Single sex schools vs. Coed schools

There is a huge ongoing debate in schools, families and society in general about the pros and cons of single sex schools versus co-ed schools. