Kisha Patel
Education Law
Paper 1
October 17th, 2018
Keeping Parts Apart
I. Introduction
Girls will be girls, and boys will be boys, so why are they educated together? In the last decade, a push for single-sex education has spread throughout school districts and education boards as more and more research has proven its benefits. The gender gap is commonly referenced regarding wages, employment, and athletic opportunities however one of the most overlooked gender gaps happens in education. The problematic reality is that girls are disadvantaged in education at drastically early ages. Co-educational environments in elementary and middle schools have shown to be disadvantaging females by lowering their self-esteem, confidence, and generalizing females into specific roles. Proponents of single sex education have argued that gendered classrooms would give females the full attention they deserve to grow and flourish academically. Boys are not immune to this issue either. Research has also shown boys preform substantially stronger in single sex environments. Co-educational environments have shown to be disadvantaging males by forcing masculine ideals, suppressing activity and imagination, and creating a competitive and hostile learning environment. Young girls and boys have been proven to grow and develop on different tracks, which is problematic with a uniform education system that does not provide leniency for students growing at different developmental stages. Co-educational classrooms prove to do a disservice to both girls and boys who develop and learn differently from each other, Proponents of single sex education have found that gendered classrooms would give both girls and boys the full attention they deserve to grow and flourish academically. When traditional gender roles matter less, students prosper.
Schools across the country have attempted separating the genders in classes, schools, and activities to help increase productivity and success among both sexes. However, educational institutions must tread lightly to not violate federal and constitutional laws under the 14th Amendment on equality and President Bush’s 2002 mandate on No Child Left Behind.
The 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution states: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the US.” While an originalist application of the Constitution would argue that this Amendment was not intended to and should not protect against sex discrimination, the Amendment is routinely used in arguments for sex equality. Cite!
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was created and signed into law by President Bush in 2002 through the Department of Education. This Act reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 that allows local agencies to use Innovating Programs funds to support same-gender schools and classrooms. Cite!
II. Background
“School is an institution that, by its very nature, selects, labels, and sorts children. The groupings that schools impose on children, and the fact of this continuous classification, encourage ways of thinking about the self and others that involve understandings about who is supposed to be in which configuration and who is not. The groupings emphasize sameness and difference and foreground issues of legitimacy”. These groupings also have an influence on what is traditionally masculine and feminine, which is integrated into the classroom. “Masculinities and femininities are not developed by the peer group and imposed onto the classroom. Classroom and institutional processes are of key importance in their construction. Classroom based masculinities and femininities are also formed in a situation in which children are expected to construct themselves not just as boys and girls but, overwhelmingly, as pupils.”
In Schoolgirls, Peggy Orenstein conducted a study by visiting two middle schools in San Francisco, one that was predominately low-class students and one in a more affluent area. Orenstein examines the confidence gap between girls and boys through her study. In one observation, she examined a teacher who asked a classroom “What would your life be like if you were born the opposite sex?”, the teacher then had the class make a list of what would be different if they were the opposite sex. When the students begin to share, traditional gender stereotypes were revealed. A boy stated, “I wouldn’t play baseball because I would be afraid of breaking a nail.” Girls made statements such as, “I wouldn’t care how I look or if my clothes matched”, “I could stay out later”, “I’d get to play more sports.” Other boys make statements such as “I would have to help my mom cook”, “I’d have to spend time on my hair”. Through this, Orenstein noticed that all of the boys observations about gender swapping involve disparaging “have to’s” whereas the girls seem wistful with longing. By sixth grade, it is clear that they have learned to equate maleness with opportunity and femininity with constraint. This creates a resentment that produces a negative effect in the classroom when males associate their sex as privileged and dominate while girls feel the need to be submissive and reserved into what they believe are traditionally feminine roles.
