Our 4-year-old started preschool this year, and my husband and I are already exploring public and private school options for our child. One of these options includes sending our child to a single-sex school. However, we both have questions about the advantages or disadvantages of this type of learning environment. Are there any research studies that have been done on this topic?
—Anonymous
The U.S. (in contrast to other countries) has a long-standing history of educating girls and boys together. Single-sex schools and colleges have always been part of the landscape but not typically a huge part of the public school system. Interestingly, over the past 20 years, the number of single-sex schools and classrooms in the country has grown.
There are a few reasons for this. One is a feeling that girls will be more likely to invest in math and other STEM subjects if they are educated without boys. A second, on the flip side, is a concern that boys are falling behind and would do better if education were focused on their needs. Both of these reflect a greater understanding of the differences in development between boys and girls that could, in principle, mean they thrive in different academic environments.
The argument in the other direction is that, of course, the world contains both men and women and ultimately working with a variety of people is necessary. There is also a general discomfort factor around this, or a worry that it will generate unequal access in some way.
These are big-picture policy questions. You’re asking a much more basic question: as a parent, is single-sex education better or worse? The answer is that we do not have much data we can trust, and the data we do have doesn’t point strongly in one direction or another. A primary issue in the research is that, at least in the U.S., single-sex schooling isn’t randomized, and it is very difficult to avoid concerns about selection, especially on a topic like this that families think carefully about.
There are a couple of papers from international contexts with better methods. One study in Korea that does take advantage of randomization found that children in single-sex schooling did better, although it is not clear how applicable this is outside of that setting. A study in Switzerland found that high-achieving girls in math did better in single-sex classrooms. In both cases, the effects are fairly small.
Conclusion: There are a lot of factors that go into choosing a school. You may like (or dislike) the idea of single-sex education, which certainly should be part of the calculus. But there isn’t much reason to think one of these approaches to education is “better.”
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