ACLU Shakes Things Up in Kentucky

by Lara S. Kaufmann, Senior Advisor
National Women’s Law Center

I know that Kentucky is nowhere near an ocean, but the ACLU is certainly making waves there. Earlier this week, the organization filed an amended complaint in a case challenging a school district’s single-sex middle school classes as unlawful and discriminatory. The complaint alleges that the separate boys’ and girls’ classes are fundamentally unequal and violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, and the state sex equity law. The complaint expands on previous claims brought by a private lawyer against the school district and other entities, and also names as a defendant the U.S. Department of Education, challenging as illegal and unconstitutional the Department’s 2006 regulations encouraging schools to adopt single-sex educational programs.

This is an important case, and we look forward to seeing how it unfolds. Single-sex programs, even with good intentions, tend to be based on harmful stereotypes that limit opportunities for both girls and boys. The Constitution and Title IX contain safeguards to ensure that single-sex programs serve only carefully defined and appropriate purposes, do not perpetuate stereotypes about the interests, abilities or learning styles of either gender, and do not result in discrimination in educational opportunities. Unfortunately, the Department of Education’s 2006 revision of the Title IX regulations – adopted against strong opposition by the public and many experts, including the NWLC – rolled back these safeguards to permit more sex-segregated educational programs based on discrimination and stereotyping, without requiring equality of opportunity for the excluded gender (assuming that equality in separate programs is even possible).

This case illustrates the problems that all too often arise when schools engage in experiments with sex segregated programs. For one thing, the single sex program here was far from voluntary, as even the Department of Education says it must be: the school did not offer any option for algebra students who did not want to be segregated by sex, and the only co-ed math class was pre-algebra. Moreover, in the algebra classes the all-boys’ class used different textbooks and different teaching methods, and moved at a slower pace, than the all-girls’ algebra class. The teachers embodied the very essence of stereotyping: according to the complaint, one of the school’s science teachers has said, “I play lots of review games with my boys so they can get up and move, where the girls would rather I just ask questions and they can write down the answers.”  One of the school’s math teachers “explained that he used softer light in the girls’ classrooms and brighter light in the boys’ classrooms. He played soft music in the girls’ classrooms and only occasionally in the boys’.” And to add insult to injury, since the filing of the lawsuit, to address the obvious disparity between the boys’ and girls’ algebra classes, the school has sent the girls’ class to the computer lab several times a week while the boys have been getting extra math instruction. The school is denying its students equal experiences and access to unique educational opportunities based on their sex. 

This not only violates the law, but also defies common sense. The students of Kentucky deserve better.