Single-Sex vs. Coed: The Evidence
singlesexschools.org
singlesexschools.org
I would like the article to answer this: how well do the kids in the single-sex schools do later on in life, when they end up having to work alongside people of the opposite sex? What are the relative rates of rape, spousal abuse, divorce, unplanned pregnancy, etc. between adults who came from the single-sex vs. the co-ed schools?
Say children from single-sex schools grow up to be in relationships that have lower divorce rates. Does that mean that single-sex schools better prepared them for marriage? Or are they just in unhappy relationships that children that grew up in coed schools would know to end earlier since they've more inter-sex socialization experience?
A little googling led me to this article about a study which looked at the same:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-...
And what I thought would be of interest to us here:
In an indication of greater, though still low, interest in the field of engineering, alumnae of single-sex independent schools are three times more likely than those from coeducational independent schools to report that they intend to pursue a career in engineering (4.4 percent vs. 1.4 percent).
sigh statistics... amirite?
My folks sent me to a very good, private, single sex school from the age of 7-18. Came out with an awesome education and no idea how to even have a conversation with a woman. Women may as well have been aliens.
That was a good few years ago now and I'm fairly normalised I think, but it took a while. Would never do that to any kids I have, though that ain't looking exactly likely any time soon.
Perhaps having single-sex classes for some subjects would help?
Maybe it would have been worse for my academic career, but again, maybe not. But I can only think that it couldn't have been worse in terms of social weirdness.
that working in consonance with gender differences can help to boost achievement for both girls and boys, even in a coed classroom
Which means that we can't simply say that there are no gender differences - it doesn't work, probably because of the interplay of societal and cultural factors which perpetuate/reinforce existing biases
and also this part:
They randomly assigned 401 8th-graders either to single-gender physics class or to coed physics class, for one school year. At the end of the year, the girls who had been randomly assigned to the all-girls classroom were more engaged in physics and less likely to agree with statements such as "physics is for boys." Girls who had been randomly assigned to coed physics class were more likely to agree that "physics is for boys."
Which means that for certain limited set of subjects where gender bias is already present in the culture of the society, this methodology could potentially be used to help in removing that bias, (as a temporary transitional state)...
So I think there is an interesting question to be asked, what sort of activities can provide an appropriate context for social interaction given the organization of our present day cities, without interfering so much with teaching and mastery?
But attending college and getting better grades is not the goal. In fact, one of the biggest employment and political problems in the United States is due to so many middle class parents conditioning their kids into thinking that going to college will solve their future and guarantee them employment. But, let's toss that aside for the moment.
The argument on this site begins with a study of South Korea, which randomly assigns students to coed or same-sex schools (we don't REALLY know how random this is), and shows data which these students are more likely to get higher grades and attend college.
But the real question is NOT can they get better grades - the question is whether there are educational systems that can better prepare students to be a success in LIFE, not just get to college. Do students who attend same-sex schools fare better in relationships, do they push society forward in the underlying principals of a better civilization? Do they make the world better, and are they happy?
The real result? South Korea is ranked 111th in the world in gender equality. (For comparison, the United States is ranked 22nd).
So let's ask something that SingleSexSchools.org will NEVER want to answer - are opportunities for girls in South Korea as good as those offered by men? Is the education of girls in South Korea equal to the education offered to boys?
The reality is that South Korea is not just a bad environment for women and girls - it's bad and getting worse. Their rankings in these categories were some of the lowest just a few years ago and have steadily declined each year.
I don't really have time for a point-by-point rebuttal, but the basic point is this: removing diversity never makes society stronger. Are there benefits for single-sex activities and education? Of course. Is it 'better' to reduce students interaction with the opposite sex to almost none in day-to-day education? The evidence says otherwise.
The issue is always when someone argues for widespread, radical change based on the wrong goals.
This being HN I suspect most of us are men who attended sausage-fest university courses. The all male electronics lab was in the same (large) building as the all female nursing courses. Technically a coed school, but the last woman dropped out of the electronics program in 2nd or 3rd semester. Every year is of course a little different.
