Normandy High Tries Single-Gender Classes (MO)

November 23, 2010

In Lindsay Schulte’s all-girls communication arts class on arecent morning, students divided themselves into groups of four.The girls sat around rectangular desks and used colored markers todraw and write character traits of well-known personalities andhistorical figures.

Down the hall, the all-boys communication arts class studiedcharacterization, using John F. Kennedy and Michael Jordan assubjects. They grabbed at the questions that teacher Dennis Lovetossed around like a basketball.

Normandy High School is the latest in a growing number of publicschools to embrace single-gender classrooms. It’s part ofSuperintendent Stanton Lawrence’s effort to turn around theNormandy School District, where low test scores and other academicmarkers have the North St. Louis County district teetering on theedge of accreditation.

Lawrence hired Principal Curt Green two years ago to take chargeof the high school, where one-third of the students were notgraduating.

Green had used single-gender classrooms to help turn aroundfailing schools in Baton Rouge, La., and Atlanta. This year, heturned the third floor of East Hall of Normandy High into the NinthGrade Academy, where girls and boys are separated from each otherand the rest of the school.

The intent, Green said, is to improve learning, reduce classroomdistractions and ingrain academic achievement into schoolculture.

"Freshman year is crucial," Green said. "You build yourfoundation. Often times, students get behind that first year anddrop out later if they can’t catch up."

For decades, private and Catholic schools in St. Louis offeredsingle-sex education. But more public schools are giving it atry.

At suburban schools, single-sex classes have become a popularoption for some parents. The Parkway School District has single-sexclasses at Carmen Trails Elementary School and at Ross ElementarySchool. In St. Char les, Francis Howell Central Elementary School isat the end of a three-year experiment with single-genderfifth-grade classrooms.

At urban schools, the approach is used to target laggingperformance, particularly among boys, whose declining academicachievement has school officials wringing their hands.

Among them are the high school and middle schools in East St.Louis and the Imagine Academy of Academic Success — a kindergartenthrough eighth-grade charter school in north St. Louis.

St. Louis school officials are exploring implementingsingle-gender classes in some middle and elementary schools,Superintendent Kelvin Adams said.

Teachers at the Ninth Grade Academy in Normandy say that boysare more likely to squirm in their seats, use nonverbalcommunication, talk out of turn and prefer classwork that requiresthem to use their hands.

So Love keeps his lectures short. Every now and then, he letsthe boys get up and move.

In an all-boys setting, students who typically sit silently inthe back of class will compete to answer questions, Love said."It’s really hard to get them sometimes to raise their hand andwait their turn."

Girls tend to be more verbal, teachers say, and they preferorganization and working in groups.

"Some of the girls are willing to participate and get involved,where maybe they were more shy before," Schulte said. "Some of themthat might have been more quiet in class don’t feel that fear ofcoming up and doing things they may not have been as comfortablewith in front of the boys."

‘Very focused’

Ninth-graders said they were skeptical at first. Girls and boysboth predicted more fights and less learning. But the opposite hashappened, they say.

In coed classes, ‘some kids would act out so they could impressthe girls," said student Raymond Mesa. "Now they sit down and dothe work."

"I like the way that I’m learning," Rontez Williams said. "I’mvery focused on my work."

Single-sex education in public schools became illegal in 1972with the passage of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on thebasis of sex. Then in 2001, U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison andHillary Rodham Clinton wrote an amendment to the No Child LeftBehind Act that made single-sex education in public schools legalagain.

In 2002, only about a dozen public schools across the countryoffered single-gender classrooms. Now there are at least 540,according to the National Association of Single Sex PublicEducation.

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and theNational Organization for Women have spoken out against separatingboys and girls, saying such classrooms are illegal anddiscriminatory. Other critics say the approach promotes genderstereotypes and fails to prepare students for a world where bothsexes work together.

But advocates say it removes many obstacles that keep girls fromachieving in science and math and that it engages boys whootherwise would sit in the back of the class.

"We want a culture where boys want to be scholars and girlsenjoy computer programming and physics," said Leonard Sax,executive director of the single-sex public education organization."That doesn’t happen automatically."

Sax spent Nov. 12 in St. Louis training teachers at ImagineAcademy. Sax encouraged teachers to use strategies that wouldn’twork in coed classrooms, he said, such as using fantasy sports tohelp teach math to boys.

"If you don’t know how to take advantage of the opportunity, youmight not accomplish much," Sax said.

At Normandy High, Green said school officials will evaluate testscores at the end of the year to determine whether thesingle-gender approach should be expanded.

Ninth-graders Samone Smith and Josephina Sharkey said theirclassmates would rather be in classes with boys. The two of them,however, said they better relate to lectures in girls-onlyclasses.

"Guys play around too much," Josephina said.

"It’s so much more calm," Samone added. "If they just do thisevery year for freshmen, I do think it would be a good idea."