Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters

All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters
by Karen Stabiner

Investigative journalist Karen Stabiner spent pivotal years with the young women of two very different girls' schools: Marlborough, an elite prep school in Los Angeles, and The Young Women's Leadership School in East Harlem, an experimental public school. On both coasts, her subjects are fascinating young women on the brink of adulthood, whose choices will affect their lives. Even-handed and thought-provoking, All Girls could change the way we educate all children in the future.

A friend with a daughter older than my own was trying to make an impossible decision. Should she send the girl to a coed school for seventh grade, or to an all-girls school? She had no idea what a girls' school was like; she and everyone she knew had gone to coed schools. The only information she had was theoretical: Some people believed that single-sex education was the best solution to pervasive gender discrimination in the classroom, while others dismissed it as a short-term fix for wealthy families who could afford private-school tuition.

What was best for my friend's daughter? There was no real way to tell. It was like making a choice between chocolate and vanilla without ever having tasted chocolate.

My daughter, Sarah, was in third grade at the time, brimming with the confidence and energy that researchers see in girls that age. But I had read about what was supposed to be in store come adolescence. By the time Sarah and her friends graduated from high school, too many of them would be unsure of themselves. They would judge themselves on how they looked or whether the boys liked them; they would look at images in the media and find themselves wanting. Girls who had the talent to pursue advanced work in math or science might not, because they doubted their own abilities in these fields. Their test scores would slip. For girls, the central lesson of coed middle and high school seemed to be about limitations.

So I did what any parent might like to do, given the chance: I went back to school to see firsthand what the alternative, a girls' school education, was like. In 1998, I approached the head of school at Marlborough School, a 112-year-old private school in Los Angeles, California, and the principal of The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem, a then-two-year-old public school for economically disadvantaged girls in New York City, and got permission to observe at both schools for the 1998-1999 school year.

I attended classes, tagged along with a handful of students, and talked to their parents and teachers, to find out for myself how theory translated into practice. The result is a look at two very different schools, where teachers and administrators are trying to define how best to teach girls. It is the story of some girls who feel happy and successful-no small thing, amidst all the stories of teenage girls' eating disorders, depression, and self-doubt. The process changed my mind. I had carried around a rather musty, fussy, and completely uninformed image of what a girls' school must be: the sort of place where a child of privilege learned how to crook her little finger while she drank tea. I had thought that girls' school was for girls who could not handle the real world-until I spent time at two of them. The girls I met seemed almost arrogant at first, but I soon realized my mistake. They were not arrogant; they were self-confident, comfortable with themselves in a way I was not used to seeing. They had learned to speak, as one Marlborough teacher put it, in "a person's voice, not a woman's voice." They said what they meant, absolved of the social concerns that often made girls tone themselves down. They felt no need to defer or compromise their opinions in the name of getting along.

Had anyone told me when Sarah was born that we would someday enroll her at a girls' school where she had to wear a uniform, I would have laughed; I might have been insulted at the implication that she could not handle the rigors of a big coed school like the one I attended. By the time my family had to make a choice, though, we agreed that a girls' school would provide her with more opportunities than she would find anywhere else. A quality education is about much more than test scores and transcripts: It ought to open doors and keep them open for as long as possible. Our daughter enrolled at Marlborough last fall.

Most families do not have the luxury of that kind of choice; they have to work with their neighborhood public school or find a way around it. One of the reasons I observed at The Young Women's Leadership School was because it raises a difficult question: If girls' schools benefit their students, then what responsibility do we have to girls who cannot afford private school? Our public school system is based on the notion of equal access-but research shows that equal access is not the same as an equal education. Some of the most provocative research says that girls from poor ethnic communities benefit the most from a single-sex environment, and yet they are the ones who have the most trouble gaining access.

Their parents can lobby for change, though, whether for a school like The Young Women's Leadership School or for a revamped math class at an existing school. What I hope to do, with this book, is to give parents and educators a glimpse of a new model, one built on notions of what girls need. One they can borrow from, or seek to imitate, if they find concepts that will serve their daughters well. The best way to know what to do is to have firsthand experience; only then can we make a truly informed decision for our girls.

It would be naïve to assume that school is all that matters. One of the strongest students at The Young Women's Leadership School almost became a casualty of events outside of school-and although she and her family had agreed at the outset to let me use their real names, I have decided to change them. Diana Perez (her new name, for the sake of this book) had a rough time and got through it; she ought to be able to start college without being trailed by the past. I have also changed the name of one person who appears only briefly in the book.

I sat in on classes at Marlborough throughout the school year, and at The Young Women's Leadership School on several extended visits. I interviewed students and teachers during the school day, and visited regularly with the students' families; I also sat in on as many special events as possible-assemblies, performances, class meetings, conferences, and sporting events. With the families' permission, both schools furnished me with student records.

Along the way, the girls, their parents, administrators, and faculty often described how they felt about what was going on in their lives at that moment. If I refer to someone's feelings or private thoughts, it is because they told me about them.

Their frankness surprised me at first, until I began to understand that single-sex education is very much a work in progress: People like to talk about the process-not just what goes on in the classroom but how everyone feels about it-so that they can refine and improve a changing environment. I wanted to convey this desire to examine, to reconsider, because it is central to what goes on at both schools, and because it is just the kind of subtle attribute that defies quantifiable measure.

From All Girls: Single Sex Education and Why it Matters by Karen Stabiner © 2002, used by permission.

About the Author

Karen Stabiner is one of the most respected journalists writing today about health, women's and family issues. She is a frequent contributor on these topics to such major publications as Vogue, O, Redbook, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Magazine, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She has also written about food for Travel & Leisure, Gourmet and Saveur.