The Little Boys Room
New rules to boost single-sex schools and classes.
ublic-education administrators will have more flexibility to create single-sex schools and
classrooms under a plan expected to be announced today by Department of Education officials.
Under current civil-rights law, schools for girls are permissible only if officials
defend their arrangement with the language of affirmative action. They may
argue that a girls' school is necessary in order to remedy past discrimination
— but not that girls and their parents simply deserve to have a choice. In the
case of coed schools, it is presumptively illegal to separate boys and girls
into different classes except for sex education and contact sports.
The plan to loosen these restraints will be unveiled this afternoon, by
assistant secretary for education Gerald Reynolds and general counsel Brian
Jones.
"This is welcome news. Somebody should be able to set up a single-sex
school or classroom without having to go through all this legal business,"
says Tom Carroll, an education reformer in New York.
Carroll is the founder of two charter academies in Albany, the Brighter Choice
Charter School for Boys and the Brighter Choice Charter School for Girls.
"We have one principal, one staff, and one building — but two separate legal
entities," says Carroll. "We have no choice but to do it this way, and this is
the sort of hurdle that keeps other people from pursuing these options."
The debate over single-sex education is an old one, but feminists have
guaranteed that it can't be conducted in the real world because of restrictive
civil-rights laws. Yet there is plenty of evidence suggesting that separate
schools and classrooms for boys and girls may make a positive difference in
the places where it's tried.
That's what has happened at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in
Seattle.
"We had a huge social behavior problem with the boys," says principal Benjamin Wright. "Too many
kids were getting suspended. We had to do something."
So Wright set up a pilot program last year, separating boys and girls in a few classrooms. He got the
result he expected: The suspension of boys dropped. Another result, however, came as a surprise.
"The boys' test scores shot up. In the pilot program, 73 percent of our boys passed the state
standards. In the co-ed classes, 25 percent is about the best we might have hoped for, with 10 percent
or 15 percent a more realistic result," says Wright. "The girls stayed steady with their tests scores,
which is just fine — they're no longer carrying the load."
This year, the entire school went to single-sex classes, with the exception of its programs for English
learners and autistic children.
Test scores for this year won't be available until August, but Wright says the switch has made a huge
difference around Marshall. "There's been a huge decline in behavior problems, and the overall
stability and safety of the school has increased. Parents and teachers love it."
Yet there's no guarantee the school will be able stick to this course. Under current civil-rights law, a
coed school can try single-sex classrooms in order to correct an existing disparity. In the case of
Marshall, boys were much more likely than girls to be suspended. But once this disparity is "fixed,"
schools are required to go back to their old ways. In other words, as soon as Marshall's three-year
experiment is complete, and its suspensions are where Wright thinks they should be, it will have to
return to the conditions that created the problem in the first place.
"These new regulations are really important," says Wright. "My school is in an urban area — a place
we used to call the ghetto. If these regulations are relaxed, some of the other schools around here may
decide they can experiment, too. Kids can only benefit from this."
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