COLUMN ONE : Boys Only: Separate but Equal? : Does placing black youths in their own classes help them do better? Some public school educators think so and are running maverick programs that others call illegal or a civil rights retreat.

Michael Hunt is a roly-poly fifth-grader who wants to become a minister--or maybe a singer. He suddenly has found himself at the center of a bitterly controversial educational and social experiment.

Michael is enrolled at an all-black inner-city elementary school where the principal and teachers have decided that their pupils may learn better if segregated by sex.

The school is one of at least two dozen throughout the country, mostly in heavily African American districts in the East, that in the past five years have been quietly skirting the law by separating boys from girls.

The practice, now something of a grass-roots movement, is aimed at improving the academic performance of black boys, who in many districts have lower achievement and higher dropout rates than other groups.

Proponents believe--more from gut feeling than hard proof--that all-male classes might help provide boys with black, male role models and an education more tailored to their needs.

But federal education officials say the classes are illegal. And civil libertarians, feminists and some prominent black educators say they represent a retreat from equality and a return to the discredited notion of “separate but equal.”

Furthermore, research on the benefits of single-gender education is inconclusive at best, experts say. If such programs help anyone, they say, it is girls, not boys.

Though support for boys-only classes does not divide along racial lines, the debate has placed largely white organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in the awkward position of opposing black educators and parents on what is best for their children.

“The ultimate question is who’s going to determine what’s in the best interests of African American children,” said Jawanza Kunjufu, a well-known black writer who has advocated all-boys schools and other radical educational reforms.

“The ACLU and the NOW organization think they can decide that,” said Kunjufu, president of African-American Images, a consulting company in Chicago. “I think black parents need to make that decision.”

Some say they should decide against single-gender schooling. “They’re doing the wrong thing for the right reasons,” said Hugh J. Scott, the first black superintendent of the Washington, D.C., school system who now is dean of education programs at Hunter College in New York. “What these students need, and the heart of the problem, is good teachers,” he said.

The biggest experiment in single-gender classes is in Baltimore, where boys and girls attend separate classes in more than a dozen schools, and where district administrators not only know about the practice but, for now, support it.

The most elaborate example is the Robert W. Coleman Elementary School, crouched on a wind-swept promontory in the crumbling neighborhood of Coppin Hill, where crack cocaine became such a scourge a few years back that a grand jury visited the school to see how the children were holding up.

At Coleman, Principal Addie Johnson started the first all-male class four years ago after learning that certain boys were falling behind. Now, almost all classes are single-gender. Girls and boys mix for music class and meals and on the playground.

“I had been doing reading about how boys learn differently from girls,” Johnson recalled recently, referring to controversial theories that boys have shorter attention spans and are more energetic and physical. “I thought, let’s test this. . . . We did it kind of quietly.”

In Rochester, N.Y., Principal Anita Boggs took a similar approach five years ago at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School--a large elementary school whose student body is 97% minority and mostly low-income, evenly divided between blacks and Latinos.

“It was extremely upsetting to me to look at my fresh-faced, exuberant, happy children and know that 10 years from now, they might be dead,” she said in an interview. “I could see that they were hungry for a significant male role model in their lives, for something to be proud of.”

So when two teachers asked Boggs whether they should move more girls into a boy-heavy second-grade class, Boggs suggested they just move the girls out. To teach the boys, she assigned a young male teacher who was born in Latin America.

“To be frank with you, I kept a real low profile,” said Boggs, who ran the single-gender classes for four years until the district and state stopped the practice and transferred her to another school.

In Philadelphia, where a lawsuit forced the city a decade ago to admit girls to Central High School, the principal of Robert Fulton Elementary School, in a lower-income, racially mixed neighborhood, has set up a second-grade class this year for boys only.

“Really, I guess it’s against the law. But I wasn’t trying to break the law,” said Principal Dietra Spence, who organized the class at a teacher’s request. “I’m sure once this gets out, someone will come and disband it.”

Some districts have toyed with the idea but decided against it for fear of litigation. They have turned instead to “heritage immersion” programs that emphasize the accomplishments of African Americans. The Savannah-Chatham County, Ga., district is beginning such a program this month because its lawyers advised against boys-only classes.

The Detroit district, which is 89% African American, has opened three so-called African-centered schools. The ACLU and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund had sued in 1991 and blocked plans for all-male academies.

The heritage immersion programs also were conceived to help African American boys, whose rates of suspension, absenteeism and delinquency were the highest in those school systems. In some districts, administrators say the boys have the lowest course-passage rate and are the most likely to be held back a grade.

Experts disagree on the reasons behind such statistics. But some black theorists believe they stem in part from a clash between the male culture of young black boys and what some describe as the female-dominated culture the boys encounter at home and in school.

Kunjufu, whose controversial writings inspired Johnson, has found that boys’ test scores begin to drop during the third and fourth grades. He believes the heavily female ranks of elementary schoolteachers have failed to accommodate what he describes as black male learning styles--a notion that is vigorously disputed by some feminists, among others.

