The Separation Solution?: Single-Sex Education and the New Politics of Gender Equality
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The Separation Solution?: Single-Sex Education and the New Politics of Gender Equality
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520963788 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The Separation Solution?
Single-Sex Education and the New Politics of Gender Equality
By Juliet A. Williams
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96378-8
CHAPTER 1
Rethinking Gender Equality
When I first learned that a growing number of public schools teaching grades kindergarten through twelfth across the United States were experimenting with single-sex classes to address issues ranging from low self-esteem among adolescent girls to academic underachievement among at-risk boys, I was more than a little surprised. Of course I was aware that some parochial schools, as well as a handful of elite private schools, remained committed to the idea of educating girls and boys separately. Nonetheless, it was hard for me to comprehend how single-sex education could be on the rise in U.S. public schools. In its landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Supreme Court resoundingly rejected the doctrine of "separate but equal," declaring unconstitutional a state law establishing racial segregation in Kansas public schools. In the ensuing decades, Brown has proven critical not only in efforts to address race discrimination in education but also in confronting discrimination in public schools related to sex, socioeconomic status, disability, language, sexual orientation, and religion, among other categories of difference. And while classifications based on sex still are not officially subject to the exacting degree of judicial scrutiny reserved for cases in which racial and other "suspect" classifications are at play, single-sex public education has faced an increasingly inhospitable legal environment in the decades since the Brown decision.
In 1972, Congress passed Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, guaranteeing that "no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." With Title IX in place, it seemed unlikely that separate classes for girls and boys in U.S. public schools would be able to survive legal challenge — an expectation borne out in several high-profile lower-court decisions concerning sex-based admission policies. By the late 1980s, single-sex public education for students in grades K–12 had virtually disappeared from the educational landscape of the United States. In 1996, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in a closely watched case declaring unconstitutional the male-only admissions policy at the state-run Virginia Military Institute, Justice Antonin Scalia bitterly proclaimed single-sex education "functionally dead."
The seemingly imminent demise of single-sex public education wasn't just something I had read about: I had lived it. In 1983, as a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore, I had suddenly found myself in the position of being the first girl in a class of nearly 300 boys at Central High School of Philadelphia, the second-oldest public high school in the United States. That year, Pennsylvania's highest court ruled in Newberg v. Board of Education that Central's all-male admissions policy violated the state constitution's Equal Rights Amendment. The Newberg decision turned on a finding that Central High's long-standing sister school, the Philadelphia High School for Girls, afforded substantially inferior educational opportunities to female students. I was already several days into my sophomore year at Girls' High when the Newberg decision was announced. My initial response was elation. As an entering freshman at Girls' High, I had hoped that the strength of the academic program and the supportive friendships I expected to form with the other girls would be enough to compensate for the absence of the camaraderie I had always enjoyed with male peers in school. These hopes, however, had been quickly dashed. What I encountered in my first year at Girls' High stands in sharp contrast to the inspiring images of sisterly empowerment frequently summoned in discussions of single-sex education. While all-girls schools are touted as places where young women can escape the damaging sexist stereotypes that discourage achievement in fields like math and science, my own experience was very different. As a ninth grader, I encountered a curriculum that often subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, reinforced gender stereotypes (although I was hardly inclined to object when informed by our biology teacher that we girls could be excused from that most dreaded of high school rites of passage — frog dissection). With more than a touch of adolescent hyperbole, I regarded my ninth-grade year in an all-girls high school as akin to serving time in prison. In hindsight, the analogy strikes me as apt, not so much because both are forms of involuntary confinement, but rather because social life behind bars — as in other sex-segregated social institutions — frequently is structured around the performance of masculine and feminine roles even when members of only one sex are present.
