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Best Schools for Girls and Boys Have Feminist Values

Toronto Star

Saturday, April 11

By MICHELE LANDSBERG, 

Grrls or girls, cyber or Spice, young females are the media Flavour of the Month. And who can blame us if we'd rather write about the delightfully spunky, optimistic young --- than brood about the inequities that still beset grown-up women?

Sometimes, of course, there are darker motives at work. Conservative newspapers whipped themselves into a headline frenzy over "girls' brutality" and "girl gang violence" all winter, the better to discredit the feminist movement which supposedly gave rise to such unnatural horrors. Of course, the crisis was completely manufactured. There is, in fact, no increase in "girls' violence". (If you'd like to see how the supposed crisis was inflated, buy the current issue of This Magazine, in which reporter Nicole Nolan punctures the media hype.)

Girls are such a hot topic that when the American Association of University Women (AAUW) issued a report on single-sex education, newspapers around North America snapped it up as a front-page item.

Single-sex classes, reported the media, do not help girls do better in math and science after all. Oh, they might give a boost to girls' "self-esteem", but other than that, you might easily conclude from the news stories that these all-girl experiments were a big floppo.

Interesting, if true. The problem is, it's not true and that's not what the report said.

Six years ago, the AAUW documented the sweeping discrimination against girls at all levels and in all areas of public education. To follow up, the Association called together a round-table of 16 education researchers last November to "clarify the subject's complexities".

Their chief clarification: no conclusion is possible. It's just too early to tell --- and the experiments in separate girls' classes are so few, so scattered and so different in style, motivation and context, that over-all pronouncements are meaningless. True, no study yet shows an upward surge in girls' math scores. That could be because teaching methods haven't changed, or the standards of measurement are unclear.

It occurs to me to ask: when the report is so firm about there being no clear findings yet, why do I hear the thump thump of reporters leaping to conclusions?

And there's another question to ask:  did the AAUW perhaps become more cautious since its first report? I don't know, but a lone effort in New York to create a separate school for black girls ran into a firestorm of hostility from civil libertarians.

The current report rounds up some fascinating interim findings. Some all-girl Catholic schools, for example, inspire better learning because they focus on academics and have MORE FEMALE PRINCIPALS. Some old-fashioned sex-segregated schools, however, especially if they're designed to instill traditional gender roles, produce no significant educational advantage for girls.

And how about elite private girls' schools? Aren't their achievements merely the predictable pay-off for the children of wealth and culture? Well, perhaps not, because ne study uncovered similar benefits at an all-girl public school in Philadelphia where 90 per cent of the students are black. Some findings are indisputable: most girls are happier in an all-female environment. Boys prefer the co-ed model. Why? It seems if boys can't bully and harass the girls --- because the girls have been whisked away to a safer environment --- they'll simply turn on each other. (Will SOMEBODY please start changing the boy culture?)

No wonder that girls in a school without boys are more confident, freer in their behaviour, more interested in math and science, and tend to base their self-worth on their intelligence and achievement. In co-ed schools, by sad contrast, the single best predictor of a girl's self-worth is her physical appearance. One study points out that girls' confidence tumbles dramatically if they're moved from a separate to a co-ed school. Another researcher says that co-ed schools "wash away" girls' self-worth with every football and basketball game, in a culture which "celebrates male dominance".

Rummage through all the contradictory findings in the AAUW report and, despite everything, a picture of a really good school begins to emerge out of the fog. It's small. It feels like a community. All the teachers take responsibility for every student's learning. Expectations are high; the teachers focus on a core curriculum that includes the arts. Co-ed or not, this school's students flourish because the staff is specially trained to understand and dismantle gender stereotypes and discrimination in all its forms.
     No, you didn't see that in the news.

And here's a prediction: one headline you'll never see, even though it's a truth well-documented in the report:  "Best Schools For Girls and Boys Have Feminist Values".

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