Boys & girls together: but not everywhere & all the time.

A few years ago, the Detroit school system tried something new to combat unemployment, dropout, and homicide rates among urban males. It developed a plan to open three all-male academies. A legal challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund prevented the schools from opening. Two all-male classes in a Dade County, Florida, school were discontinued in 1989 when the regional branch of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights prohibited them. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., African-American Immersion Elementary School in Milwaukee was intended as a school for African-American boys, but, as the result of a legal challenge, now accepts African-American girls as well. Both proponents and opponents of single-sex schooling in the public schools appeal to equal opportunity to justify their positions, but the courts and federal regulators have found the arguments of the opposition compelling.

As a result, Senator John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) is preparing an amendment that he hopes to include in the "Improving America's Schools Act of 1993." The amendment would provide grant money to four selected Chapter 1 schools to gather data and evaluate the concept of single-sex classrooms in poor urban neighborhoods. It would allow those schools to exercise hiring preferences that would allow men to teach boys and women to teach girls. Pending the outcome of discussions with groups such as the Women's Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and the U.S. Department of Education, the amendment will either explicitly or implicitly waive civil rights laws (Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, section 204 of the Education Amendments of 1974, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to allow these schools to experiment with this model without the threat of antidiscrimination suits.

Critics of single-sex education programs have two basic worries. Michael Meyers, the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, argues that schools designed for black males lead to a balkanization that diminishes multiculturalism. He argues that it is "shocking" that blacks, "who once stood in solid support of ensuring equal and integrated public education," would support same-sex education for black adolescents. Ellen Vargus, of the Women's Legal Defense Fund, says that separate education for girls has historically meant inferior education. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, in which "separate but equal" education was declared unconstitutional. The groups that fought hard and long to ensure equal opportunity in education, as well as in other realms, are understandably hesitant about allowing antidiscrimination laws to be waived. In Vargus's view, "we ignore history at our risk" when we begin carving out exceptions to such important legal doctrines. And when the law put aside is based on the "feel-good justification" that single-sex classes might benefit disadvantaged boys and girls, without, she claims, "a shred of evidence" to support that assumption, a perilous precedent is set.

Discriminating on the basis of sex, these groups argue, should only be done in the most narrowly tailored circumstances to remedy past discrimination. A 1992 study by the American Association of University Women concluded that girls are disadvantaged in coeducational schooling because teachers give less attention and encouragement to girls, girls are sexually harassed in school, and some tests are sexually biased. Numerous studies have shown the benefits of single-sex education for girls. Thus a credible case can be made that single-sex education for girls could be justified on legal and policy grounds, and that groups such as the NOW Legal Defense Fund and the Women's Legal Defense Fund might not challenge a public school program that provides all-girl science or math classes, given that those subjects have been dominated by boys in the past. But they do not want to see corresponding all-boys classes. Since boys have been advantaged from the start, the reasoning goes that boys do not need special treatment to remedy past wrongs. Future separation of boys and girls may lead again to unequal educational opportunities.

But the logic and worries of civil rights groups may not hold in the inner city. It is generally acknowledged that African-American male students in schools in poor neighborhoods do not receive the same academic advantages as the male students (usually white and middle class) who have been the subjects of the studies. African-American males have too few male role models who exemplify the fruits of academic achievement. A widely cited statistic shows that young African-American males have a greater chance of going to prison than to college; the murder rate among young African-American males reveals the fatalistic approach they take to their own lives. Although there have been no conclusive studies on the subject, advocates of single-sex classrooms for disadvantaged boys and girls argue that it is actually the boys who are ignored in classroom settings and the girls who dominate the academic scene. Girls are called upon more often, while the boys are treated as annoyances or distractions rather than as serious students. Instead of worrying that these young men will get undue advantage in single-sex classes, we ought to be asking whether they aren't being programmed to fail in their current classrooms. For a certain segment of the male student population, then, single-sex classes may have a salutary effect.

I share one worry of the critics and it is that boys have been the primary focus of inner-city, single-sex education. Parallel girls' programs have often been an afterthought or a preemptive strike against lawsuits. The Danforth proposal needs to be carefully crafted to ensure that the girls' programs receive the same attention and resources as the boys' programs. Initial drafts of the proposal reveal a bias toward inner-city males, even though girls in the inner city engage in their own version of self-destructive behavior. Criticism from women's groups is having the positive effect of moving the Danforth proposal toward a more balanced approach. It would be a shame, though, if civil rights opposition squelches these efforts before they have had the opportunity to be tested and before they have had the opportunity to touch children's lives in ways that may never be quantifiable.

The pursuit of data and their credibility, or lack thereof, seems to be one of the driving forces behind justifying or criticizing single-sex efforts. Proponents maintain that the educational conditions of these children are so devastating that we should study every option to see what will work and what will not. Opponents of the same-sex public school experiments argue that the lack of data should prevent us from doing anything so drastic as waiving civil rights laws. Furthermore, they are already discounting future data by arguing that it will be impossible to determine whether it is the single-sexness of the schools or the increased attention, resources, and talented teachers that will be generated.

It seems to me that the situation is so desperate that if a program can energize and attract teachers and community involvement, whether or not it is a scientific fact that all-boys or all-girls settings are inherently beneficial, then it is worth doing. I also suspect that such experiments will confirm that separating boys and girls can have direct educational benefits. Consider the experience of Shanteria Dixon, a fifth grader in an all-girls' class in Baltimore. What she likes best about the program, she says, is that she can go on trips with her class without "boys disturbing me." She says she is doing better in school now and that she wants to be a lawyer. Maybe she can convince opponents that equal educational opportunities for boys and girls such as herself - even if that means sometimes dividing the boys and the girls - should have the sanction of the law, or at least at the moment, the benefit of the doubt.