Abstract
Every few weeks, it seems, another news article about the benefits of separating students by sex appears in reputable outlets. An October 14, 2016 story in The Atlantic hyped “A New Generation of All-Girls Schools” focused on efforts “to close the achievement gap” in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM; Yap, 2016). The article follows the classic pattern I have written about earlier (Signorella, 2015), with the dueling experts and cute anecdotes about the children touting how wonderful it is to be in a single-sex classroom. The claims are typically that problems in the achievement and aspirations of girls and boys will be solved by placing each in separate classrooms or schools.
The recent publication by Juliet A. Williams, The Separation Solution? (2016), is a book-length essay about the ongoing debate in the United States over whether the sex composition of schools and classrooms affects the achievement and social development of children and adolescents. Note that the terminology in the research, in addition to the popular media, remains “sex” rather than “gender,” as the intention is clearly to assign students by biological characteristics rather than (and usually despite) gender identity or orientation (see the discussion by Williams on pp. 10–12).
The book opens with an instructive eyewitness account of Williams’s high school years in Philadelphia amid a legal challenge over twin single-sex public magnet schools. In 1983, Williams became one of the first female students to enter the previously all-boys Central High School following a legal ruling that Central High School’s practice of barring girls violated the Pennsylvania constitution. Reading the original case is enlightening as the many comparisons between the two schools in Philadelphia recorded in the legal proceedings showed that the boys’ school had numerous advantages over the girls’ (e.g., twice as many books, twice as many computers as in the girls’ school; Newberg v. Board of Public Ed., 1983).
In this first chapter, Williams also provides an excellent and concise overview of the subject, with a focus on K–12 public schools in the United States. She discusses the frustrations in tracking the single-sex school phenomenon and the overblown claims of achievement gains by proponents of single-sex schooling. I was pleased to see, for example, that she mentioned the oft-cited Florida school district initiative that had supposedly produced marked educational gains by separating students by sex, noting that these results have not been published in any peer-reviewed outlet. She also introduces crucial themes in the debate, such as the “boy crisis” (which Williams vows to keep in scare quotes to emphasize the framing at play, p. 26) and intersectional issues, such as opposition to single-sex schools being denounced because it might harm boys of color while ignoring risks to girls of color.
The purpose of the book is not, however, to provide an extensive critique of the empirical literature on the impacts of single-sex schooling. Rather, Williams hopes to use the continuing disagreements to “consider whether, and how, an insistence on the truth of gender differences can be reconciled with an increasingly expansive legal definition of sex equality” (p. 9). I used the example of the first chapter to illustrate how Williams has captured the key elements surrounding this dispute. Although many writers in this arena also have addressed the complex interplay (as well as the players) among sex, gender, gender identity, race, social class, and history, Williams provides an accessible introduction without neglecting the important empirical and theoretical contexts. It seems apparent that the author answers the question of whether “gender-specific problems can be presumed to demand gender-specific solutions” (Williams, 2016, pp. 165–166) by concluding that any solutions based on social categories risk emphasizing differences rather than reducing them.
One of the biggest contributions of the book is the examination of the intersections of gender, race, and economic disparities as they impact the push for single-sex schools. Williams dissects Salomone’s (2003) influential book arguing for single-sex schools on social justice grounds and shows the shaky evidence for some of Salomone’s positive views of single-sex schools. Throughout the book, Williams draws on Crenshaw’s now classic explications of intersectionality (e.g., 1989) and highlights the neglect toward girls of color that many of the single-sex initiatives exhibit, an issue that continues to be addressed more broadly in current work by Crenshaw (2015). As there is significant attention to issues such as intersectionality, it seems likely that any audience for the book would need to have some background in social science or education literatures.
After criticizing The Atlantic at the start of this review for a superficial look at the single-sex education controversy, I close by noting that the magazine published an interview with Williams (Anderson, 2015) about her book and, in the essay I criticized here, included a link to the interview (Yap, 2016). The conversation with Williams provides a good companion and introduction to the book, as Williams both reviews and expands upon central issues from the book. Williams was asked why she did not include in her book testimonials from former single-sex school students. She gave this analogy: “If I were to write a book about new treatments for cancer, [I wouldn’t] go out and ask people whether they enjoyed their treatment. I would want to know about results. Our kids deserve to grow up in a society that takes their education every bit as seriously as we take our commitment to good medicine” (para. 7).