My grandmother recently passed away. She and I were very close, and I’m realizing there were questions I never asked her. For example, she attended Pembroke College, the women’s affiliate of Brown University when Brown was male-only. I never asked her whether or not this was her choice. When she was attending college, many prestigious colleges and universities were male-only. Educational and career opportunities for women during my grandmother’s time were much more limited than what is available to women and girls today.
Forty years ago, Congress passed Title IX, which guaranteed women and girls equal access to education. The progress that women and girls have made in the area of education and consequently, career possibilities is significant. We have come a long way.
Unfortunately, old stereotypes die hard. There is a nationwide campaign to separate out boys and girls at school by creating single sex classrooms in public schools. Maine is no exception as schools in Rockport and Sanford this year pursued single sex programming. The new trend is based on junk science suggesting that male and female brains are so different that they need to be separated in the classroom and taught using radically different teaching methods. The arguments sound very similar to the arguments made against allowing women of my grandmother’s generation into Brown University.
The programming in Sanford appears to have been very popular with some of the parents and students. But even the best of intentions can lead to discriminatory outcomes. And that’s what our review of documentation from the school revealed.
Quoting from a school newsletter, “young ladies have developed some important routine [sic] for themselves one [sic] is a daily cup of cocoa as they read the Portland Press Herald and discuss local, national and global events.”
The school newsletter goes on to describe the boys’ class, “The class has created an exercise area within the class and all the young men have the opportunity to exercise . . .Ms. Wagenfield’s class has signed up with the NFL Experience which is a free program sponsored by the National Football League where students can earn points towards prizes by tracking and increasing their daily activity.”
Well-intentioned and popular or not, such activities can have long-term negative consequences in reinforcing gender stereotypes about girls and boys. This example is striking because improving girls’ access to athletic activities has been one of Title IX’s core goals and signature accomplishments. The girls at Sanford would have benefitted from the opportunity and the incentives to increase their daily activity, just as much as boys—and the boys might have enjoyed the hot cocoa, for that matter. There was no basis for depriving them of the same opportunities on the basis of their sex.
But the hot cocoa/NFL example is just one of many troubling aspects of the Sanford program, which our review showed was explicitly justified on the ground that boys and girls learn and develop so differently that they need to be treated differently in the classroom in order to excel.
The consensus of scientific research was summarized in the prestigious journal, Science, which reviewed these programs all across the country and found, “There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.”
The ACLU of Maine Foundation has worked toward equal access to education for young people for a long time. This year, we were proud to assist in passage of anti-bullying legislation. We taught 116 Bill of Rights workshops to 1450 students at schools in thirteen counties during the 2011-2012 school year. We believe that every child has a constitutional right to equal education under the law.
Public schools have a responsibility and an obligation under the United States Constitution to provide all students with an equal education. Separating them by sex and subjecting them to overtly different treatment in the classroom is certainly not equal. We applaud the Sanford School District’s decision to return to an equal coeducational environment, and we will continue to encourage schools not to adopt unscientific programming based on outdated stereotypes that women of my grandmother’s generation fought so hard to overcome.
