Print
Oct 25, 2006 9:28 pm US/Central
Single-Sex Education Put To The Test
(CBS News)
-
-
There are 93,000 public schools, but only 241 of them offer single-sex classes.
CBS News
There's something different about Miami's Young Women's Preparatory Academy. There are smaller classes, and there's no whispering or giggling. Teenagers are actually concentrating, CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann reports.
What's different about it?
"There are no boys," one girl says. That's because the magnet school just became all-girls -- and the middle-schoolers there love it. There is no one judging how they look or what questions they ask.
"I concentrate more. I'm much more focused," says seventh-grader Daniela Vidal, adding that boys made sixth grade miserable. "They make lots of noise, and yell and scream, and throw stuff across the class," Daniela says. She doesn’t miss that "at all."
But the school is a rarity in America's public education. There are 93,000 public schools, but only 241 of them even offer single-sex classes.
The big question is whether separating the sexes improves learning.
"A math book should take precedence over a boy," teacher Anthony Cabrera says. "And that can happen here."
But like so much of school, this approach has a report card -- and the grades on single-sex classes are mixed.
The girls in the Miami school are happy. But critics worry that, in the end, their education just won't be as good.
"I thnk we do want a quality education for all our children, but we don't want to do it in a way that turns the clock back," says Marsha Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center.
But three years ago, Woodward Elementary near Orlando, Fla., separated boys and girls. The school's standardized test scores have jumped for both genders. After two years of same-sex classes, 71 percent of students beat the national average in reading, and 79 percent beat it in math.
Fifth-grader Corbin McDonald says when the girls went out, his grades went up.
"They always bugged me and started talking. It's hard to focus," he says.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
