Are Single-Sex Classrooms Legal?
The increased flexibility of these revised Title IX regulations ordered in No Child Left Behind did not become official federal policy until last week, but the original NCLB laws already had initiated some changes anyway. As of this past September, 241 public schools were offering single-sex classes, and 51 of them were fully sex-segregated, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, which Sax runs.
Some of these attempts have come under fire. This August, a school district in Louisiana dropped plans to offer single-sex classes in two junior high schools after the American Civil Liberties Union brought a case against it. Years before, the ACLU's New York affiliate group joined with the National Organization for Women to file a Title IX complaint against Tisch's Harlem school, but the Department of Education "never issued a ruling one way or another," says Emily Martin, deputy director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project.
Both NOW and the ACLU are members of the National Coalition for Women and Girls on Education, whose members have been circulating E-mails about how to respond to the new regulations. "There are actually more differences within the sexes than there are between them," says Lisa Maatz, director of public policy and government relations at the American Association of University Women, another coalition member.
Separation may not only be unnecessary, they say, but it could have adverse effects such as increasing gender inequality over the long term or perpetuating stereotypes. A culture of equality, NOW President Kim Gandy says, requires that males and females learn to work together early on. "How can you expect a boy who's never been beaten by a girl on an Algebra test to think that it's OK for a girl to be his boss?" she asks. "Our experience has been, when it comes to separating girls and boys and men and women, separate has not been equal. At every turn, women and girls are the ones who are shortchanged."
A culture of equality, Gandy says, requires that males and females learn to work together early on. "How can you expect a boy who's never been beaten by a girl on an Algebra test to think that it's okay for a girl to be his boss?" she says.
A review by the Department of Education concluded research is too limited to be definitive in favor of either argument. But advocates of the gender separation options say the anecdotal evidence already is compelling enough. DeMary of Virginia, who retired from the Virginia schools last December and now directs the Center for School Improvement at Virginia Commonwealth University, describes a young girl in a girls-only middle school classroom in Virginia who spoke to the state Department of Education. "She said, 'I don't have to worry about the boys ... I can focus on the content.' "
Single-sex education is not a "silver bullet," DeMary says, but if it could help, why remove it from the tool kit of educational options? After all, she says, with state testing laws and federal No Child Left Behind policy, "we have enough accountability on student achievement that if it's not working–we're not going to keep doing it."
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