Benefits Of The All-Boy All-Girl Class

Educators are always looking for the best ways to help students learn.

- Liz Rothaus Bertrand

Some local schools and programs around the country are trying single-gender classrooms — an idea with old-fashioned roots that advocates say can provide innovative solutions to some of today’s educational challenges.

As early as the mid-1800s, the United States was already a leader in public school co-education, says Johann Neem, author of “Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.” Boys and girls, however, often occupied different sides of the classroom and many institutions of higher education remained single gender well into the 19th and 20th centuries. The common view was that “boys and girls/men and women had different social roles and virtues, and each had to be protected,” Neem says.

These days, advocates for separating genders say it’s about providing educational equity for all students. They argue that subconscious biases can prevent equal participation in class, that girls and boys have different learning styles, and that kids can more easily be themselves in a single-gender classroom setting.

At Charlotte Latin School, a private school serving children from transitional kindergarten through high school, several middle school courses are separated by gender. These include all seventh-grade math classes and elective engineering courses. Head of Middle School Todd Ballaban says these programs help ensure all students, particularly girls, receive the best support and opportunities to succeed.

“If you just look at the facts of the working world, as sad as I am to report this, when you look at the STEAM field, it’s dominated by men,” Ballaban says. One culprit may be unconscious biases that happen in a classroom setting, he says.