Value of Separate Classes for Boys, Girls Put to Test

Of the state’s few experiments in single-gender public education, the concept may get its truest test in the first two such schools to open in Southern California--in an Orange County office park.

Other all-boy and all-girl public schools launched this year in California serve mainstream students on or next to mainstream, coeducational campuses.

The Single Gender Academies, which opened in Fountain Valley on Dec. 1, cater to students who have left traditional education altogether.

The 75 enrolled in grades 7 through 12 come from the Orange County Department of Education’s alternative and correctional school system. Some have run afoul of the law. Some have gotten too many Ds or Fs in regular schools. Others have had personal or family troubles. Plenty know the life of street gangs from the inside.

Without help, most are in jeopardy of not graduating.

Also differentiating these academies is their isolation from other schools. The two-story campus is surrounded by a glass-walled office complex.

But something else makes this the state’s purest laboratory for testing the hypothesis that separating the sexes can help some students: the fact that male and female students almost never run into each other--not before school, not during recess, not during lunch and not after school. Classes are on a staggered schedule so that boys and girls are never on campus at the same time.

“It is a different model,” said Karen Humphrey, the state-sponsored, single-sex schools’ coordinator, “and I think it has some elements to it that are rather exciting.”

Among them: Students attend class in four-hour shifts without a break. They share workstations--ones with late-model computers and video equipment. They are encouraged to conduct research projects off campus.

Principal Susan M. Condrey doesn’t call the student-teacher work areas classrooms. They are “learning environments.” That may sound a bit hokey, she conceded, but she is trying to get students to reconsider their lives--and what school means. The single-gender schooling, funded by a one-year state grant of $500,000, is part of that strategy.

“We’re hoping that these kids feel like they can be successful members of their communities,” Condrey said. “That is what’s been missing from their lives. They don’t really fit in. We are going to help these kids who don’t have what most people have--who don’t have the home life, the skills, the training, the means, the awareness to succeed. Our goal is to bond with these kids and help them find their way.

“I think the single-gender setting makes it much easier because we’re focused on them, and they’re focused more on themselves.”

In this century, single-sex education in the United States has been virtually the exclusive province of private schools. The latest opening of the public ones follows the debut of two same-sex schools in Stockton in August and others in San Francisco and Siskiyou County.

The premise behind single-gender schools is that the fewer distractions boys and girls encounter in class, the better. Some educators say it also helps them break down gender stereotypes.

By the end of the year, Condrey predicted, “we’re going to have our girls building rockets and robots, and we’re going to have our boys writing poetry.”

It remains an open question, however, how much single-gender settings actually help students. Some research suggests that girls can do better in subjects such as math and science when isolated from boys. But the benefits for boys are unclear.

In serving students who are hardened yet fragile, the schools attempt to strike a balance between tolerance and discipline. Students are required to sign a letter stipulating such statements as, “I am capable of learning, developing and participating in school and in my life.”