Teachers have measured boys against female standards of behavior, Kunjufu argues, faulting them for their failure to be quiet and eager to please. Naturally energetic, boys have wrongly been labeled hyperactive and forced into special education classes in disproportionate numbers, he says.

Kunjufu, who is best known for a three-volume work called “Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys,” wants mandatory training for teachers, especially white women, in what he describes as black, male learning styles--their shorter attention spans, higher energy levels, competitiveness and stronger motor skills. He would also like curricula modified.

Those views are partially shared by Spencer Holland, an educational psychologist at Morgan State University in Baltimore and another prime advocate of boys-only classes. He and others say these programs may be needed only to get through the crucial elementary school years.

Holland believes that African American boys who grow up in households headed by women develop attitudes toward girls and women that inhibit learning. For example, they may refuse to imitate a female teacher, when imitation and modeling are crucial to elementary school learning.

So in the late 1980s, Holland began advocating single-gender classes--taught by men who understand “boy behavior” from personal experience. “It caused a furor,” he recalled recently. “I was accused of sexism: ‘You can’t do this in public school! Where’s the research?’ ”

The research, as it turns out, is not clear-cut and does not explicitly examine the merits of special schooling for black boys. Studies of the single-gender education are few, relatively recent and plagued by methodological questions. What’s more, they have focused on secular private academies and Catholic schools.

One of the best-known researchers is Valerie Lee, an associate professor of education at the University of Michigan. Lee found some favorable effects of single-gender Catholic schools, mostly in girls; she found few positive, and some negative, effects of single-gender, independent schools.

Students at girls Catholic schools seemed to have higher educational aspirations and achievement, and less tendency to engage in sexual stereotyping. But in private boys schools, Lee found examples of girls and women being treated as sex objects.

Slightly different conclusions were reached by Cornelius Riordan, a professor of sociology at Providence College in Rhode Island, who has found that female and minority students do better in single-gender Catholic schools, while white boys do better in coeducational schools.

Although single-gender schools are not necessarily more effective than others, they tend to have certain positive attributes, Riordan said. Those include a greater degree of order, a “pro-academic culture,” and fewer anti-intellectual values.

They also offer more successful “same-sex role models” among the students, Riordan said, and greater leadership opportunities. If there are indeed gender differences in learning, as some people argue, Riordan said single-gender schools might cater to those differences.

On the issue of legality, a report released last month by the U.S. Department of Education stated that federally funded, single-gender classrooms are illegal under Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally subsidized school programs. The only exceptions are classes in human sexuality and contact sports, and classes for pregnant girls, on grounds of privacy or safety.

As for single-sex schools, the report said they are allowed only if comparable schools exist for both genders. But Norma V. Cantu, assistant secretary for civil rights, said in an interview that the education department is reconsidering that policy.

Cantu attributed any rise in interest in single-gender schooling to “the lack of enforcement of the civil rights laws.” As soon as the government comes out clearly against “certain types of groupings, then you’ll see administrators cease to experiment,” she said.

Others see a worrisome philosophical shift behind the interest in boys-only classes and single-race schools--as well as in girls science and math classes, such as those offered at Ventura High School.

Included among those critics are such prominent black intellectuals as Kenneth B. Clark, a key figure in persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that “separate but equal” schools violate the Constitution. Clark has argued that the ruling should apply no less to gender than to race.

Some sense a growing preoccupation with the differences, rather than similarities, between races and between genders, and a loss of enthusiasm for the traditional liberal ideal of integration as the route to equality.

“I think a lot of people committed to integration have been so disappointed for so long that when the new medicine man comes to town and has a new bromide in the bottle, people are in such pain they’ll try anything,” said Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Among other things, critics fear that single-gender classes reinforce ideas about gender differences--for example, that the opposite sex is a distraction and that boys cannot learn with girls.

On a recent morning, a group of 10- and 11-year-olds at Baltimore’s Coleman school talked animatedly about the advantages and drawbacks of single-gender classes. Both boys and girls agreed that they found it easier to concentrate and that they had learned something about self-respect and self-control, in part because they felt more comfortable airing personal issues.

Administrators said test scores and achievement levels have also improved significantly. They were also struck by how much the girls seemed to flourish and how many more were now taking math.

Parents, too, are pleased with the experiment. Boys and girls both “are able to focus on the correct kind of competition,” said Sidney Matthews, a Baltimore father who teaches at Coleman and whose daughter is in an all-girls class there. Matthews said boys no longer fear appearing to be “sissies” and girls do not hesitate to use their intelligence.

In Rochester, too, attendance improved, suspensions dropped and achievement levels rose, according to Boggs.

After four years, the principal says, state and district officials discontinued the classes. A lawyer for the district said they were stopped as soon as the district learned of them. The lawyer said Boggs’ subsequent transfer had nothing to do with the single-gender classes.

Looking back, Boggs still believes single-gender classes should exist as an option.

In Baltimore, fifth-grader Michael Hunt agrees. He says life at his school is more harmonious. Parents have become more involved in the school--and no longer simply to gripe about fights among their children.

“From what I see the parents are not coming up that much (to complain),” he said. “They’re coming up to help.”