For now, at least, it’s a room all their own. Thirty 8th graders, all of them girls, sit quietly at their desks in Marina Middle School, dissecting Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” oblivious to the sporadic squeals and bouncing balls on the blacktop outside.
Rachel Friedman prods them to explore the themes and context of Miller’s complex play, set in the witch-hunting days of Colonial Massachusetts. In the past few weeks, the class has explored the history of witches and discussed their relevance to contemporary politics and women’s issues, lessons made easier, she says, in an all-girl setting.
And on this day, the teacher wants her students to apply what they’ve learned to the hysteria of 17th-century Salem.
“We have witchcraft and magic and things unexplained,” Friedman says, allowing a pause while she scans the room. “What’s going on here?”
What’s going on at this San Francisco school and in five other California schools is a unusual experiment in single-sex public education.
Gov. Pete Wilson came up with the idea in 1996, based on the much-touted, but much-debated, benefits of separating the boys from the girls. Lawmakers approved the $500,000-per-school start-up grants, and six academies--most of them parts of other schools--opened in the fall of 1997.
The single-sex settings, the Republican governor said, were part of the state’s “education renaissance” that included class-size reduction in the early grades; new academic standards; a growing roster of charter schools; and a school voucher proposal, dubbed “opportunity scholarships,” that was never enacted. According to Mr. Wilson, the new academies would give girls the opportunity to speak out freely and offer boys a learning environment without the distraction of the opposite sex. But like the ambitious effort here to lower class sizes, and like other prominent school reform experiments in California and elsewhere, it is far from clear whether the six schools will live up to their expectations. And right now, it’s not even clear that they will survive at all.
In an old portable classroom at Andrew P. Hill High School in San Jose, distractions on a summer-like day abound. Several of the 11 boys studying “self-esteem” as part of a health education course seem to have shifted their focus to getting the teacher’s attention, or perhaps just getting the teacher.
“OK, settle down, quiet please,” says Matt Sperisen, who, like most of the academies’ instructors, is young, new to the school, and relatively new to teaching. Mr. Sperisen received emergency credentials from the state in 1996 and is working this year on earning his full credentials.
“I need you to think about self-esteem. Can you name someone who has high self-esteem?” he asks slowly, reading from a colorful textbook. “Can you think of someone with low self-esteem?”
The concept, however, seems elusive to the group of 9th grade boys, many of whom, between blurting out half-serious answers to the teacher’s questions, fidget, razz each other, snack, and stare off into space. One student, a big but baby-faced boy wearing oversized black pants, is sent out of the room three times to settle down.
“Self-esteem is how much you like yourself and how you feel about yourself,” the teacher explains, keeping his cool despite the fair-weather fever that has gripped his students.
California’s experiment is modeled after single-sex private schools, but most similarities end there. With the exception of one of the state’s academies in Orange County, which is set up for at-risk students, participants in the California program move in and out of coeducational settings--hallways, lunchrooms, and extracurriculars--throughout their day.
Students in Sperisen’s class, for example, mix with the general student body before school, between classes, during lunch, and in after-school activities. And by their junior year, when the program ends, they’ll be back with the girls.
After giving birth to the six academies, the state has essentially left them to wither or flourish on their own.
Initially, Wilson announced that he had set aside $5 million in his budget to pay for year two of the program. Some $2 million of that amount would go to the existing single-sex academies, and $3 million would double their number to 12.
But by summer, that $5 million had been inexplicably dropped during the legislative budget process, leaving the academies--in San Francisco, Orange County, East Palo Alto, San Jose, Stockton, and rural Dorris--scrambling to come up with funds for this school year. Despite Wilson’s endorsement, their future hangs in the balance.
“The funding problems were a total surprise,” says Principal John A. Michaelson of San Francisco’s Marina Middle School, where Rachel Friedman teaches. “A real kick in the stomach.”
The 115-student single-gender program, which includes separate classes for boys and girls within the 800-student campus, is open to all the city’s students.
An aide to Wilson, who is winding down his eight-year tenure as governor, can offer no explanation for the omission.
“It’s hard to say why this was left out. We tried for a second year of funding and expansion,” and there seemed to be no staunch opposition in the legislature, says Rich Halberg, a spokesman for the governor on education issues.
He notes that the program would have been a small portion of the state’s $28 billion K-12 schools budget this fiscal year. “The budget process is at times dysfunctional,” Halberg says.
Michaelson and administrators at the other academies, who want to make the experiment a permanent school offering, say they’re working with officials in their districts to scrape together money from local school budgets and are hoping to piece together a patchwork of private grants.
After the self-esteem lesson in San Jose, Sperisen explains that many of his male students--a few of the schools have had a tough time filling the boys’ programs--were recommended to the program because they weren’t faring well in the school’s regular classes.
