Boys and Girls: To Segregate or Not To Segregate?

My last post focused on controversial clothing, marketed to young girls, and decorated with gendered slogans such as “Future Trophy Wife.” As I noted then, retailers such as Urban Outfitters hide from potential outrage over these products in the claim that they’re intended to be sold to a college-aged demographic, presumably one that is 18 and over. Yet under the banner of “Back to School” shopping, that intention is vague at best. As we all know from the experience of being in High School, what’s cool to 18-22 year olds is irresistibly cool to 15-18 year olds. It would be crazy to assume that none of these types of T-Shirts, with printed messages like “I Drink, You’re Cute,” have ended up on the backs of girls still “safely” occupying the K-12 zone. Reflecting on this discovery I began to think about other gender issues as they exist within the realm of the educational environment, specifically in public secondary schools.

This train of thought eventually led me to the public debate currently taking place over “Single-Sex” education, or “Sex-Segregation.” I came across the Time Magazine article “Ew Boys: TheGrowing Legal Battle Over Same-Sex Education.” According to the article’s author, Adam Cohen, the number of public school systems which separate boys from girls in the class room grew from about 12 in 2002, to “as many as 500” a decade later. But why? What are the perceived benefits of this trend and does it pay off? That is very much the question at the center of the debate.

According to the National Associationfor Single Sex Public Education, “The single-sex format creates opportunities that don’t exist in the coed classroom.” This school of thought operates on the assumption that boys and girls are psychologically distinct from one another. Because of this, according to advocates for single-sex education, both girls and boys benefit from being separated in the classroom and educated along different trajectories according to how each gender learns best. The NASSPE emphasizes this last part as the key to their argument. Simply isolating the sexes and teaching the same curricula to each group simultaneously wouldn’t be effective, they claim. Instead the group advocates special “training” for educators that will allow them to tailor lesson plans to the specific educational needs of each gender propelling them to reach their maximum potential.

Others, however, aren’t buying NASSPE’s stance. The assumption that girls’ brains work differently from boys’ brains is seen by many to be just that, an assumption, not backed by any scientific data. National Public Radio’s Neal Conan hosted a debate forum on the subject on his show Talk of the Nation. In this episode he cited an article in the scholarly journal Science, which found “that there’s simply no empirical evidence that segregating boys and girls improves education.” The American Civil Liberties Union has been active on the issue in recent years, filing lawsuits against school districts in Louisiana and Mississippi, condemning the practice of sex segregation as discriminatory. In a statement published on their website they say, “We have seen time and time again that sex segregated programs are inherently unequal for both girls and boys” and “can shut students out of the best classes simply because of their sex.”

My opinion aligns with the ACLU which cites Title IX and the Equal Education Opportunities Act as the legal basis for bringing these districts to court. Even though groups like NASSPE seem well intentioned and claim to be working to break down gender stereotypes, they lack crucial supporting evidence. Without academic research to conclusively prove that separating girls from boys raises achievement levels, I’m left to assume that this is another example of gender biases appearing in public schools.