Should Boys and Girls Be Taught Separately In Schools?

After reading a book called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” Alabama school principal Lee Mansell began segregating school classes by sex, saying that separation is better for boys and girls.

Foley Intermediate School began offering the separate classes a few years ago after Lee Mansell, the school's principal read a book by author Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” She also read an article in a magazine that by separating boys and girls as the book described, she could raise the test scores of her school's lowest-achieving group, minority boys. The book, the article and the book that the article's author ended up writing titled “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences” feature stories of children, particularly middle school ages boys who are failing and on Ritalin can transform their test scores and school successes by getting into single-sex schools. The New York Times reports that the school's decision has both support and opposition, as does the theory in general. Supporters say that boys and girls should be separated in school because the two groups are essentially different from each other and because they have such different social experiences and social needs. People who oppose the concept point to "Title IX,” the 1972 Education Amendments that make it illegal to discriminate in schools on the basis of sex. Rosemary Salomone, a legal scholar at St. John’s University School of Law says “What kind of message does it give when you tell a group of kids that boys and girls need to be separated because they don’t even see or hear alike?” Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation sums it up by saying

“Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there’s also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy.”