I was understandably delighted when, returning home from school one afternoon just a few days into my sophomore year at Girls' High, my mother greeted me with some exciting news. An article about the Newberg decision had appeared in the local newspaper that morning. Those seeking more information were encouraged to call the Women's Law Project, the organization that had brought the suit on behalf of three girls, now entering their senior year of high school, who previously had been denied admission to Central. My parents were intrigued, and they called the Women's Law Project lawyers right away. After a brief conversation, the lawyers confirmed that I was entitled to join the six brave young women who had the previous week become the first females in a school of over 1,000 male students in grades nine through twelve. And so, the next morning I set out for school as I normally did — except that instead of getting out of the subway and walking up the stairs to Girls' High, I continued down the block to approach our "brother" institution, Central High. The plan was simple enough, but it was not long before I realized things were going to be more complicated than I ever could have anticipated. As I approached the entrance to Central High that September morning, I was greeted by a phalanx of television cameras and news reporters covering a school walkout being staged by some 150 incensed male students. What followed from that day forward was three intense years in which I experienced the force of opposition to integration in the most personal ways imaginable. Still, by the time the graduation ceremony for my senior class finally rolled around, it was evident that Central's staff, students, and even many alumni were ready to embrace the dawn of a new era rather than bitterly mourning the passage of an old one. A few months after I graduated, Central High welcomed an incoming class of ninth-graders that was over 50 percent female. At the time, I assumed that in the coming years some kind of merger between Girls' High and Central was all but inevitable, and that the last remaining vestiges of single-sex public education in the United States would quietly fade away.
THE RISE OF SINGLE-SEX EDUCATION
Far from disappearing, in the years since I graduated from Central High, single-sex education has made a striking debut in K–12 public school classrooms across the United States. Contrary to Justice Scalia's dire prediction, with hindsight it is evident that the United States v. Virginia decision marked not the end of single-sex public education but, rather, only a strategic turning point for advocates, who have since redirected their lobbying efforts to focus more intensively on the legislative and regulatory arenas — an approach that has proven remarkably effective. Since the early years of the new millennium, advocates have campaigned vigorously to alter existing civil rights laws that prohibit sex discrimination in public schools. Responding to these efforts, in 2006 the U.S. Department of Education amended its Title IX regulations to ease restrictions on schools that separate students on the basis of sex — the first major change in those regulations in over thirty years since the law originally was passed.
Less than a decade later, experts estimate that there are nearly eighty single-sex public schools across the country, up from just three in 1990. In addition, an estimated one thousand public schools in the United States offer separate instruction for boys and girls in academic subjects such as language arts and math. Today, there are single-sex programs all across the United States, from inner-city Los Angeles to rural Maine, from Seattle to Atlanta. South Carolina leads the nation in promoting single-sex education, with over seventy public schools in the state supporting "single-gender" programs; the highest concentration of K–12 single-sex programs is found in southern states. On an almost daily basis, there is news of another community considering single-sex options in the desperate search for alternatives to the dismal failure of the status quo approach in public education.
A growing number of school districts in the United States are investing their limited resources in experimental single-sex initiatives despite a conspicuous lack of research evidence establishing the benefits of separating girls and boys during the school day. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Education undertook a systematic review of existing research on single-sex education. After an "exhaustive search" of the literature that initially identified over twenty-two hundred published studies, researchers found that fewer than ninety quantitative studies, and just four qualitative studies, met standard criteria of validity. The existing data on outcomes in single-sex versus coed learning environments is problematic not only because it is so meager: it also happens that some of the most commonly cited research studies on the subject are among the most shoddy. An often-mentioned study undertaken at Stetson University in Central Florida is a particularly telling example in this regard. In 2001, a team from Stetson launched a three-year-long pilot project that compared test scores in two classes at a local public elementary school: one single-sex and one coed. It has been widely reported by single-sex education advocates, as well as in news media accounts, that the Stetson study found significant improvements in the academic performance of students assigned to single-sex classes. After three years, 37 percent of boys in coed classes reportedly achieved a score of proficient or above on state assessment exams, whereas 86 percent of the boys in the single-sex classes did. For girls, the reported figures were 59 percent and 75 percent, respectively. These results certainly are intriguing. But those hoping to learn more about these findings will quickly discover that the Stetson study has yet to appear in any peer-reviewed research journal — or indeed, to be published anywhere at all. Nonetheless, the Stetson study was featured in a segment of the NBC Nightly News report, in 2008, about the promising results of single-sex public schooling initiatives, and it continues to be cited in news reports as evidence that single-sex education works.
