Single-Sex Schools

The National Catholic Register has a very interesting article on single-sex schools for this week's edition.^[1] Taking an in-depth look at the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) campaign against them, it also covers in some detail the research refuting the ACLU position. Of particular interest to me was a school that randomly assigned students into either single sex classrooms or mixed classrooms. Children of both sexes performed significantly better in the single-sex classrooms.

While the ACLU is technically right in saying that the existence of a single-sex approach to education creates the possibility of discrimination, I believe that it is wrong to say that it must cause such discrimination. It simply does not stand to reason that it should be impossible for a district to create equivalent classes in each school. The weakness of the ACLU's position is further revealed by studies such as the one mentioned above: for in such a situation, there would be the same teacher, the same text, so on and so forth, and yet the ACLU would remain opposed.

Women can certainly do well in and provide valuable contributions to many of the areas, law, medicine, science, so on, where they have historically been excluded. That is a far cry, however, from proving that they provide these contributions while thinking and learning in precisely the same way their male counterparts do. Indeed, such a conclusion would seem counter-intuitive. If the addition of women (as opposed to a woman who happens to excel individually) brings something to the field, then it must be because they bring something to the field that was lacking before.

But that's rather an aside. Lets look at the following quote:

According to a systematic review released by the Department of Education in 2005, of 2,221 studies, the department found a preponderance of studies that yielded results lending support to same-sex schooling.^[2]

Clearly here, regardless of the accuracy of my ideas here on how men and women contribute (differently, but both valuably), we are doing women a disservice by educating them with the guys. I am told there is a shortage of women in science, computers, and engineering. Might this be the cause? Are you positive that the situation might not be improved if we were not quite so zealous about opening each and every single-sex classroom to members of the opposite sex? For even all-girls schools have come under legal pressure to open up.