Some statistical analysis of different engineering and hard science grads social outcomes would be interesting. Assuming the rate of female engineers varies much by type.
Perhaps a better comparison would be other technical disciplines, from memory the math dept was a much better integrated program.
"opportunities"
As if college application screeners don't care about a students unique history. All you need is a reputation that school xyz only admits girls from all-girl schools not coed and shockingly the quantity of applications from girls from coed schools will collapse. Why waste time applying if you know they'll not admit you?
I'm sorry, someone who attempts to prove their point with studies will always be more persuasive than another's hand waving.
>But attending college and getting better grades is not the goal.
Again, there are many people for whom educational attainment is important.
>Do students who attend same-sex schools [...] push society forward in the underlying principals of a better civilization? Do they make the world better
I'd say better education is a pretty big component of pushing society forward and making the world better. Why force everyone to attend co-ed schools? If some want to attend single-sex schools and this has proven educational benefits, let them do so.
>For comparison, the United States is ranked 22nd [in the world in gender equality]
A big part of which has been played by a well-known group of single-sex schools [1].
Single sex schools clearly helped improve the lot of women in the US (and other countries). But it's not clear that it was because single sex schools are better than co-ed (which is at issue) or that they are better than no schools at all (which appears blindingly obvious).
Consider this study for example[1] which suggests that schools were more tools of indoctrination than improvement.
We find that public schools offered practically zero return education on the margin, yet they did enjoy significant political and financial support from local political elites, if they taught in the “right” language of instruction.
Or this one[2], according to which, being suspended (so: missing school) makes no difference in academic outcomes.
Ideas are dangerous. I think you mean "this is a flawed article because it starts out to buttress a preconception rather than examine the data and then find a conclusion."
"we don't REALLY know how random this is"
Seriously? It's probably at least as random as any random assignment to condition in US college labs (I speak from a great deal of experience here). We're talking huge n values and a system that presumably at least has some level of public scrutiny (again, unlike US college labs). Why compare to US college labs? Because that's where most accepted social science research labs comes from.
In any event, I see two major flaws in the initially cited study that are far more obvious and problematic than this.
1. Not everyone is Korean. Culture does matter. (Not everyone is a US college freshman either, of course.)
And worse:
2. The outcome is measured entirely in terms of going to a 4-year college (good) vs. not going (bad). Not, for example, being "happy" 20 years later. Or graduating from college even.
Anyway, what would we expect from a rambling rant hosted on the domain singlesexschools.org.
You make some interesting connections between different opportunities for girls and boys in South Korea and single-sex schools, but I would be careful to correlate the two. It could very well be that coeducation is helpful in achieving equality on a society level, but maybe after equality has been achieved single-sex education might prove more effective.
The big idea is not that girls distract boys and boys distract girls, so they should be apart. The big idea is that boys and girls, especially at high school age learn/are motivated in fundamentally different ways so splitting them and teaching them in different ways could be more effective.
So this is not empirical evidence, but my mom who has been teaching high school for over 30 years strongly agrees with this. In her opinion the average boy just can't sit still and needs to be motivated more competitively, whilst girls benefit from more social engagement.
Of course that analysis is rather crude. There's subtleties there. Of course boys would benefit from being taught to be more social, and girls would benefit from being taught to be more competitive. But it's clear that there's efficiencies to be had here.
For me personally high school felt as a very inefficient time of learning, but I also had much fun and made many friends with both boys and girls. I wonder if the research has shown anything there. Do boys who graduate from boys-only schools work well with girls? What is their opinion on them? And vice versa?
Although I think high school could benefit from efficiency improvements, I also think high school is an important preparation for growing into a broad-minded adult. I hope they keep that in mind when the decisions are made.
That is all very well, but where do the hermaphrodites go?
The question also reveals the imperfection of the solution. What of the boys who identify as male, but think/learn/are motivated more like girls are? And vice versa? If we were thinking purely in terms of effectiveness, we would instead devise a test that would determine which teaching style would best suit you.
