Three cheers for a school their own: long a part of the Catholic educational tradition, single-gender schools are receiving renewed attention for their success especially with young women. This Catholic educator argues they should continue to be an option.

IMAGES OF POWERFUL WOMEN FILL EACH DAY'S NEWS, from National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice standing close to President Bush in the Oval Office to Mia Hamm's latest exploits on the professional soccer field and the heroic last images of astronauts Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark on the space shuttle Columbia. In the sands of Iraq, women in combat fatigues fight shoulder-to-shoulder with their brother soldiers, while women pilot Chinook helicopters overhead.

With such images prevalent each day, talk of single-sex education might seem startling, even regressive. Good heavens, girls' schools and women's colleges? Didn't they go out of fashion somewhere between sock hops and mosh pits?

On the contrary, enrollments are rising in single-sex institutions, and their educational successes have stirred renewed interest in single-sex education at the K-12 level. The National Coalition of Girls' Schools reports a 23 percent rise in enrollments since 1991. Last year, the Bush Administration proposed regulations to permit experimental single-sex classes in public schools.

Yet opponents claim that the resurgence of interest in single-sex education could be used to undermine Title IX, the 30-year-old law protecting equal educational opportunity for girls and women.

Numerous studies find that girls' schools and women's colleges, compared to coeducational environments:

* offer female students more opportunities for leadership;

* insist that girls and women discover "their own voices" and speak out often;

* promote greater female achievement in math and science;

* foster greater interest in lifelong education;

* provide significant role models of women's achievement for students to emulate;

* have a higher rate of completion of bachelor's degrees;

* lead to higher percentages of Ph.D. attainment and portionately more women graduates working in Fortune executive positions.

MOST FEMALE INSTITUTIONS WERE FOUNDED IN RESPONSE to barriers to women s education. When the Catholic University of America refused to admit women in the late 1890s, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, having seen the rise of Vassar and Bryn Mawr, decided that Catholic women needed a college to call their own in the nation's capital and set about the work of establishing Trinity College.

Controversy swirled around this radical idea, with some opponents charging that establishing a Catholic college for women was heresy. But the sisters received encouragement from Cardinal James Gibbons, who wrote his approval to Trinity's founder Sister Julia McGroarty, S.N.D. that establishing Trinity College "will relieve the [Catholic] University authorities of the embarrassment of refusing women admission."

The "embarrassment" eventually abated as the success of the graduates of women's colleges convinced the formerly all-male universities that women would not faint, go insane, or stop bearing children as a result of the rigors of collegiate study (all of those reasons had been cited to keep women out of college). By the 1970s, nearly all universities had opened their doors to women, who soon became the majority population throughout higher education.

With so many new options, the demand for women's colleges declined. Today 65 women's colleges remain, 18 of them Catholic, compared to nearly 300 in 1960. But these are not our mothers' women's colleges; the transformation of these institutions in response to the educational needs of new generations of women is clear not only in the diversity of students but also in the academic programs that place considerable emphasis on technology, math, and science.

Just as women's schools provided access to higher education for generations of immigrant women in the 19th and 20th centuries, Catholic women's colleges continue to be gateways for students who might not otherwise be able to attend college. Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles is well known for its outreach to the Hispanic community, as is the College of St. Elizabeth in New Jersey. The College of New Rochelle was a pioneer in the education of adult women in new formats, a model adopted in various forms by Ursuline, Rosemont, Immaculata, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Trinity, and others.

All-girls high schools, too, have adapted curricula and programs for the 21st century. Leadership development is a staple in the mission statements of most girls' schools today, with a variety of programs designed to promote girls' leadership skills like self-reliance, team building, and public speaking. Education in math, science, and technology--fields where the research reports particularly strong success for single-sex schools--has become a hallmark for many of these institutions. The New York Times recently reported a trend among girls' schools nationwide to empower their students through emphasizing financial literacy.

WHAT ABOUT THE BOYS? WHILE THE BENEFITS OF SINGLE-ex education for girls and women have been studied for decades, the literature on single-sex education for boys and men is thin, though growing. Proponents argue that boys also derive similar benefits from educational activities in an environment that focuses on their particular learning styles and developmental needs. More research could strengthen this argument.

Critics of single-sex education argue that the model is both outmoded and dangerous, pointing to the coeducational working world as evidence that girls need to "learn to compete with boys" to be successful in their later work lives. The American Association of University Women has opposed single-sex classes, saying they mask the problem of gender discrimination in education, and instead urges improved gender equity performance of teachers in coed schools and classrooms.

Some critics also claim that sex segregation in education reinforces discriminatory behavior against girls, as when girls were forced to take classes in home economics while boys took shop classes premised on biases about the likely lifelong careers of males and females. According to these critics, the same repudiation of "separate but equal" addressed in Brown v. Board of Education for racial segregation in schools should hold true for gender segregation as well.

Advocates for girls' schools and women's colleges counter these arguments in several ways. First, the outcomes, already cited, are powerful and persuasive. To abandon such an effective form of education for girls and women would, in and of itself, be highly discriminatory and have a negative effect for those who can benefit from single-sex education.

Second, in response to the argument that women need to learn to compete with men in order to be successful in life, women's schools cite the track records of their graduates in the coed workplace: 20 percent of the women in Congress are graduates of women's colleges, as are 33 percent of the women on Fortune 1000 boards and 36 percent of the highest paid women officers of those companies, according the Women's College Coalition. Women's college graduates are twice as likely as their counterparts in coeducational universities to receive doctoral degrees or to enter medical school.

A survey by the National Coalition of Girls' Schools reveals that a higher percentage of girls' school graduates hold managerial positions than the national average for women (78 versus 62 percent) while 80 percent of girls' school alumnae held leadership positions in college and the workplace.

Women and girls, men and boys--all should have opportunities to attend educational institutions that foster their success. Girls' high schools and women's colleges have proved to be successful platforms for lifelong career advancement and personal fulfillment for their graduates and have produced some of the most significant women achievers in our nation's history.

Catholics, especially, should take pride in the distinguished history of schools that provided opportunities for immigrant Catholic families when other educational options were closed to girls and women. Sustaining the educational legacies of the religious orders of women who founded those schools should be a top priority for the laity in the years to come.

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PATRICIA McGUIRE, president of Trinity College in Washington, D.C.