Closing the Confidence Gap

In the 1990s, a slew of new studies showed that adolescent girls were in crisis. Something strange happened to girls when they reached their teens. They went from having confidence and good grades to becoming silent, self-doubting, subpar students. One of the popular theories at the time was that teachers inadvertently favored boys in the classroom. Some parents responded by sending their daughters to all-girls’ schools.

By the mid-1990s, the same schools that only 15 years earlier had been dismissed as “finishing schools” found their admissions offices overflowing with applications. Girls’ schools were in vogue, no longer the domain of young ladies whose parents could afford to keep them out of trouble--that is, away from boys at the local public coed high school. They appealed not just to the daughters of the Junior League but also to daughters of feminists. Student populations at these schools became more ethnically and economically diverse, as well as academically competitive.

The idea that girls were being unfairly treated derived from the American Assn. of University Women’s 1991 report, “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which warned that girls were being ignored in the classroom and suffered from something called the “confidence gap.” In adolescence, the report said, a confluence of events occurred in girls: Their science and math scores dropped precipitously, they felt critical of their changing bodies and they were overwhelmed by a sense of personal inadequacy.

In 1994, Peggy Orenstein’s book, “Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,” studied two coed eighth-grade classrooms, which supported the conclusions of the 1991 report. That same year, psychologist Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls” poignantly described the identity crisis that girls endured when they changed from resilient, assertive tomboys, to deferential, self-critical, depressed teenagers.

Karen Stabiner, a freelance journalist and author of “To Dance With the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer,” contributes to the growing literature on girls with “All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters,” an absorbing inside look at two all-girls’ schools: Marlborough, a century-old prep school in Los Angeles, and the Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem, an experimental public school.

“All Girls” divides its well-written narrative between Marlborough and the Young Women’s Leadership School. Stabiner spent the 1998-99 school year at the schools, observing, talking to students, teachers and parents. The author confesses that she started her year of reporting with the old-fashioned bias. “I had carried around a rather musty, fussy, and completely uninformed image of what a girls’ school must be; the sort of place where a child of privilege learned how to crook her little finger while she drank tea.” By the end of that year, however, she had enrolled her own daughter at Marlborough.

Both schools, Stabiner discovers, are “vanity-free zones” where girls can spend seven boy-free hours a day, wearing uniforms instead of the latest spaghetti-strapped fashions. These girls don’t waste energy competing for boys; instead, they focus, undistracted, on academics. They also get to know one another: One of the girls at the Young Women’s Leadership School says that she was able to forge closer friendships with her classmates because “they knew me on a different level than they would have if there had been boys here.”

The two schools are places where girls feel comfortable asking obvious questions in math and science class. At Marlborough, the girls are so opinionated and outspoken that a woman who comes to talk to students about the history of women and their body images is practically shouted off stage. “The whole point of segregating girls,” writes Stabiner, “was to focus their attention on academic achievement and have them define themselves in terms of accomplishment, not by the more fleeting measures of appearance and popularity.”

We follow this process with mounting interest as Stabiner shows us the college-prep obstacle course facing Marlborough seniors: SAT courses, the early admissions game, the agonizing application essay. In East Harlem, meanwhile, the goal isn’t so much getting into the Ivies as keeping the girls in school, introducing them to the idea of going to college and avoiding pregnancy. One in five black teenagers and one in six Latinas get pregnant every year, and one of the book’s most alarming scenes is a sex education class at Leadership School, when it becomes clear to the teacher that most of the girls are having sex and most of them aren’t using birth control. “What do you do,” asked one girl in an anonymous note, “when you’re pregnant and afraid to tell somebody?” Still, the Leadership School provides a serious academic environment that gives the students an incentive not to get pregnant and drop out. It even produces star students who, we learn in the epilogue, get into colleges like Columbia and Bard.

Stabiner introduces a dizzying array of girls: seniors at Marlborough and ninth-graders at the Leadership School, along with their well-meaning teachers and administrators. At times, it is hard to keep track of each girl’s story, the more so when Stabiner breaks up her narrative with interesting points of context: the history of women’s education, studies showing that girls’ and boys’ brains develop differently, studies about girls’ self-esteem. Stabiner finds that girls’ schools succeed in shaping their students into strong, smart achievers, but she expects the reader to believe that the 1991 American Assn. of University Women’s study, which showed that girls were discriminated against in coed classrooms, is still the last word on coed schools. Missing from Stabiner’s glowing portrayal of how girls’ schools empower their students is any real-time comparison to girls at coed schools.

In one of the few anecdotes that compares the parallel universes in secondary school education, a Marlborough girl named Sommer Louie talks about a childhood friend who attends a coed school: “Her mind is not on the books. She has a boyfriend this week, a boyfriend that week. She doesn’t have the same drive.” Sommer concludes that the only difference between them is where they go to school.

The reader, meanwhile, is left to wonder, for example, how many girls at Harvard-Westlake School, an elite coed prep school in Los Angeles, get into good colleges and how their self-esteem and math scores compare with those of Ivy League-bound Marlborough girls. Is it the all-girl environment that helps these girls thrive or the hard work of the girls and their teachers? It is difficult for the reader to judge

Stabiner finds virtually no disadvantage to an all-girls’ education. Her daughter’s being a student at Marlborough seems to be an inherent conflict of interest. What author, after all, would want to alienate her child’s teachers? The cruelty that adolescent girls are so famous for is also suspiciously absent from these pages. Should we assume that this kind of behavior is worse in coed schools? None of these girls seems to suffer from eating disorders, also common among adolescent girls. Does this mean that single-sex education is a panacea for this ailment?

Although Stabiner fails to dramatize the difference between single-sex and coed schools, “All Girls” will give perspective to parents considering their options and to politicians seeking reform in the public school system. They can all rest assured that the tea party is over.