Posted on 08/21/2003 4:08:56 PM PDT by Pan_Yans Wife
When sixth-grade student Mayosie Davis showed up for the first day of school at Atlanta's King Middle last week, she could hardly believe it.
There weren't any boys in math class. None in language arts, either. Social studies? A boy-free zone.
The entire sixth-grade class has been separated by gender this year for everything but lunch and an elective course. Boys take their core academic classes in one area, girls in another.
"I miss them," Mayosie says with a sheepish smile. "I'd rather hang around boys than girls."
King is the only public school in metro Atlanta and one of only 32 coed public schools nationwide that offer single-sex classes, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. The list includes one other Georgia school, in Savannah.
King's principal, Carolyn Huff, said that the change strips away some of the distractions that plague middle schools -- hormone-charged students flirting with each other, fighting over one another, fussing with their hair and clothes. Huff cited research showing that boys and girls learn differently and appear to thrive in separate settings.
The goal, the principal explained, is to boost King's test scores, which have crept up in recent years but remain among the lowest in the state.
"We thought we could just get the right books, just get the right program, just get the right materials," Huff said. But she came to the conclusion that turning the school around required a dramatic change.
Parents signed off on the plan, school officials said.
"I know we are a trailblazer with this," the principal said.
The single-sex movement is small but growing, and it's stirring a debate among educators, women's groups and legal scholars that in some ways echoes civil rights battles over racially segregated schools. Separate schools for boys and girls used to be the norm across the nation. Atlanta had single-gender schools as recently as the late 1940s.
Terry O'Neill, vice president of membership in the National Organization for Women, argues that gender segregation is a step backward for girls.
"Segregation implies inferiority, bottom line," O'Neill said. "They separate men from women in fundamentalist Muslim cultures, too. They did that in Afghanistan. It's not the answer. It takes us very much in the wrong direction. You have to encourage [boys and girls] to work together."
Debbie Seagraves, executive director of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said efforts to separate boys and girls at public schools may violate the federal Title IX law, which outlaws sex discrimination in education.
"There's no such thing as separate but equal," said Seagraves. "Separate will become inherently unequal as time goes on."
Merits hotly disputed
The single-sex education movement got a big boost last year from President Bush, whose No Child Left Behind school reform law authorized the use of single-sex classrooms provided that they didn't discriminate based on gender.
The federal Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights is drafting a set of regulations that should clarify the issue, a department spokeswoman said.
Research on single-sex education is mixed. For example, after an elementary school in Seattle switched to single-sex classrooms in 2000, its reading scores tripled and discipline referrals plummeted from 30 a day to just one or two. But a high-profile 12-school effort in California in the late 1990s was deemed a failure and abandoned.
Advocates of single-sex education say it makes sense to address the differences between boys and girls.
For instance, girls who stand on the sidelines in coed classes become more competitive and outgoing in an all-girl environment, said Leonard Sax, a physician who founded the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. Boys tend to talk loudly and learn better when free to move about, Sax said.
"If you visit an all-boys school and an all-girls school, everything is a lot louder in the boys school," he said. "The classroom is conducted at a much higher decibel level. The teacher is raising his voice. That is appropriate, given what we know about how girls and boys learn."
Huff, King's principal, said single-sex classes may help reduce what she calls the "dumbing-down" phenomenon -- boys who refuse to give correct answers, do their work or pay attention because "it's just not cool to be smart." Without girls in the room to "impress" with their slacker attitude, the theory goes, boys will be more likely to care about school.
Decibel levels differ
At King, the boys are called the Distinguished Gentlemen, the girls the Debutantes.
In the boys' area, math teacher Travis Brown leads a lesson. The room hums with energy. Brown marches among the desks, talking loudly. Some boys sit on their knees, others restlessly stand up and sit down.
Nearly everyone barks out answers the moment Brown is finished asking a question. And there's no evidence of any "dumbing-down." In fact, the class gleefully corrects a minor mistake one student makes at the board.
In the girls' area, math class is an entirely different affair. The girls politely stay in their seats, raise their hands when teacher Gigi Miller asks a question, and wait to answer until they are called on. For long stretches the room is virtually silent.
'More focused'
King teachers say they can tell the new approach is working. Behavior has dramatically improved, they say, and students are paying more attention in class without the distraction of the opposite sex. They noted that the girls wore fairly skimpy clothing for the first few days -- but once they realized boys were not around for most of the day, they began wearing less revealing outfits.
"Last year it was a struggle to keep them focused," said Cheryl Darville, who teaches social studies to boys.
Khaia Smith, who teaches boys language arts, said she likes being able to pick books she knows the boys will like, which helps hold their interest. And dumbing-down is on the wane, she said.
"It's cool to be smart, it's cool to be a leader," she said.
Student Carolyne Ouya, 11, says she liked the single-sex environment.
"We get to learn a lot better without the distraction of us thinking about [boys] all the time," she said. "Now that we're here, I'm more focused on my work."
Phyllis Dawson, whose son, Carlos, is a sixth-grade student at King, said there was less fighting and more studying with girls out of the mix.
"The girls distract them, with the clothes that they wear," Dawson said. "There's no fighting. You know how guys and girls call each other names and stuff? There's none of that."
Some students pine for the days when boys and girls got to see each other all day long. Deterio Thurmand, 12, said it was boring without girls around.
Are "the girls coming back"? Deterio asked Huff between classes.
"You miss the girls?" Huff asked.
"Everybody does," Deterio said.
Good grief...they eliminated all of the fun.
I've heard the same thing from women I work with.They think guys are more fun.
I'm sure they're not trying to stop physical attraction between the sexes, but instead are trying to maximize learning potential by recognizing the differences in the way boys and girls learn and behave.
What if it works?
Uh, isn't this what they're trying to avoid?
As an added plus, maybe the demand for prescription behavioral control drugs would plummet.
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