Single-sex schools unbalance education

By Patrick Welsh

The notion that girls are getting shortchanged in coed schools has gotten new life with the Bush administration's recent announcement that it plans to support the creation of single-sex public schools.

Whenever I've heard the arguments — that boys, whether they be the scholars or the troublemakers, commandeer the attention of teachers; that girls lose confidence, become passive and are distracted when boys are in the classroom — I can't help but wonder what girls and what classrooms they are talking about. Certainly not the ones I see every day at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va.

This year, as usual, the power balance in my classes is weighted heavily toward the girls. I simply don't see the wilting flowers that Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and the advocates of single-sex education think would flourish in all-girl schools.

Senior Lee Sparks, who was accepted early into the University of Virginia (UVA), thinks that older women like Hutchison and Clinton fail to realize how much her generation has profited from the feminist movement. "In most of my classes, the girls are the ones who excel above and beyond the boys; we expect to be able to excel and don't think twice about it," she says.

Last summer, Sparks spent three weeks with 500 other young women at Girls State, the annual leadership conference sponsored by the American Legion.

"The women in charge kept assuming that we felt we were limited in what we could achieve simply because we were females. They kept talking about female empowerment ... telling us that we could make it even though we were women. The girls were laughing about it because we never thought that being a female would keep us from succeeding."

I'm sure there are some girls in my classes who are more interested in impressing their male classmates with their looks and fashions than with their insights into Jane Austen or Shakespeare. But is putting them in an all-girls class going to make them any more focused or scholarly? I doubt it.

As the current national discussion on how vicious girls are to each other is bringing to light, the biggest sources of intimidation and distraction for many teenage young women are their female classmates.

Today's arguments for all-girls schools remind me of the arguments I heard 20 years ago from some older African-American colleagues who had taught in Alexandria's formerly segregated schools. They felt that, despite the inequity in funding and facilities, black kids got more out of segregated schools — that with integration, many black students felt uncomfortable, lost confidence, were afraid to compete with white students academically and lost out on the leadership positions that were open to them when schools were segregated.

Much of what they said was true, but with time the state of African-American students in Alexandria improved dramatically, far beyond what it was during segregation. The answer came from working to make the theoretical benefits of integration a reality — for kids from all races and backgrounds.

I am sure that some of our students who are Central American refugees might feel more comfortable in schools that were exclusively Hispanic, and that our Muslim immigrants from Africa and the Middle East might be more comfortable in exclusively Muslim schools. I certainly felt comfortable going to my "kind" of school in the '50s — one full of second-generation Irish Catholics being taught by Irish nuns. But some discomfort is the price of growth and coming to understand and be part of the diverse society we all share.

What the present discussion of single-sex schools is overlooking are the unique advantages of going to co-ed schools.

"I don't want to learn in an environment that isn't at all realistic," says UVA-bound senior Lindsay Walsh. "If I were off in an all-girls school it would be an admission of inferiority — that I was there because I couldn't quite compete with males. If I don't learn to compete now, when I am I going to learn?"

Furthermore, Walsh says, "I love hearing male viewpoints in class, the same way I love hearing viewpoints of kids from other countries and other religions when we are discussing politics. That's priceless."

In co-ed schools, it is easier for young men and women to truly understand each other and form deep friendships, above and beyond anything romantic or sexual. I see this especially in band, orchestra and sports like track and crew where boys and girls represent the school together.

"We race against each other in practice; we cheer for each other at the regattas," says Walsh, who rows on our women's varsity eight team. "When you are together with guys, striving under pressure for a common goal, a bond develops that helps you understand each other. We see our male teammates as close friends, not weekend dating material."

Walsh worries that the push for single-sex schools is a ruse of conservatives to create more pressure for private school vouchers. Whether intended or not, the stress on single-sex schools could do that. In most public school districts, there will be so many equity issues and legal challenges that creating single-sex schools will be too complicated and divisive, not to mention a strain on resources. The only alternative for parents who buy the idea will be the private single-sex schools that already exist.

Cloistering young women in schools by themselves is not going to give them the academic and social confidence that girls such as Lindsay Walsh, Lee Sparks and so many others I see every day possess.

Indeed, doing so runs the risk of depriving them of the dynamic interaction with young men that will prove invaluable in the world beyond the school walls.

What makes a difference in whether girls — and let's not forget boys — flourish in schools is not whether they are educated separately or together, but whether their schools have focus, discipline (which includes zero tolerance for bullying or harassment from any quarter), involved parents and caring teachers who know how to communicate their subject matter.

High school English teacher Patrick Welsh is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.