But then these boys would likely be a small minority in girls classes, would that lead to social problems for them? Would it be preferable to just go to a boys class for them?
This brings up the nightmare scenario where in the name of equality, by law girls are not allowed to compete (including sports?) and boys are not allowed to learn by discussion / cooperation.
Given the fixation my educators had on forcing more or less all male EE and CS students to do group labs and group programming projects and group discussion in class and group participation grades, and implementing grade inflation such that your grade is pretty much your attendance record and there's not much point in competing, by the theory that girls can only learn socially not competitively then all male establishments are already doing everything they can to make life harder on the men and easier on the women, short of the proposals like outright segregation "separate but equal" and all that.
In The Netherlands at the end of elementary school there is an aptitude test that high schools base their admittance on. This is a nationwide system, with 3 levels of education. The highest level is a 6 year long education that grants you automatic admittance (except for some number-limited fields) to any university. Note that even if you get a score that only gives you admittance to the lowest level of education you can still get into any university by taking a few years longer and finishing the other levels as well.
Anyway, my best friend in elementary school was always in extra classes because of his supposed special intellectual ability. I feared very much that if I didn't score well at the aptitude test he'd go to a school I wouldn't be able to go to.
Luckily I did score well and was admitted to the highest level, but I can imagine this system could smash dreams.
Wonderful question. Really. I just have two things which will make it more effective:
1. The preferred term is 'intersex' now. I know, but using the word everyone else is using makes people less likely to get angry.
2. Transsexual people are a broader category of people who will be impacted by what you bring up. The number of people who are born with an indeterminate sex (intersexed, that is) is a lot smaller than people with gender dysphoria, or feeling like they've been born into a body of the wrong sex. Trans people are still a minority, but they're a larger minority, and a more vocal one, so people are more likely to care about them. It's not the way things should work, but it's the way they do work.
When you get into gender, the argument can still be forced into a binary perspective by not getting much further than agreeing that some boys can be like girls and some girls like boys.
If you are forced to take into account the full spectrum of physical biology however, it becomes obvious that the issue is far more fundamental than the social labelling. Biology is messy and doesn't care much for people's ideas on exclusive differences.
Except if you do this, you can't really say you're segregating by gender or by sex. You have to say you're segregating by learning style, which isn't what the article's about.
edit - what I am essentially getting at, I guess, is that I don't think that using a more inclusive argument would have made the argument stronger. It would have made it nicer, but not more effective. Those who already agreed with the point will applaud it even more if it is couched in their preferred terms, but those who disagree will either get put off by the language or try and argue about the definition of the group, which is much easier despite being larger, precisely because it is not as well defined.
This idea is even more harmful. The differences within the group are greater then the differences between the groups - but by trying to split the environments along enormously broad divisions, you're ensuring you marginalize huge swathes of people in addition to creating an unhealthy socialization environment.
The reality here is once you let in the idea that gender has something to say about people beyond what their genitals look like, you're letting in any number of other harmful ideas. It's no coincidence that girl's only highschools mysteriously lack shop-classes, for example but always have Home Ec.
It would be ignorant to think otherwise. There are differences between sexes beyond the genitalia. That is not a harmful idea, that is a fact. The harmful idea is that any of the sexes should be denied any opportunity, like a shop-class or Home Ec. That would be equal to denial of education, and I'm proud to say we've moved past that in the past 40 years.
I think it is much more harmful to impose a dogmatic belief that forces everyone to lead identical, mono-cultured lives and denies individual choice.
What if I want to go to a single-sex school? Who are you to deny me that choice?
I'm sadly never surprised that the cinclusions people draw about gendered education just so happen to reinforce societal gender stereotypes.
I also don't like them because they're hell for trans kids. Your education record will out you because your school was single-sex, and you can't transition in school or at least daren't try.
But the needs of minorities don't matter, right?