Efforts to address the paucity of reliable research on single-sex education long have been hampered by the fact that the Department of Education does not track the number, let alone the location, of single-sex public schools and classrooms. In the course of researching this book, I have experienced the frustration shared by many who seek answers to even the most basic questions about the status of single-sex education in U.S. public schools. Some years ago, I contacted the National Center for Education Statistics, the data collection agency that operates within the U.S. Department of Education's Institution of Education Sciences, for assistance in determining the exact number of single-sex K–12 public schools in the United States operating at the time. I was directed to consult with a member of the team working in the Common Core of Data division. The analyst I spoke to by phone helpfully offered to create a spreadsheet for me listing all single-sex K–12 schools in the country based on the National Center for Education Statistics' own most recent data. The table he generated based on the 2008–9 data listed over one thousand institutions, the vast majority of which turned out to be detention centers and other nonqualifying schools. After combing through the list, I eventually identified sixty-nine single-sex public schools, thirty-five serving female students and thirty-four serving male students. However, in the course of reviewing the list of schools, I noticed that Western High School in Baltimore had been tagged in the National Center for Education Statistics data as a "male" school, when I knew Western to be an all-female school — founded in 1844, Western has the distinction of being the nation's oldest public high school for girls. When I pointed out the error to the analyst in the Common Core of Data division, he suggested the mistake might be due to an "error in my programming logic" and acknowledged that he could not confirm the accuracy of any of the other data he had provided. Beyond making it more difficult for interested researchers to identify single-sex programs, this lack of administrative accountability points to the federal government's broader abdication of its mandated obligation to monitor single-sex programs for discriminatory practices.
The failure of the federal government to oversee single-sex schools and classrooms has led many journalists and researchers to rely on information provided by a partisan advocacy group, the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. The organization was founded in 2002 as a nonprofit to promote single-sex initiatives in K–12 public schools. For many years, it maintained a website featuring the most comprehensive list available of single-sex public schools and schools with single-sex classrooms in the United States. However, in 2011 the organization's leadership decided to take the list down after learning that the American Civil Liberties Union was using the website to identify single-sex programs that might be operating in violation of federal and state laws. More recently, a coalition of research scholars formed the American Council for CoEducational Schooling. The mission of the organization is to "improve and promote coeducation in schools," and a central focus has been to dispel popular myths about the nature and educational significance of biological sex differences. With the launch of a user-friendly website, the American Council for CoEducational Schooling aims to become a serious challenger to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (now known as the National Association for Choice in Education) as the leading national clearinghouse for information about single-sex public education.
A growing number of researchers are turning their attention to single-sex education in an effort to assess the educational impact of alternatives to coeducation. While there remains a pressing need for rigorous research in this area, the analysis presented here is not primarily concerned with questions concerning the relative efficacy of single-sex learning environments in comparison to coeducational settings. Instead, in the following pages, I consider what twenty-five years of debate over single-sex public education might reveal about popular understandings of gender difference. In the wake of feminist activism and legal reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. "gender order" clearly has undergone significant transformations. Nonetheless, while it may no longer be controversial to insist that women and men receive equal treatment in the eyes of the law, gender continues to be regarded as a mark of fundamental difference. Indeed, "Venus and Mars" thinking has proven exceptionally resilient, even as the legal landscape has been substantially reworked. The single-sex public education debates present an occasion to consider whether, and how, an insistence on the truth of gender differences can be reconciled with an increasingly expansive legal recognition of sex equality. Reflecting on more than two decades of advocacy for single-sex education, this book asks: What claims about gender differences have gained traction with policy makers, educators, parents, and the public over the past twenty-five years? On what grounds have some women's rights organizations and other civil rights groups challenged single-sex initiatives? What role have courts played in setting the terms of gender discourse in education policy debates during this period? And what does the struggle over single-sex education suggest about contemporary understandings of gender in the United States? Following gender theorist Judith Butler, I aim here to "understand why the terms [sexual difference, gender, and sexuality] are considered so important to those who use them, and how we might reconcile this set of felt necessities as they come into conflict with one another." I am particularly interested in exploring the "institutional possibilities" that discourses of gender difference both "open and foreclose" in the context of recent public-education-reform debates.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Separation Solution? by Juliet A. Williams. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments1. Rethinking Gender Equality
2. Single-Sex Education in Historical Perspective
3. "We’ve Got to Try Something": The Male Academy Initiatives
4. What about the Girls?
5. Single-Sex Education and the Popular Neuroscience of Sex Difference
6. Different but Equal?: Reflections on the Future of Gender Discourse
Notes
References
Index