? Grant thinks so, although she acknowledges that small class size and new, rigorous reading standards also played key roles.

The U.S. Department of Education and education reformers are willing to gamble that single-gender schools and classrooms will help solve what ails the nation's 15,000 districts.

And lured by the department's promise to change a 32-year-old law that bans single-sex classes and by education reformers' assertions that "brain-based research" shows boys and girls have inherent learning differences, hundreds of public schools throughout the country -- including those in Volusia County, Miami-Dade County and elsewhere in South Florida -- are taking them up on that by creating or considering single-gender programs.

It doesn't matter that the practice of separating classes isn't legal yet or that educators and civil-rights advocates claim that it doesn't work, and it perpetuates discrimination.

In the meantime, single-sex education has become a political hot button in an era of education reform.

Try inserting "race" instead of "gender," American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Emily Martin said. "The government has an important reason not to define people based on gender."

But girls have caught up, the DOE maintains. It's the boys who need help now. The department's latest studies show boys are more likely to be retained, diagnosed with a disability or drop out of school.

"Coed education has not worked," said Leonard Sax, pediatrician, psychiatrist and founder of the National Association of Single-Sex Schools. "If anything, it made gender gaps wider."

Single-gender education is not new in the United States. From Colonial times, most public education was reserved for boys. But economics integrated schools: By 1890, DOE research shows, the coed concept won. Of the 628 public schools counted at that time, only 41 were single-sex schools.

Longtime debate

But the ages-old debate about whether the sexes learn differently or whether a certain curriculum is suitable for girls persisted.

Girls, for example, were assigned home economics or cosmetology classes, while boys studied physics and math.

In 1972, legislation was passed that prohibited discrimination based on gender. Title IX permitted single-sex education in few, specific cases, such as physical-education or affirmative-action situations. It did not preclude single-sex schools, but it did strictly limit them.

"One of the biggest advances of the 20th century is the increased opportunity in education for women," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation in Washington, D.C, which opposes single-gender public education.

In 2001, the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration's education-reform measure, allocated money to some classes that complied with Title IX. One year later, the DOE also proposed amending Title IX to permit schools to offer single-gender classes as long as they are voluntary, fair and "substantially equal." Districts could offer single-gender schools if equal ones exist for both genders.

No final decision

The DOE has not yet made a final ruling on its proposal and hasn't set a timeline to do so. Despite that, hundreds of schools have gone ahead with their own plans. The DOE will investigate them only if complaints are filed. So far, there have been few.

According to the National Association for Single-Sex Education in Poolesville, Md., 193 public schools nationwide now offer single-sex formats; of those, 42 are single-gender schools.

Schools in Volusia and South Florida, for example, already offer such classes, and Miami-Dade's district -- led by Superintendent Rudy Crew, who opened an all-girls school in East Harlem, N.Y., in the mid-1990s -- may build two single-sex schools,one for each gender, in 2007. Schools in Duval and Broward counties, as well as Boynton Beach and Palm Beach Gardens, have offered the classes during the past several years, and most boast improved test scores.

Woodward Avenue Elementary in DeLand is Florida's only public elementary school that offers single-sex classes. Last year, Principal JoAnne Rodkey introduced single-sex classes to kindergarten, second- and fourth-grade classes. She said she did it for her boys.

The students' scores from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test showed remarkable results. Only about half of Woodward's fourth-graders in mixed classes last year scored at grade level or higher. But 91 percent of the all-boys class scored at grade level or higher, as did 83 percent of the all-girls class.

In reading, slightly more than 70 percent of fourth-graders in traditional classes read at grade level, while a little more than 80 percent of those in the single-sex classes did. Other standardized tests showed similar results.

Brain differences

Sax and Michael Gurian, author of The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life, lead the advocacy for single-gender education.

Both rely on brain-scan imaging that shows that different parts of the brain are stimulated when boys and girls learn the same thing.

In his book Why Gender Matters, Sax cites studies that show a host of differences between the genders: Girls' brains mature in language and fine motor skills about six years earlier than boys, he writes. But boys, he points out, develop spatial memory about four years before girls.

Boys develop math skills first; for girls, it's reading. Boys follow simple, step-by-step directions best, while girls can multitask.

The result is not that one is smarter than another, he said. It just means that instruction methods should be developed to address those differences. He advocated single-sex classes.

Gurian, who founded the Gurian Institute with the Missouri Center for Safe Schools and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, takes a more tempered approach. The group trains teachers on gender-based learning differences.

What we "know," he writes in The Minds of Boys, is that "the gender of the human brain is not plastic, not a new skill to be learned, not a new mode of communication." It is hard-wired: You can't change the brain of boy into that of a girl, Gurian writes.

