Math Minus Boys : Reports of Teaching Bias Prompt Classes for Girls Only

Scrunched over her notebook, the 18-year-old Ventura High School student scribbled answers to her math problems until suddenly her pencil stopped and her brow wrinkled.

Bernice Motter was stumped.

Seeing the look of perplexity on her classmate’s face, 16-year-old Shara Meschan leaned across the table and pointed with her pencil to the equations in Bernice’s notebook as she briefly explained the solution.

Within moments, Bernice’s pencil was racing again.

Asking for help is not always easy, Bernice said later. But an unusual feature of this Algebra II class helps her feel comfortable even when she is bewildered.

There are no boys in the classroom.

Based on studies showing that public schools subtly discriminate against girls in upper levels of math and science, Ventura High School this fall began offering two Algebra II classes for female students only.

A local middle school, inspired by the high school, also launched sex-segregated math classes this year for seventh-grade girls and boys.

With these programs, the two Ventura schools have joined a handful of U.S. educational institutions seeking to spur girls’ success in math or science by giving them classes of their own. California Department of Education officials said they know of no other public schools in the state teaching sexually segregated math and science classes.

Most schools that offer single-sex classes are private, said Meg Milne Moulton, an executive director of the National Coalition of Girls Schools.

Public schools, Moulton and California education officials said, are afraid of violating strict federal laws that bar sex discrimination and require schools to open all courses except sex education to male and female students.

But girls-only classes such as those in Ventura are legal, a consultant to the state Department of Education said, as long as they are optional and technically open to boys who request to be in them.

In Ventura and across the country, many of the experiments with girls-only classes were sparked by a 1992 landmark report published by the American Assn. of University Women Educational Foundation, educators say.

Pulling together various studies done over the last 10 years, the AAUW study showed that, among other things, teachers tend to pay more attention to boys than girls; most standardized tests are biased against girls, and school curricula reinforce negative female stereotypes.

As a whole, the AAUW concluded, public schools systematically track girls toward traditional jobs in female-dominated fields and away from studies that lead to high-paying careers in science, technology and engineering.

Even without the AAUW report, Ventura High teacher Christine Mikles said she knew that girls are often subtly steered away from advanced mathematics.

“Parents, teachers, counselors, peers--they don’t encourage the girls to stay in math when it starts getting a little harder,” Mikles said. “They say, ‘It’s OK, honey. You don’t need it.’ The boys come in with the same problems and they say, ‘Get down and start working harder.’ ”

Girls and boys sign up in equal numbers for Algebra II at Ventura High, Mikles said. But in the next level math course, boys outnumber girls 3 to 2. And by the time students reach calculus, twice as many boys enroll.

Mikles got the idea for girls-only classes at a workshop last year where she met teachers from Marin Academy, a small private school in Marin County that had begun to offer a girls-only algebra class.

Returning to Ventura, Mikles recruited about 60 girls for the experiment, enough to fill two sections of Algebra II.

At the same time, Mikles, who advises other teachers in the Ventura Unified School District, began working with teachers at Anacapa Middle School to launch single-sex math classes for seventh-graders.

Girls’ interest in math may plunge in high school, but it begins dropping in the junior high years, Anacapa Principal Charlotte McElroy said.

Anacapa teachers, McElroy said, were just as concerned about boys who were so distracted by the girls in their math class that they were performing below par.

“Hormones begin to run wild at this age,” the principal said. “Both the boys and girls begin to worry about their faces breaking out. They worry about whether they have the right kind of clothes or not. They worry about whether they have the right hairstyle.” So far, she said, parents and teachers are pleased with how well boys and girls in the gender-tracked classes are doing.

“They’re more focused on the math,” McElroy said. “The girls are much more comfortable even physically moving around the room.”

At Ventura High, Mikles decided to go even further than just separating the sexes.

Because research shows that all students, but particularly girls, learn best when they study in groups and use hands-on techniques, Mikles set up her female-only algebra classes to work without a textbook.

She divided the classes into small teams of students who spend most of their time working from printed handouts, operating computers and completing classroom projects, such as the coin-tossing experiment where each group charted the probability that a pitched penny will land heads-up.

As her students worked on their coin-tossing project last week, Mikles walked around the room, gesturing at the girls clustered in groups of three and four, huddled over their papers and talking in low tones.

“The camaraderie is really nice,” Mikles said. “The girls help each other out. I guess maybe boys are more task-oriented while girls are a little slower because they want to make sure everyone understands.”

Many of the girls in the class agreed that not having boys around makes learning easier.

“It’s less like a school classroom and more like a homey atmosphere,” 16-year-old Shara Meschan said.

Bernice Motter added: “Boys are, like, impatient. They know it all and if you don’t understand something, the guys will, like, say--’Don’t you understand? What’s so hard?’ ”

But that does not mean the girls want to go too far with the idea of females-only classes.

Asked if their all-female algebra class had inspired plans to attend a girls’ college, the four teen-agers in Shara’s and Bernice’s group replied almost in unison, “No.”

“We still like boys,” 17-year-old Kelly Brandon said. “We just don’t want to do math with them.”