Back to School or Back in Time?

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

This year, for many public school students across the U.S., “Back to School” means something different than it used to. A growing number of students in a wide variety of states all over the country will be in single-gender classrooms, separated from their peers of the opposite sex.

Single-sex public school classes are popping up all over the country (some have estimated that over 500 public schools will have single-sex classrooms this fall), and the number has been growing steadily since 2006. That is when the Department of Education revised longstanding Title IX regulations to make it easier for schools to adopt single-sex programs. Why is that a problem? Because Title IX and the U.S. Constitution contain safeguards to ensure that single-sex programs in public schools serve only carefully defined and non-discriminatory purposes, do not perpetuate stereotypes about the interests, abilities or learning styles of either gender, and do not result in unequal educational opportunities. The permissive 2006 regulations fly in the face of these safeguards. And as we suspected, by all reports, many of the single-sex programs being adopted by public schools today are based on harmful stereotypes and do not provide equality of opportunity for the excluded gender (or for those who want to continue learning in a coeducational setting). 

Proponents of single-sex education are telling schools and parents that separating boys and girls in school will improve their education. But these claims are not supported by the evidence. They rely on extreme and overbroad generalizations about the differences between boys’ and girls’ brains and how they learn – for example, that teachers should smile at girls and look them in the eye, but should not look boys directly in the eye or smile at them; and that boys – but not girls – should be given time limits for academic tasks.  In reality, every individual is different. Scientists say that males and females are more alike than they are different. And all of the focus on separation by gender takes attention and resources away from the school reforms most likely to make a difference, like smaller classes, better teachers, and increased parental involvement.

Every day, I read articles about new single-sex public school programs. They’re all over the place, at all levels from K-12. One of the most recent articles was about a Florida elementary school that has single-sex classes even for kindergarten. The boys are taught the alphabet with active learning techniques (such as finding things around the room that start with the letter “S”), while the girls are made to sit quietly at their desks and place candies on paper outlines of the letter “S.” The principal remarked that during lunch – the only time of day that boys and girls are together – the students choose to separate themselves by gender anyway. But that proves nothing – if they only interact with the same sex in class, of course those are the children with whom they will be most comfortable socializing! But how sad. Do we really want to create a generation of kids who don’t know how to interact with the opposite sex? Seems backwards to me.