Why do we fear the rise of single-sex public education in America?

The concept of single-sex education is foreign to most Americans. For the past fifty years, the majority of publicly funded school districts in the United States have offered exclusively ‘co-educational’ classrooms. Institutions catering for all-boys or all-girls have largely been confined to the private and religious sectors.

In United States v Virginia, the Supreme Court held that single-sex education in the public system can only be constitutional where students of both genders are provided with ‘tangible and intangible facilities” of equal quality.

In recent years, however, there has been a noticeable rise in the number of school districts which have begun to provide the option of single-sex education. While only a dozen public schools offered sex-separated opportunities in 2002, there are now at least five hundred and fifty institutions with single-sex classrooms in the United States (Figures from the National Association For Single-Sex Public Education). Under the current federal rules, published in October 2006, a school district may establish single sex classrooms where there is a rationale for providing one-gender teaching in a subject, and where the district has already made available co-educational instruction at another accessible location. In the case of creating single-sex schools, the district simply has to ensure there is a mixed-gender institution within the vicinity.

The rise in single-sex schooling has been closely monitored by academics and practitioners alike. Many commentators have been extremely critical of the trend, with terminology such as ‘re-segregation’ and ‘educational apartheid” making its way into the most heated debates. But single-sex education is still commonplace in many regions outside of the United States, particularly Europe, South America and Asia. In these areas, there is no suggestion that educating girls and boys separately is discriminatory or a cover for some other, malign policy agenda. Indeed, if you were to tell a parent that sending their child to a single-sex public school is tantamount to segregation, they would probably be highly offended.

So why is the situation so different in America?

I believe that much of this discussion boils down to the base point from which one starts his or her argument. In the United States, separation in education has historically been associated with racial segregation and the attempt to deny African American children access to educational opportunities. Teaching children separately has become a symbol of the attempt by one class of persons to assert dominance and racist feelings of superiority over another class of persons, while simultaneously holding that other class down. Viewed in that context, and considering America’s troubled history on the question of gender, it is not hard to see why commentators would suspect that there must be some hidden agenda driving single-sex education; for instance, it must be trying to discriminate against young females.

However, in a country such as Ireland, where there has been single-sex education for more than a century, teaching children separately has no such negative connotations. In the early twentieth century, as in many countries, single-sex schooling was the only means of ensuring that all Irish females  had equal access to education in a society that was still deeply religious. While such archaic reasons for maintaining separate schooling have long disappeared, single-sex public schools remain in modern times because of the overwhelming evidence that Irish children, particularly young females, perform better in that particular environment. Therefore, unlike in the United States, Irish people have always viewed single-sex education as an ‘enabler’ rather than an obstacle, and it is probably for that reason that the policy continues to be relatively uncontroversial to this day.