Separate Isn’t Equal for Girls

Boys and girls cannot learn together. That’s the philosophy behind Long Beach Unified’s Jefferson Middle School. Recently, Jefferson claimed to be the first public middle school in the nation to segregate boys and girls into different classrooms.

Will this save the public school system? Hardly. I work at an L.A. public school for pregnant teens--McAlister High School. Our classes have only girls. We have four campuses in L.A., all gender-segregated. It’s been that way for decades. Has it made a difference? Not really.

Students in our all-female classrooms are learning at a normal rate. They are not doing better or worse than students in gender-integrated classrooms at other schools. This is the reality that gender segregationists do not want to hear.

It is no secret that America’s grade schools are not keeping up with the information explosion shaking the foundations of modern thinking. Genetically modified foods are finding their way onto our dinner tables, but we are not even teaching most children what DNA means.

Segregating genders is just the latest nutty idea of how to save our schools. The real villains are falling funding rates, poor planning, dumbed-down textbooks, and that the best and the brightest would rather be doctors and lawyers than teachers.

You want segregated classrooms? Don’t forget our own American history. In the mid-19th century, college sororities were begun because women were excluded from the college fraternity movement. Only as recently as 1975 did Harvard University open its doors completely to women. Harvard, America’s oldest college, merged its admissions office with Radcliffe, a related women’s university. Should we once again exile women into different universities? Different classrooms? Different beaches? Different worlds?

The future is frightening because it’s an unknown territory. But we cannot hide from these fears by trying to reverse history and return to a fantasy of medieval times where men and women know their places. Now that women have become a majority on most college campuses, should we really turn the clock back and put them in separate classrooms?