Feminist Looking Glass

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance magazine has an article on the rise of gender-segregated classrooms in America.  It includes this worrisome sentence: “In 2002, only 11 public schools in the United States had gender-segregated classrooms. As of December 2009, there were more than 550.”  The movement is called the Single Sex Public Education (SSPE) movement, and, as that sentence shows, it has been winning many converts.

The separation of boys and girls has, of course, been done in private and parochial schools for a long time.  But we have the Bush administration to blame for expanding the movement to public schools, since, in 2006, the Department of Education altered the Title IX provision of the No Child Left Behind Act to ease restrictions on gender-segregated education in public schools.

The article talks about the movement and the assumptions on which it is based.  But there is very little evidence to back up the assumptions and, so, in reality, the assumptions are just a set of stereotypes.

As an example, last year, the Mobile County Public School System in Alabama, with 66,000 students, implemented SSPE programs in eight of its 93 schools.  (The programs were later ended when the ACLU threatened to file suit.)   One of the schools made its girls and boys eat lunch at different times and prohibited them from speaking to one another on school grounds.  It directed its teachers to:

create “competitive, high-energy” classrooms for boys and “cooperative, quiet” classrooms for girls. Boys were to be taught “heroic behavior.” Girls were to learn “good character.” Sixth-grade language arts exercises called for boys to brainstorm action words used in sports. Girls were instructed to describe their dream wedding cake. Electives were gender-specific. Boys took computer applications. Girls took drama. No exceptions.

It has always seemed to me that gender-segregated classrooms are wrong.  All they do is continue stereotypes.  I agree with this statements by Emily Martin, Deputy Director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Program:

While schools might think that sex-segregated classes will be a quick fix for failing schools, in reality they are inherently unequal and shortchange both boys and girls.  There is no reliable evidence that segregating students by sex improves learning by either sex.

School districts across the country are experimenting with sex-segregated programs, which rely on questionable brain science theories based on outdated gender stereotypes.  Instead, these districts should focus on efforts that we know can improve all students’ education, like smaller classes and more teacher training and parental involvement.

(The SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance magazine also has an article titled “Unmaking Brown” on the growing resegregation of schools along racial lines. )