News

Encourage single-gender lesson

March 28, 2009

Single-gender education, which had fallen into steep decline in U.S. public schools starting a few decades ago, is making a comeback. Based on the early classroom results, it can be fairly classified as an old idea with positive new potential.

That's especially encouraging for our state, which has moved to the forefront of the movement toward more single-gender programs in public schools.

S.C. Education Superintendent Jim Rex is a strong proponent of this particular trend as part of his wider push for more choice within the public-education system. Workshops for 350 teachers are being held today in Columbia.

David Chadwell, the state's "single-gender coordinator," told our reporter that 216 of the roughly 500 U.S. public schools now offering some all-boy or all-girl classes are in South Carolina. That growing list includes 38 schools in the tri-county area: 17 in Charleston County, 13 in Dorchester District 2, six in Berkeley County, two in Dorchester District Four.

At Berkeley Middle School, the families of 140 students (roughly 11 percent of total enrollment) have exercised educational choice by placing them in single-gender programs introduced at the start of this school year. Principal Lee Westberry reports that those students are "performing better and they're happier."

Most other schools across the nation have charted similar single-gender success. It shouldn't come as a surprise.

Many teachers learned long ago that it can be much tougher to keep some boys' attention when girls are in the classroom, and vice versa. And while recognition of general gender differences in learning patterns became politically unfashionable a few decades ago and hastened the retreat of single-gender education, a refusal to acknowledge reality can't eliminate it.

All-boy and all-girl classrooms aren't the right educational answer for all students. But they do represent a common-sense expansion of educational choice — and another needed innovation in the ongoing drive to improve our public schools.