The Benefits of Single Sex Education

The Benefits of Single Sex Education

Introduction

Single-sex schools/education, also known as single-gender and same-sex schooling, is the practice of separating boys and girls for formal instruction. Policies and practices of single-gender education in the United States have undergone significant reform in the early 21st century. Public school, an institution with a strong tradition of coeducation dating from the mid-19th century, has increasingly become a site of experimentation with single-gender approaches once found primarily in parochial and private school networks.

The No Child Left behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) has helped to create new opportunities for this type of education in schools across the United States. The number of public schools offering some type of single-sex program has risen steadily from 3 in 1995 to 442 in 2008, with close to half of these programs located in South Carolina. These new public schooling arrangements to separate the education of boys and girls in hopes of bettering academic achievement represents one of the major new reforms of 21st-century public schools. This entry provides the policy context of single-gender education programs, reviews the purported benefits of this approach, and considers the critiques of these reforms.

Discussion and Analysis

Single-sex schools have been utilized throughout history for very different purposes. For example, so-called first-generation single-sex schools came to existence as male-only institutions expressly because males were thought to be the sex that was capable and deserving of education. Eventually, all-female academies were born to prove that women, too, were capable of learning and also deserved a share of societal attention in the education sphere (Tyack& Hansot, 1990).

However, it was not until the advent of the Common School Movement, started by Horace Mann in the 1830s, that students of the working class and poor were deemed fit for education. During this time, public schools became coeducational-not for any philosophical reason, but due to efficiency and budgetary concerns stemming from the numerical growth of willing students. Single-sex schools continued, mostly in the form of private, oftentimes parochial institutions.

In modern times, so-called second-generation single-sex schools have reinvented themselves as a medium for affirmative action and a remedy to social disadvantage. For example, Detroit and Milwaukee school districts attempted to establish single-sex academies for boys of African heritage yet met rigorous resistance. Attempts to establish single-sex schools for girls were also met with threats of litigation from civil rights groups. The most famous case was the Young Women's Leadership School (YWLS) in New York City.

Besides being a focus of recent popular culture, single-sex schooling has received legitimacy in the policy environment with changes to Title IX in conjunction with the No Child Left behind Act (NCLB). After Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced the amendment to NCLB, schools offering gender-separate classrooms have increased from four in 1998 to 228 in 2006, with 44 of those schools entirely single sex. While political will reflects support for expanding parental school choice, current policy discourse continues to assume balkanized positions between those believing single-sex schools are ...