Page 26 - FINAL COLLABORATIVE WORK

Outline

“Many parents may be wondering what the fuss was about this past week, when the Bush administration endorsed
single-sex public schools and classes. Separating the sexes was something we did in the days of auto shop and
home etc, before Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Title IX. How, then, did an apparent return to the Fifties come
to symbolize educational reform?”

I have just spent three years working on a book about two all-girls schools, the private Marlborough School in Los
Angeles, and The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem (TYWLS), a six-year-old public school in New
York City. I went to class, I went home with the girls, I went to dances and basketball games and faculty meetings,
and what I learned is this: Single-sex education matters, and it matters most to the students who historically have
been denied access to it.”

“But single-sex education can be a valuable tool -- if we target those students who stand to benefit most. For years, in the name of
upholding gender equity, we have practiced a kind of harsh economic discrimination. Sociologist Cornelius Riordan says that poor
students, minorities and girls stand to profit most from a single-sex environment. Until now, though, the only students who could attend
a single-sex school were the wealthy ones who could afford private tuition, the relatively few lucky students who received financial aid
or those in less-expensive parochial schools. We denied access to the almost 90 percent of American students who attend public
schools.”
But brain research has shown us that girls and boys develop and process information in different ways; they do not even use the same
region of the brain to do their math homework. We cannot pretend that such information does not exist just because it conflicts with
our ideology.
“The first objections last week came from the National Organization for Women and the New York Civil Liberties Union, both of
which opposed the opening of TYWLS in the fall of 1996. The two groups continue to insist -- as though it were 1896 and they were
arguing Plessy v. Ferguson -- that separate can never be equal.”

If the intention is to strengthen the public school system by responding to new information about how our children
learn, then these classes can serve as a model of innovative teaching techniques, some of which can be transported
back into existing coed classrooms. Single-sex public schools and classes, as odd as it may sound, are about
inclusion; any school district that wants one can have one and everyone can learn from the experience.
But if this is about siphoning off the best and potentially brightest, and ignoring the rest, then it is a cruel joke, a
warm and fuzzy set-up for measures like vouchers. If single-sex becomes a satisfying distraction from existing
schools that desperately need help, then it only serves to further erode the system. The new educational reform
law is called the No Child Left Behind Act, an irresistible sentiment with a chilling edge to it -- did we ever actually
intend to leave certain children behind? The challenge, in developing these new schools and programs, is to make
them part of a dynamic, ongoing reform, and not an escape hatch from a troubled system.