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All Boys, All Girls: Philadelphia Could Approve Another Single-Sex School Today. Not Everyone Backs the Idea

Posted on: Wednesday, 18 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Martha Woodall, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jan. 18--Fueled by concerns that public inner-city schools are failing to educate low-income and minority students, schools for boys or girls only are on the rise.

Before 1996, there were three publicly funded single-sex schools in the country, including Philadelphia High School for Girls. Today, there are 42. The roster includes two more Philadelphia schools, E. Washington Rhodes and Thomas FitzSimons, which became single-sex in September. There are no single-sex public schools in New Jersey.

And, if a proposed charter school for boys modeled after the prestigious Boston Latin School is approved by the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the number of single-sex schools in the district could increase to four.

The commission could vote on the Southwest Philadelphia Academy for Boys and five other charter applications as early as this afternoon.

If approved, the school would open in September with ninth grade only, adding a grade each year. Enrollment would be open to all male students in the city. The rigorous college-prep curriculum would require, among other things, four years of studying Latin.

James E. Nevels, chairman of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, supports the concept of single-sex schools but says Southwest Philadelphia Academy for Boys' charter application will be judged on its merits.

Paul Vallas, the district's chief executive, agreed.

"We will look at the other things: the curriculum, plans to recruit," said Vallas, who oversaw the opening of a girls' charter school in Chicago when he headed that district. "It will rise or fall on those issues."

Support for single-sex schools is getting help from the federal No Child Left Behind law, which has led to proposed changes to Title IX regulations, to encourage more single-sex public schools. Approved in 1972, Title IX bans sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds.

But as the debate over the proposed charter school in Philadelphia shows, single-sex public schools remain controversial. Proponents say that many boys and girls flourish in single-sex schools. Opponents say that such schools violate state and federal law and can reinforce stereotypes.

Several law organizations have said they might sue the district if the charter is approved. And members of the charter group say they are so serious about their project that they will consider opening an independent boys' academy if their proposal is rejected.

"I think the basic problem is that it violates state and federal law," said Carol E. Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project in Center City. "I don't think it gets much clearer than that."

The project also has attracted opposition from the Education Law Center, the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

The law groups contend that the proposed single-sex charter would violate the U.S. Constitution, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Pennsylvania's charter law, the state's Fair Educational Opportunities Act, and the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Amendment.

"We are not opposed to a Latin school at all and think probably girls would benefit every bit as much as the boys," Tracy said. "But this does not pass legal muster."

The law groups raised similar objections to FitzSimons, which has boys in grades six through 11, and Rhodes, which has girls in the same grades. Both are privately managed public schools in North Philadelphia.

Rosemary C. Salomone, a law professor at St. John's University in New York who is advising the proposed charter, maintains that the boys' charter would be legal under state and federal law.

Salomone, who is the author of Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling, calls the resurgence of single-sex education "a new approach to an old idea." She has prepared a legal memo for the School Reform Commission to rebut the objections of the Women's Law Project.

"We have a strong argument against all the points they raised," said David P. Hardy, one of the founders of the proposed charter.

"The reason we went with single-sex is that research shows that a lot of boys do much better in a single-sex environment," Hardy said.

That research, he said, shows that, when boys don't have to show off to impress girls, they are less aggressive. "They become more attentive to academic study and show more willingness to focus on the arts," he said. "There are reasons why parents spend tens of thousands of dollars to send their sons to the Haverford School, Chestnut Hill Academy, and St. Joseph's Prep."

Girls in single-sex schools develop leadership skills and are more likely to take advanced math and science courses, studies have shown.

Many advocates of single-sex education also say a heightened focus on academics is critical in inner-city schools, where educators are trying to counter a street culture that devalues schooling.

Proponents say the successes at some of the newer single-sex schools, such as the Young Women's Leadership School in Harlem, which sends 100 percent of its graduates to college, demonstrate the effectiveness of that approach.

Leonard Sax, a Maryland physician-psychologist, said recent research showing that boys and girls have different learning styles bolsters the argument for single-sex education.

"Boys and girls do learn differently," said Sax, the author of Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences and chair of the nonprofit National Association for Single Sex Public Education in Poolesville, Md.

But opponents say the research into single-sex education is too limited to support expanding it. They also fear that separate schools could undermine hard-won educational equality gains for girls and minorities.

Verna L. Williams, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati's College of Law who has studied single-sex schooling, said he worries that the approach can do more harm than good by reinforcing sexual and racial stereotypes. "In the desperation of improving education, in public schools in particular, in urban settings, single-sex seems really attractive," she said.

But Williams,a former vice president and director of educational opportunities with the National Women's Law Center in Washington, has found that, in many cases, the single-sex schools in inner cities are proposed to improve safety or reduce teen pregnancy.

"The fact that so much of the discourse surrounding single-sex education is about black children in troubled urban school districts is cause for concern," Williams wrote in a 2004 article in the Wisconsin Law Review.

There is no similar push for single-sex schooling in affluent suburban districts, she said.

Although middle-class children benefit, "benefits are the most pronounced for at-risk kids. And they are most pronounced for African American and Hispanic at-risk kids," said Cornelius Riordan, a sociology professor at Providence College, who has been researching single-sex education at nonpublic and public schools for 20 years.

The proposed changes to Title IX were announced in March 2004 by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige but have not yet been implemented.

The department received nearly 6,000 comments. Final regulations are expected this spring. The Women's Law Project and the American Association of University Women were among the groups that oppose the changes.

Contact staff writer Martha Woodall at 215-854-2789 or martha.woodall@phillynews.com.

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Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

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