“But a lot of the problems of this class have to do with plain old immaturity,” he says. Sperisen says that moodiness, whatever the mood, tends to spread easily among the academy’s classes, which spend the entire school day, the whole school year, together.
He adds that some of their behavior is “just a reflection of where kids are socially today, with no respect for each other or their teacher. It’s a sad commentary, and at 14 or 15, the die is cast.”
Despite the occasional unruly atmosphere, Derek Perry, a thin, square-shouldered 14-year-old who had been doing well in his regular classes, doesn’t hesitate when asked what he likes about the single-sex academy.
“We get more individual attention because our classes are so small. And we have more computers,” he says, smiling through his braces.
“We’re like one big family,” deadpans Kesan Hames, 15, a class clown with a penchant for Pop Warner football. “And sometimes we get on each other’s nerves.”
So far, many of the educators involved with the program say that, despite its administrative and budget problems, they like it too, if only for the same reasons as Derek Perry’s: smaller classes, extra resources, and the chance to work more closely with students and parents.
“Ideally, I’d like to see the program expand,” says Jocelyn Lee, the coordinator of San Jose’s 70-student single-sex academy for 9th and 10th graders on the sprawling, 2,300-student campus of Andrew P. Hill High. “It’s exciting to focus on the progress of a small group of students,” she adds. “It’s not for everyone, but for some students and teachers, it works.”
In many ways, that’s what the governor and others who championed the program hope to gain from such experiments: They want to create a public school system in which there are many more options for students and parents than schools traditionally have offered.
Andrew Hill’s principal, Bruce Shimizu, agrees. The single-sex program “speaks to the school’s willingness to try new programs,” he says, citing the school’s new dress code and its magnet program in the health sciences as other innovations. “Even if it doesn’t grow, if 40 or 50 students are benefiting each year, it would be worthwhile to keep it.”
In addition to seeking out private grants, Lee is looking into the possibility of securing funds by positioning the high school’s academy as a charter school.
At Marina Middle School, Michaelson says parents and students have liked the program. “It’s more cohesive and less distracting,” and some evidence suggests that test scores and grades are creeping up for enrollees, he says.
Despite such anecdotal evidence, the academic benefits of single-sex education in the public school world remain largely unproven.
And some critics of such experiments with single-sex schooling point out that merely separating students by gender won’t in itself eliminate the other problems that plague some public schools, problems like inexperienced teachers, outmoded facilities, and large and sometimes unmanageable classes.
“No one knows enough about who it’s good for and who it’s not good for,” says Fred A. Mael, a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research, based in Washington, who recently wrote a report comparing coeducational and single-sex schools. “And there’s virtually no research on what, if anything, you will gain from a couple of years or a couple of classes” in a single-sex setting.
Much of the recent interest in single-sex education stems from a controversial and widely publicized 1992 study from the American Association of University Women. “How Schools Shortchange Girls” concluded that female students receive less attention from their teachers than boys do, are less apt to see girls and women reflected in their study materials, and are often not expected or encouraged to pursue higher-level mathematics and science.
But since its release, the report from the Washington-based organization has been challenged on several fronts. Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks who recently wrote a study called “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls,” said the AAUW report failed to acknowledge the “different strengths and weaknesses” that girls and boys bring to school.
“I believed in the gender bias, until I actually took a look at the research,” Kleinfeld says. “And the research shows that girls get higher grades in virtually every subject in school. On standardized tests of reading and writing skills, they’re off the charts compared with boys, and boys do a bit better in science and math. Girls are now the majority in college and earn about half the professional degrees. Girls are soaring.
“Is there a systematic gender bias in schools? No.”
Kleinfeld ticks off a number of problems that she says disproportionately affect boys: lower grades, higher rates of suspensions and dropouts, more trouble with the law, and higher rates of substance abuse.
Some studies of single-sex schools bode well for it. For example, some research--focused mainly on students at Roman Catholic and private schools--has concluded that single-sex schools foster higher self-esteem, better participation, and better, long-lasting academic achievement, especially among girls. And several studies have found that single-sex schooling has had particular benefits for disadvantaged minorities.
But many experts say no research has determined whether benefits stem from factors specific to the single-sex setting or from other factors, such as smaller classes, higher expectations, or parental involvement.
Other studies have found that single-sex settings for girls do not adequately address what some researchers have identified as a gender bias in classrooms. Another AAUW report, “Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls,” released last spring, acknowledged that single-sex education works for “some students in some settings.” But there is “no evidence that single-sex education in general works or is ‘better’ than coeducation,” it concluded.
though there is a dearth of conclusive research, more and more public school systems are experimenting with the idea. Marsteller Middle School in Manassas, Va., for example, has offered single-sex classes to all of its students for the last three school years. In the northern Michigan town of Pellston, the middle school’s 6th graders have for the past two years been given the option of attending their core classes in a single-sex setting. And this fall, an elementary school in Denver switched to a single-sex program for its 4th and 5th graders.