This negative attitude about gender ability translates into the classroom as well. “For children aged between about 5-6 and 11-12, primary or elementary schooling is a major site for the construction of communities of masculinity and femininity practice.” Orenstein describes a “hidden curriculum” in classrooms where female students are subjected to different treatment than the males. This hidden curriculum is a belief that educational materials are not gender neutral. Orenstein says that, “the ‘hidden curriculum’ has recently been applied to the ways in which schools help reinforce gender roles, whether they intend to or not.”
One of the biggest issues that Orenstein found during her study was the vast difference in confidence in the classroom between males and females. For example, Orenstein noticed that when the teacher asked questions to a class, boys would make it a priority to be the first to speak and be the loudest. Boys would call out every answer, even when the teacher asked the class to raise their hands. The females in the class would raise their hands and wait patiently when they had a question and would usually get ignored over the boys shouting out answers. The teacher does not say anything to condone the boys’ aggressiveness, but she doesn’t have to: they insist on-and receive her attention even when she consciously tries to shift it elsewhere in order to make the class more equitable.
Orenstein explains a situation where a boy named Kyle shouted, “I know!” to a question that was asked by the teacher. Instead of calling on Kyle, who had already answered more than his share of questions, the teacher turned to a girl named Dawn who had her hand raised to ask a question. As she begins speaking about her confusion, Kyle interrupts yelling “But I know, I know!” the teacher ignores him but Dawn is rattled and stops speaking. Kyle then yells “I know!” again and then yells out the answer before Dawn can. The teacher does not reprimand Kyle, but simply states, “That’s correct, does everyone understand?”. Kyle shouts “Yes!” and the teacher moves on while Dawn remains confused without her question answered. Situations like these are commonly occurring which make girls have lower self esteem and confidence in the classroom. This scenario validates Kyle’s action while invalidating Dawn’s right to speak. This is not Kyle’s fault, he does not mean to take away from Dawn, but he is a product of society and his biological personality traits that cause him to be a more aggressive student. Separating the classes could help eliminate this issue. Without boys and their natural assertion, girls have more of a chance to participate, and in turn grow their academic self-esteem. One teacher during Orenstein’s observations admitted that she “Definitely plays to the boys” in class. By dividing the genders, teachers would not have to worry about how they divide their time between boys and girls.
III. Why Girls Succeed in Single-Sex Classrooms
One of the largest problems facing girls in education is the lack of attention from teachers. As a result, girls do not complete school with the same confidence levels as males. Research conducted by the American Association of University Women shows that teachers give more classroom attention and more esteem- building encouragement to boys. Girls are already under considerable pressure from their peers to play down and diminish their academic success, and encouragement from teachers is essential to their academic growth. Girls intuitively desire approval and need teachers to encourage and assure them. “This is related to the way that girl communities of femininity tend to treat being nice as an essential part of acceptable femininity.” Decreased confidence in the classroom has demonstrated to affect educational potential in girls. The 1990 AAUW poll, Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, documents a loss of self-confidence in girls that is twice that for boys as they move from childhood to adolescence. Schools play a crucial role in challenging and changing gender role expectations that undermine the self-confidence and achievement of girls. Sharing a classroom with boys has shown to hurt female self- esteem because male personalities tend to dominate attention. “The teacher-student interaction patterns in science classes are often particularly biased.” This disadvantages girls in the classroom and stunts their academic capability.
Therefore, support from teachers is necessary to encourage more females to pursue “male fields” such as math and science. Even girls who are highly competent in math and science are much less likely to pursue scientific or technological careers than are their male classmates. “A study of high school seniors found that 64 percent of the boys who had taken physics and calculus were planning to major in science and engineering in college, compared to only 18.6 percent of the girls who had taken the same subjects.” Further, educational curriculums need to be designed to encourage female participation. “One study of science classrooms found that 79 percent of all student-assisted science demonstrations were carried out by boys.” Without boys in the classroom, the girls would have to carry out the science demonstrations. “School science structures are structured by norms of masculinity, focusing on the rationality of the mind, so that primary school science becomes a strongly masculinizing practice, in which boys can control and dominate discussions through an assertion of the priority and accuracy of their observations over those of girls.”