The thing with girls being more likely to study science actually applies to me. I dropped Physics this year partly because of grades but also I didn't like the male-dominated environment. Had I been to an all-girls' school, maybe that'd be different. But I'm trans, so I'd be stuck at an all-boys' school. That'd be awful.
What about schools segregated by political party or religion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
I thought we, as a society, already concluded that separate cannot be equal. But I have to say, for some reason I don't feel the same negativity towards separation by gender as I do by race. I just think that if we've already decided that divide-by-race is a bad idea then how can divide-by-gender be good? I have a funny feeling that divide-by-political-stance, and race, is already happening due to divide-by-wealth via school fees. I wonder what the dominate race & political-affiliations are at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. versus http://www.csueastbay.edu/
If you could truly prove that you could have separate and better, Brown v. Board of Education would not apply.
Of course this also misses the colossal point of enforcing the gender binary, which is terrible and leads to a broken, sexist society.
Single sex schools are, quite frankly, unethical.
Teens will find ways to socialize with each other whether or not they're in a single-sex environment. It's not unethical to split based on "this group responds better to these methods of teaching."
School isn't the epicenter of all social interaction during a person's youth, nor should it be. Taking this view leads to teen suicide, because if teens are convinced that all of life is just like cruel highschool then they'd rather not live at all. (If your highschool years weren't cruel, then I'd imagine it's hard to understand why this is true. Take it from someone who was hunted.)
How can it not be the epicenter of social interaction for young people when it's where they spend the majority of their waking hours? How many people did you meet in high school vs. how many in extracurricular activities?
I'm going to bow out of this conversation now.
But everyone has to live in it. You're not asking for compassion, you're asking schools to do something that might be advantageous for a minority at the expense of everyone else. How does that make the world a better or more advanced place?
I sympathize with what you're saying, but surely there's better solutions here than single-sex schools.
Based on experience, I would say that for teens (especially earlier teens) in single-sex schools have far fewer ways to socialise with their peers of the opposite sex. This should be obvious.
> School isn't the epicenter of all social interaction during a person's youth, nor should it be.
Based on experience, I would say that teens (especially earlier teens) the place where they spend 8 hours or more per day is in fact crucial to their social interactions. This should be obvious.
I can agree that seeing a grade improvement is not, by itself, enough to get me say we should separate classes by gender here in the US. But if this article didn't make you at least consider that option a bit more than it did before, then you're doing this incorrectly. These are large differences - 0.8 standard deviations increase in scores! They are verified over a large body of students and it was actually randomly assigned. This is great! There are so many questions that I'd pay to have an actual study of that caliber done to answer.
Again, it's not the whole answer. Not everywhere is Seoul and not all students are the same. (In fact, the given article agrees: "Our only concern with the article is with its underlying premise: namely, that either single-gender or coed must be "best." We believe that premise is fundamentally mistaken. The single-gender format is better for some students, and coed is better for others,"). I'm not saying you should be completely convinced by every article that gets posted here that happens to have a scholarly citation. But if this site continues to automatically and consistently dismiss these things just as a matter of course, then how can we ever hope to learn new things and change our views? There's something here. "Grades aren't everything" doesn't mean that "grades aren't important," which doesn't mean "this study is pointless."
Without even looking into the background of this
The fact that someone made up their mind on an issue doesn't by itself mean they're wrong though.
Having a stated belief upfront puts your work in obvious danger of confirmation bias[0]. It can and should be assumed that you will promote results which support your belief and ignore results that don't.
1. I wonder about the effectiveness of single-sex vs. coed schooling.
2. I do a bunch of research.
3. I conclude that single-sex education is significantly more effective, and that students are being harmed by the dominant paradigm of coed schooling.
4. I establish a website to promote my views, and I call it "singlesexschools.org".
5. I display, on my website promoting single-sex schools, the arguments and papers that convinced me single-sex schools were a good idea.
Pretty much anyone who possesses knowledge will be able to give you a "stated belief up front" if you ask them about it. That doesn't mean they started with the belief. Knowledge causes beliefs. In my five-step scenario, what should I have named my website?