A 165-student girls’ school in New York City’s East Harlem called the Young Women’s Leadership Academy has generated much scrutiny over the three years it’s been open. The school is not open to boys, and the district offers no comparable public school for boys. And Detroit and Philadelphia have embarked on the idea with mixed results.
Geraldine Clifford, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says single-sex schools have a place in public education, but maybe only a small one. “Choice is kind of an American value, and now parents want choice in public schools,” she says. “But I don’t believe [these schools] will be a big movement.”
Clifford sees California’s single-sex academies as having grown out of a longing by some here to go back to the days when the state’s schools were “a proud lighthouse, a model to the nation.”
While adding that the state has “always bred experimental movements,” Clifford points out that “single-sex academies are not all that novel. They’re not new. They have their roots in European tradition and religious traditions,” including the Catholic, German Lutheran, and Muslim faiths.
Single-sex public education also has a tradition of legal problems. The U.S. Supreme Court’s only action on the issue dates to 1976, when the justices let stand an appeals court’s ruling that Philadelphia’s single-sex high schools did not violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. At a lower level, a federal court in 1991 forced three all-male public schools in Detroit to admit girls, and girls now make up about half those schools’ enrollments, district officials say.
In 1988, the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights cited racial and sex discrimination in killing a plan to hold separate classes for African-American boys in Miami. The office is now investigating whether the Young Women’s Leadership Academy in New York violates Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination in schools receiving federal aid, by discriminating against boys. Citing that law, New Jersey education officials closed down two small middle school programs this year.
Karen Humphrey, who oversees California’s single-gender academies for the state education department, says the program was designed to withstand legal scrutiny by providing equal opportunities and equal funding to boys’ and girls’ programs. So far, she says, no one has challenged the schools in court.
Though California’s is one of the largest experiments with the idea to date, it is unlikely to provide a clear answer to the question of whether single-sex public schooling works.
Researchers who are studying the program say that, since the academies are so unusual, with most of their 700 students moving in and out of coed settings, their research is not likely to provide any definitive answers. And they note that it will be difficult to isolate the influence of the academies on their students’ achievement amid other forces that are reshaping California schools.
Amanda Datnow, a researcher with the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Lea Hubbard, a researcher from the University of California, San Diego, have been studying the program since its inception. Datnow describes it as “a whole new thing” in single-sex schooling.
For their study, which began last January and will conclude in December 2000, the researchers are tracking the achievement of individual students and monitoring the attitudes and opinions of teachers, parents, and students. And while Datnow says she can’t say anything conclusive so far, a few things are clear.
“Anecdotally, teachers have reported some positive effects,” she says. “But they also say they’ve faced a lot of challenges,” in administering the program. Teachers have told her that students have better feelings about school, for example, and are posting better grades. “And overall,” Datnow says, “the main reason to separate boys and girls was to reduce distractions, and in fact teachers say they are are seeing some of that.”
Just ask Arcelia Ramirez, a teacher at the San Francisco 49ers Academy in East Palo Alto, a tough, poor neighborhood that borders the region’s booming high-tech belt. The 150-student school, a partnership between the Ravenswood school district and its sponsor, the San Francisco 49ers professional football team, was set up exclusively for at-risk middle school boys, but began a girls’ program after being awarded one of the state’s start-up grants last year.
“These girls are concrete-hard when we get them,” Ramirez says, gesturing to her 16 8th graders, many of whom, with teased hair and plenty of makeup, appear much older than their 13 or 14 years. Like the boys at the school, most of the girls are at risk of dropping out, but, by enrolling at the academy, have expressed a commitment to turning their lives around.
“They’ve been exposed to so much at a young age; they never have a chance to just be,” Ramirez says. “I try to keep it as real as possible in here. We focus a lot on feelings and friendship. And, because I’m a woman, I can serve as a counselor and a role model.”
On this day, the girls are engaged in a frank how-to discussion of proper condom use and the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The class is part of a weeklong sex education program provided by a volunteer from the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. This session would never have gone over in a coeducational class, Ramirez says. “It would have been a joke.” The volunteer’s lecture is followed by a question-and-answer session in which one student, who spent a portion of class staring into a compact mirror, plucking her eyebrows, remarked that sex with a condom “doesn’t feel as good.”
“AIDS doesn’t feel good,” answers the medical school staffer, health educator Sherry Felder, who adds later that she has heard much worse from students this young.
All in all, the single-sex program is helping the girls focus better on academics and, with no boys to compete for, “how to be a team player,” Ramirez says. “Wild dogs don’t make it at a tea party,” she adds. “These girls are learning to be women.”
