Michelle Martin

Single-sex or not

Sunday, October 24, 2010

It’s time to start thinking about high school for Caroline. Just typing that sentence scares me a bit; Teresa just got her first tooth, and it seems like such a short time ago that Caroline was at the same stage.

But she’s not, a point that was made abundantly clear to me when I took her to a Shadow Day at an all-girls Catholic high school.

Standing there in her school uniform — almost the same as the uniforms the high school students were wearing; she wouldn’t even need to buy a new skirt — she easily could have been one of the high schoolers. She was on the small side, but there were students who were smaller.

Caroline is in seventh grade, so she has more than a year before she (and we) decide on a high school. She gets good enough grades to give her lots of options, and she wants to look at many of them.

But she was already asking what it would be like to go to a school with only girls.

That’s a question I can’t really answer. My Catholic high school — in the Chicago suburbs — has been co-ed since its founding in 1936.

My husband doesn’t have any experience of single-sex education either. He went to Lane Tech in the 1970s, in the first class to have girls there for all four years. Some of the teachers weren’t too welcoming of the girls, he said, but the male students didn’t seem to mind.

Research on single-sex schools has mixed results, according to a U.S. Department of Education analysis of several studies. Most research projects show single-sex schools either having no effect or a mild positive effect on academic achievement and self-esteem. Even those positive effects come with caveats: Latina and African-American girls had slightly higher academic achievement while non-Latina white girls had the same achievement in co-ed and single-sex schools. Increased self-esteem for girls in all-girls schools may have been limited to certain areas, such as academics or leadership, and not apply to their overall self-concept.

But even those caveats beg questions: Is the increased effect on Latinas and African Americans caused by the poor quality of co-ed schools available to them? How can you think of yourself as a good student and good leader and not have a positive effect on your overall self-esteem?

Caroline is not really concerned about any of that. She’s just wondering what it’s like to not have boys around all day. I told her friends had told me they liked not having to worry so much about what they looked like in the morning, and having to work on projects with someone you have a crush on can be distracting.

Crushes exist in middle school too, she reminded me.

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