The idealist but misguided situation you describe is not the case here, anyway. This reaseach was published by a group formerly known as the NASSPE - the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
No, it wouldn't. Someone more interested in dismissing my ideas than in learning what they were could just as easily say "Effective Schooling is a known advocate of single-sex education, and can therefore not be trusted to report on the issue" (indeed, people say this all the time). The fact that someone is willing to tell you what his ideas are doesn't automatically make them bad ones. And everyone choosing to talk about an issue is going to have an opinion on it.
Not only that, but it's entirely proper, even desired, to state your hypothesis before testing it. Scientists are fighting for it right now, some are proposing a registry of hypotheses to be tested to fight another problem -- publication bias.
The article here touts the word "random", which is essential to the science of the claim - but despite being claimed repeatedly, it remains totally unexamined.
There is bias and there is bias - this article makes no attempt to clear any source of bias, and as such is about as biased as you can get.
While this particular article presents facts in favor of single sex schools, I would think that our duty is to educate our kids and peers to critically question anything they read and at least do a little research (scanning the site to get a basic understanding of the agenda the author may be pushing; to follow the supposedly supporting links, ...).
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1
Also, posted by another commenter in this thread:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-...
It's enough for me not to dismiss the idea.
If I had to put kids in a single-sex school I can imagine that some pupils would get more focused in their work and hence overall get a better mark. My worry though is for their emotional intelligence and ability to grow-up in a mixed world. School is quite a big chunk of kids' life nowadays, where they learn much more than math and history, but also socializing, playing, listening, collaboration, respect. If all those notions are taught only within their own gender, what would/will be their reaction outside this world?
Maybe this is a topic worth discussing; if that's the case, though, give me something not so clearly biased.
Further, it'd be interesting to see their eventual success against those who went to the coed schools.
It'd also be interesting to run a self-assessment of the single-sex students vs the coed students asking them a broad array of well-being questions, e.g. their happiness, level of fulfillment and satisfaction in life, etc.
Interesting starting point, but like pointed out flawed to say single-sex schools are better overall purely based on this one metric. The only thing that can be said here is that single-sex schools drive greater admission to colleges than coed schools in Seoul, given the way these schools are administered there.
Things that definitely need to be addressed - what are the differences in the coed vs single-sex schools these people go to? Are the single-sex schools taught differently at all? And if so, how? Why does Seoul have a single-sex vs coed separation in the first place?
Its possible but unlikely there is a real difference in ability to learn based solely on genital shape. Probably more likely the SS grads are somehow less individualistic, more socialized, better indoctrinated, and more conformity oriented, tangentially including better academic results as one of many mere side effects.
In that case rather than opening a giant can of worms WRT segregation, it would be much simpler to increase nationalist movements. Mandate saying the pledge of allegiance, uniforms, (one single) youth psuedo-political organization, military marching D+C in gym class, institute the 5 minutes hate and two way telescreens, encourage the rewriting of history in writing class, bland conservative blather in lit classes instead of real lit, etc. Not saying the cultural effects would be an improvement, but if all you want is great test scores this might be a less controversial method.
In fact John Fairhurst was the well-regarded head teacher at Shenfield High School in Shenfield, Essex, a small town in the commuter belt east of London. You can read more in this article that I found on Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lNLliSZ...
He has since retired but not before serving as president at the Association of School & College Leaders. And he has regularly been featured in the British press commenting on the need for more innovative ways to educate kids.
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I don't like single-sex schools because I don't think they promote healthy gender relations. I recall reading that boys at single-sex schools had much worse success in relationships.
I also don't like them because they're hell for trans kids. Your education record will out you because your school was single-sex, and you can't transition in school or at least daren't try.
But the needs of minorities don't matter, right?
The thing with girls being more likely to study science actually applies to me. I dropped Physics this year partly because of grades but also I didn't like the male-dominated environment. Had I been to an all-girls' school, maybe that'd be different. But I'm trans, so I'd be stuck at an all-boys' school. That'd be awful.
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