Schools -- a female-dominated profession -- have failed boys by forcing them into rigid learning models. Boys and girls just don't learn the same way.

But single-gender education is not for everyone.

"We need to resist the idea that this is a magic bullet," he said.

Plenty of strategies can be used in any classroom to address gender learning differences, he said. It's not necessary to separate boys and girls. What is crucial, he said, is to reform school using these new, science-based techniques.

Garrison Elementary sits among housing projects amid the historic district in Savannah, Ga. Most come from Yamacraw Village, the bat-infested public-housing complex. Nearly all Garrison students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Nearly all are black. Most Garrison students have never left the city.

Grant, a former English teacher brought in to turn around the failing school in 2001, revamped the curriculum. One year later, she created single-gender classes for fourth- and fifth-graders

She had not read any of the leading thinkers. Grant relied on her instinct, she said, to choose children for each single-gender class. Some were the troublemakers who had run out of options. Some had failing grades.

"Every child didn't need it," she said. "Some need a little self-discipline. Others are like rivers with no banks."

No parent denied her placement requests, she said.

Omar, 11, lives in Yamacraw Village with Patricia Capers, who calls herself his mother, just not his biological one. He has seven brothers and sisters, most of whom live in different places. His father died in 2001.

For a while, Omar took medicine for attention-deficit problems, Capers said. He was put in special education.

Omar constantly fought with the girls, who taunted him because he was fatherless, Omar said.

Grant put him in the all-boys class last year and paired him with male teachers and a minister who grew up in Yamacraw and now volunteers at Garrison.

This year, Miller will be considered "regular ed." He is off medication. His work hangs on display around the school.

At Garrison, standardized math, reading and English scores improved dramatically during the past three years -- in all grades, not just the single-gender ones.

"It was just another tool in the toolbox," Grant said.

Studies still sketchy

Little research has been done on the success of single-gender education in public schools. A 2005 DOE review of 112 studies showed they slightly favor single-gender schools, but most results were null or mixed. The DOE plans several more studies on the issue.

Cornelius Riordan, sociology professor at Providence College in Rhode Island who works for the DOE studying the issue, first looked at single-sex schools in the mid-1990s. His research suggested that such schools had almost no impact on boys, especially affluent whites. He found that they held a slight advantage for low-income white girls but a dramatic impact on minority children, who have historically been disadvantaged.

Most schools that turn to single-gender theory do it to help at-risk kids, he said.

"You have desperate and poor children and parents looking for help, and you've got educators looking for ways to do that," he said. "So if anybody has an idea that might help alleviate the problem, people are all ears."

Proponents say that separating boys from girls removes distractions -- giggling, ogling and note-passing -- boosts self-esteem and fosters academic aspirations. Graduates of all-girls schools reported recently that it made them better prepared for college.

It works, Riordan theorized, by diminishing pop-culture values, reducing inherent classroom gender bias and emphasizing leadership opportunities.

Still, a broad coalition of educators and groups, such as the ACLU and National Organization for Women, find the trend disturbing.

The ACLU is keeping an close eye on several schools, including those in Philadelphia and Kentucky, and may later file complaints against them.

Smeal of Feminist Majority thinks single-gender education will erode the gains made in closing the gender gap in education.

Educators say research is just too thin to test it on the nation's schoolchildren.

"Bush has given the green light to segregate students without purpose or preparation. It's a prescription for disaster," said David Sadker, an education professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

Separating the genders, he said, will lead to more, not less, bias, a return to days of cosmetology for girls and physics for boys.

"[It] ignores sound educational policy," Sadker said. "Title IX is not an education option; it is a civil-rights protection."

And it doesn't always work.

The most notorious example came in 1997. California became the first state to experiment with single-gender schools on a grand scale.

Six districts were given $500,000 to open charter schools for both boys and girls. The staff was not trained and was given little time to prepare. Most schools became a repository for students with behavioral problems. By the third year, five or six schools had closed.

Rodkey of Woodward Elementary canceled plans for a gender-based fourth-grade class because of parents' lack of interest. Plus, many teachers aren't interested in teaching them, she said. Woodward's teachers also point out that some of the classes run an extra hour and rely on supplemental teaching techniques that could have affected test scores.

Lewis Frasier Middle School in Hinesville, Ga., closed its program after one year. The classes showed a "marked decrease" in standardized test scores and "some troubling increases in some areas of misbehavior."

"We determined . . . that gender-sep[a]rated classes were not where we needed to put our energy," Principal Tom Alexander said in an e-mail.

Single-sex education is only one of hundreds of techniques to try, Providence's Riordan said. But it has promise, he added, and if further studies back that -- as they appear to do -- then the debate will "all go away."

Erika Hobbs can be reached at 407-420-6226 or ehobbs@orlandosentinel.com.