Singles

Miss Whelan is a senior at Princeton University.

WHEN 14-year-old Cydnee Couch was in an ordinary public school in New York City, she tried hard to keep up with her schoolwork, but it was a losing battle. The boys' spitballs, incessant chatter, and frequent tugs on her ponytail were constant distractions. Then, at the beginning of seventh grade, she transferred to the Young Women's Leadership School, a newly started all-girls charter public school in East Harlem, and she immediately noticed the difference. "I can concentrate," she says.

While opponents of single-sex education claim that the benefits are unproven, students like Cydnee are testimony to its value for the girls and boys who choose it. A grass-roots push for single-sex public-school education is under way across the country. Several states are experimenting with single-sex classrooms, with New York and California taking the lead.

But the schools have faced not only educationist opposition but also legal challenges. The National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union don't want public-school kids to have the option of single-sex education. They say students are hurt, not helped, by single-sex classrooms, and that separate schooling for boys and girls is unconstitutional -- that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. For these lobbies, separation by sex is as inherently unequal as separation by race.

In fact, the case for single-sex schooling does not depend on anecdotal evidence like Cydnee's. Scores of studies worldwide have shown that girls in single-sex high schools demonstrate a significantly higher rate of improvement on reading-achievement and science-aptitude tests between sophomore and senior years than their co-educated peers. And boys who attend single-sex high schools have higher self-confidence, are more involved in extracurricular activities, and take more foreign languages and English classes than their counterparts in co-ed schools.

Important as these findings are, they are secondary to the real issue: freedom. If parents want to send their children to single-sex academies, why shouldn't they have that choice?

Whether our current courts would rule this form of school choice constitutional is an open question; the issue has not come before the Supreme Court in just that way. The Fourteenth Amendment says no person may be denied the "equal protection of the laws," and Brown v. Board of Education held that separate cannot be equal in the public schools when race is the division line. But the courts have never treated sexual classifications as demanding the "strict scrutiny" afforded to racial classifications.

Brown was based on sociological studies which found that single-race schooling inherently hurts black educational achievement and thus produces inequality. Those findings have later been persuasively disputed even when race is the issue. And as we have seen, sexual segregation has been shown to produce superior results for many students of both sexes.

Detractors cite the recent Supreme Court decision ordering the all-male Virginia Military Institute to admit women as proving that sexual segregation in educational settings is unconstitutional. But the VMI case, whatever the wisdom of the outcome, involved a set of circumstances that does not apply in most instances of single-sex education. The Court ruled that no comparable school could be created for women, and that no justification for VMI's all-male status that the school's administrators had been able to produce outweighed that fact.

These conditions do not apply at most of the single-sex charter schools sprouting across the country. In California, pairs of schools -- one for girls, the other for boys -- have now been started in pilot districts. These partner schools receive equal funding, staffing, equipment, facilities, and books. Some districts get an overwhelming response for the all-boys schools -- in one area, a hundred boys and seven girls applied for the pair of programs -- while in other districts the ratio is reversed. This is not a mark of inequality. Furthermore, with both schools opening their doors simultaneously, neither has the advantage over the other of a decades-old reputation. The districts are scrupulous in seeing that neither is better established or better endowed. And, once again, the important thing is that the students and parents have been enabled to decide what type of education best suits their needs.

While each school district should be allowed to find what method works best for its children, probably the ideal system would consist of an all-boys school, an all-girls school, and a coeducational school. That ought to answer any possible objection to single-sex education under the Court's current reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as any parents' objections to doing away with the sort of coeducational schooling they grew up with.

SINGLE-SEX education is far from an untested innovation. Although many of the private schools catering to the affluent have recently chosen to follow the public-school trend toward coeducation, such schools were traditionally single-sex. A mere 1 per cent of all schools are sexually segregated today, but recent enrollment numbers show these percentages are on the rise.