In an experiment in restructuring boys’ and girls’ access to computers, also strongly labeled as masculine, “a group of girls were trained to teach other children to use particular applications. This worked well when passing their knowledge to girls, but was far more problematic with boys.” “The latter tended to talk over them, making teaching very difficult, challenged their expertise, and would refuse help from an ‘expert’ girl even when they could not manage without it.” “The boys in effect perceived the situation not as an act of helping, but as one of competition with girls in a masculine area, and they were reluctant to accept the girls’ expertise.”
Heteronormativity proves to be a constant issue with girl students. In an effort to appear feminine around boys, girls often suppress their academic talent. Girls will also target other girls for demonstrating academic success. “Girls have to ‘give up for the sake of ‘Relationships’, silencing their own voices and suppressing their knowledge in order to fit in with their friends.” “The emphasis on niceness, in some ways, acts as a counter-discourse to the practices of the school: it is an open rejection of, and resistance to the competitive nature of school life. At the same time, however, it denies academically successful girls the ability to consider themselves both feminine and clever.” Removing boys from the situation would help to dilute this problem.
It is important to keep in mind that simply removing the boys does not solve the problem. The educational system within itself needs reform in curriculum, teaching methods, and evaluation tools. Separating the sexes is only the first step towards stronger primary educations. Separated learning environments allow the teachers to tailor their teaching methods to the type of learning environment most conducive for their students. For girls, the teaching environment may be more reading and analytically based and have fewer competition-style components.
IV: Why Boys Succeed in Single-Sex Classrooms
The dialogue about single-sex education has been focused towards how girls are short-changed in the system, however it is important to recognize that boys are done a disservice as well. These traits come both biologically and environmentally but they need to be addressed and balanced for academic flourishing.
“While high-achieving boys are generally found to enjoy competition, the association of masculinity with success means that a competitive classroom atmosphere -often encouraged because teachers believe that it is more ‘boy-friendly’ – may actually do less successful boys a disservice. Faced with competition, they may give up and try to perform their masculinity in other ways.” Boys who do not act competitively will perform their masculinity in an alternative method such as suppressing their enthusiasm. “Reports show that some boys spoke of having to pretend a lack of interest and involvement in schoolwork in order to preserve their status in the peer group. The contradictions between being a successful pupil and being a full member of a local community of masculinity that is constructed in opposition to this can be very strong.”
V: In Practice
A dozen schools in New York City tried separating classrooms and they found it highly successful. “A few parents expressed reservations at first, but it was popular enough that other schools followed suit. P.S. 140 found the separate classrooms helped students focus more academically.” 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.” “‘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.”
VI. Criticism
VII: Conclusion
Just separating classes into different sexes is not enough. The goal of single-sex education is to provide positive education techniques that are catered to the specific audience. Therefore, using the same curriculum for boys and girls may not prove to be successful. Teachers need to work with their classes and find what educational level they are at in order to teach successfully. There are strategies that a teacher will find works well in an all-girls classroom that would not even work in a co-educational classroom. Single-sex education requires educational restructuring, not just separation.
There are many variables that are in play with education separation. Simply putting girls and boys in different buildings is not going to fix the problem. A full educational reform needs to be called for in order to evaluate curriculum, teaching methods, evaluation methods and student progress. While sex separation is proactive in classrooms, young students still need socialization with peers of the opposite sex to provide healthy relationships. With that in mind, the ideal school environment would be a co-educational school building with single-sex classrooms so that students could interact with other sexes during electives, such as art, gym, or music, and interact at lunch and at recess times. I also strongly believe that we cannot shelter students forever, so I believe the best education system would allow the classrooms to come back together coeducationally in secondary school after fundamental educational properties have been developed in primary single-sex classrooms. When traditional gender roles matter less, the student, male or female, prospers.