The Pros and Cons of Single-Sex Education

Common Positive Claims
1. Separate classes for girls and boys enable teaching and learning and reduce achievement gaps. For girls, for example, single-sex education is viewed as a way to enable girls to do better in math and science. For urban males, single-sex education is viewed as a way to reduce dropout rates.
2. Avoids classroom challenges produced by peer attitudes toward the opposite sex such as male domination of females and distractions due to the presence of the opposite sex.
3. Single-sex education counters male-females stereotypes by ensuring that both sexes can take initiative in meeting challenges, assume leadership roles, and pursue activities that in co-educational settings often are seen as too “masculine” for females or too “feminine” for males.
4. Avoids teachers responding differently to male and female students (e.g., favoring males, overprotecting females).
5. Allows education to take into account the fact that boys and girls develop at different rates during the early schooling years which produces differences in their respective academic learning readiness.
 
Common Claims Against
1. Behavior often is harder to manage in all male classes.
2. There is little empirical evidence that single-sex education improves achievement for males and females. Achievement gaps are more associated with socio-economic factors than gender.
3. Single-sex education maintains and even exacerbates sexist attitudes and gender stereotypes by creating a gender-stereotypical learning environment and limiting exposure to the opposite sex.
4. Single-sex classes can make the transition to co-educational situations difficult.
5. Single-sex education tends to overemphasize academics at the expense of “whole child” development.

The following are the pros and cons highlighted in a 2013 technical report on single-sex education done by Connecticut’s State Education Resource Center.
( http://ctserc.org/docs/Single-sex%20Education%20report%20SERC%202013.pdf )

THE PROS
• Makes boys less competitive and more cooperative and collaborative
• Makes girls feel less pressure as they mature and develop
• Increases staff sensitivity and awareness of gender differences
• Improves peer interaction
• Provides positive same-gender role models
• Provides more opportunities to pursue academic and extracurricular endeavors
without racial and gender stereotypes
• Is less distracting than co-ed environments

THE CONS
• Promotes gender stereotyping
• Undermines gender equality
• Doesn’t prepare students for work or family life
• Makes exclusion acceptable
• Doesn’t value diversity
• Doesn’t socialize students to be less sexist
• Expensive to run two parallel programs