Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, cited a study in his 2005 book, Why Gender Matters, conducted by researchers at Virginia Tech that demonstrated how boys are developmentally years behind girls in terms of fine motor skills. Many boys become frustrated with school when they are taught reading and writing before they are developmentally ready, causing them to lag behind girls, Sax said.
“The question, ‘Which is better, single sex or coeducation?’ presupposes that kids are all the same—they’re not,” he said. “What works best for some girls may be a disaster for other girls. What works best for some boys might not work for other boys.”
Sax said he believes that if single-sex education is the right choice for a particular child, that child should have the option to attend a public single-sex school rather than having to pay for private education.
“What if you think your child might benefit from the girls’ format or boys’ format, but you don’t have $20,000 a year to send your child to such a school?” he said. “Choice between single-sex and coed format is generally, in this country, only available to parents who have money.”
David Sadker, a professor at American University and author of Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls, said he doesn’t believe that separating the genders is the right idea.
“Separating is a backwards step, whether it’s by race, or gender, or religion,” said Sadker. “We’re doing something on gender that we’d never do on race; we’re separating and segregating, and we would never do that on race—and it’s because we’re more sensitive to the race implications than the gender [ones], but the gender implications are very real, and they’re not good.”
However, Sadker said he doesn’t believe the current education system is fair to female students.
“Teachers talk more to boys than girls, they praise boys more, they discipline boys more, they help boys more. Boys are by far the more active participants in a classroom, and this continues through college,” he said.
Rather than separating classes by gender, Sadker advocates a model that retrains teachers to ensure they’re addressing all students fairly.
“Often in a coed class, girls get cut off, they may worry about harassment, the boys may take over physically and verbally, but teachers can control that,” he said.
Yet Sax disagrees.
“This notion that girls are intimidated by boys in the coed classroom is certainly out of date in most American schools today. If anything, it is the other way around,” Sax said. “It is common to find what I call the ‘Hermione Granger syndrome’ in American schools today, where the girls are jumping up and down to answer the questions and the boys are sitting on their hands.”
Sax said many people have an antiquated idea of what single-sex education is actually like today.
“We’re not trying to recreate the 1950s,” he said. “We’re using this format to do things that have not been done before, like engaging more girls in computer science and getting more boys who love football to love Jane Eyre.”
In his book Girls on the Edge, Sax describes evidence from UCLA studies that suggest “girls who graduate from single-sex private schools do better academically when compared to girls with comparable demographics who graduate from comparable private schools.” He also examines a larger study from the United Kingdom that found similar results for girls in public schools.
Sax said parents often are concerned that their children won’t learn how to interact with the opposite sex if they aren’t exposed on a regular basis in an academic setting.
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