Boys and Girls Together, Taught Separately in Public School
JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: March 10, 2009
Michael Napolitano speaks to his fifth-grade class in the Morrisania section of the Bronx like a basketball coach. “You — let me see you trying!” he insisted the other day during a math lesson. 'Come on, faster!'
Across the hall, Larita Hudson’s scolding is more like a therapist’s. “This is so sloppy, honey,” she prodded as she reviewed problems in a workbook. “Remember what I spoke to you about? About being the bright shining star that you are?”
They are not just two teachers with different personalities. Ms. Hudson, who is 32 and grew up near the school, has a room full of 11-year-old girls, while Mr. Napolitano, a 50-year-old former special education teacher, faces 23 boys. A third fifth-grade class down the hall is co-ed.
The single-sex classes at Public School 140, which started as an experiment last year to address sagging test scores and behavioral problems, are among at least 445 such classrooms nationwide, according to the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education. Most have sprouted since a 2004 federal regulatory change that gave public schools freedom to separate girls and boys.
The nation’s 95 single-sex public schools — including a dozen in New York City — while deemed legal, still have many critics. But separation by a hallway is generally more socially and politically palatable. And unlike other programs aimed at improving student performance, there is no extra cost.
“We will do whatever works, however we can get there,” said Paul Cannon, principal of P.S. 140, which is also known as the Eagle School. “We thought this would be another tool to try.”
Over the years, Mr. Cannon had experimented with after-school tutoring, playing sports with students and their fathers on weekends, and creating welcoming science and computer labs. Test scores improved enough to remove P.S. 140 from the state’s list of struggling schools, but Mr. Cannon noticed that fifth graders’ results were largely stagnant, a slump common across the city. He heard about a school in North Carolina that had all-girls classes and was inspired.
So he decided to try it — under the Bloomberg administration’s philosophy of letting principals run their schools as they wish, it was as simple as that, with no special training or monitoring. A few parents expressed reservations at first, but it was popular enough that this year, the middle school around the corner followed suit with its sixth grade.
“Before it was all about showing the girls who was toughest, and roughing up and being cool,” said Samell Little, whose son Gavin is in his second school year surrounded only by boys. “Now I never hear a word from teachers about behavior problems, and when he talks about school, he is actually talking about work.”
But Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said separate classrooms reinforce gender stereotypes. “A boy who has never been beaten by a girl on an algebra test could have some major problems having a female supervisor,” she said. While some advocates believe that girls are more likely to participate in class when no boys are present — and that boys, particularly those from low-income families, tend to focus better without girls around — academic research is inconclusive.
“The question always must be: What are you trying to accomplish with separating the students and how will you do it?” said Rosemary C. Salamone, a law professor at St. John’s University and author of “Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling.”
She added, “If you don’t do it thoughtfully, you run the risk of reinforcing stereotypes and playing to students’ weaknesses.”
In California, a high-profile governor’s initiative that split six middle schools and high schools into single-sex academies in the late 1990s ended after a few years, and few students showed sizable improvement.
At the Bronx’s Eagle School, there is also little evidence so far of improvement, at least of the easy-to-measure variety. Students of both sexes in the co-ed fifth grade did better on last year’s state tests in math and English than their counterparts in the single-sex rooms, and this year’s co-ed class had the highest percentage of students passing the state social studies exam.
But these numbers are as much a reflection of who is in which room. In general, struggling students are steered toward the single-sex classes (anyone who objects can opt out). While test scores might not show it, Mr. Cannon and his teachers said there have been fewer fights and discipline issues, and more participation in class and after-school activities, since the girls and boys were split up.
Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/education/11gender.html?ref=education
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