Won't somebody think of the children?
Pauline Vu, reporting for Stateline.org, says that the number of public single-sex schools has risen from 5 to 241 in the past decade. Leonard Sax, director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and author of Why Gender Matters claims that girls and boys have different learning styles and that these differences can be used
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One of the things I find interesting is that a lot of people who experienced single-sex schooling speak positively of it -- and often say they wouldn't have necessarily wanted it at different age groups! Most of the people I know/have heard who went to women's colleges did not go to girls' schools K-12 (of course, since the vast majority of K-12 schools are coed) and in general appreciated the chance to learn about boys at that age and the chance to be in an all-female environment at a time when things like leadership skills are really developing...and many of my students and coworkers feel that the single-sex environment is really good for our boys, and the fact that most of them will go to coed high schools is also a good thing, precisely because you gotta learn about girls sometime. (And I suppose lots of people who went to single-sex high schools think that's good too...but I haven't talked to them so much.)
What I really like about single-sex for most of the boys at my level (7th-9th):
* There is a huuuuuuge average difference in maturity between girls and boys at this age (starting with the fact that girls hit puberty earlier and spreading from there). This is when all the weird queen bee games really get going with girls, and most boys don't know how to play along yet -- but will try to anyway for the sake of impressing the girls. Removing the girls --> boys doing a lot less dumb stuff. Also...it gives the boys time and space to grow up at their own rates. By high school boys and girls are a lot closer together (and have both outgrown the lord-of-the-flies stuff some), so they can relate more naturally.
* In most schools -- at any level -- there are going to be "boy" niches and "girl" niches, and you have to be either pretty confident or pretty oblivious to be in the "wrong" one, I suspect (I went for "oblivious" myself; also, math team). But in a single-sex school, you can't have those niches. We have male flutists (otherwise where would the orchestra be?) and male painters (gotta have an arts program) and and male choristers (else no choir at all) male actors -- male actors wearing skirts and wigs at that (or how would there be plays?). We have, of course, male student government (which was dominated by girls in my high school iirc) and male valedictorians (in Boston public schools, anyway, valedictorians seem overwhelmingly female). I'm sure you can point to similar things from your college which you suspect would have been male-dominated in other environments, but were necessarily welcoming to women in yours, and gave women who are not naturally confident or oblivious a chance to develop those skills (and confidence). And I suspect, just as with my students, you have faith that, having developed those skills in a more sheltered environment, you can now take them out into a coed world confidently.
All that and I never went to a single-sex school myself -- I flat-out refused (also to my mother's chagrin) to consider women's colleges; indeed my college was 75/25 the other direction (in fact many of my female coworkers spent some part of their life in male-dominated environments or socialized more naturally with men for some important set of years). I don't think I'm one of the people for whom it would have been a good thing (too oblivious to care about the gender differences I was "supposed" to pay attention to; much better at being friends with boys until after college; much more closely resemble "boy" than "girl" learning patterns). But I'm glad the option exists and I wish it were more widespread, since one size really doesn't fit all in education.
So, differenceblog, there's your anecdote about elementary/secondary :).
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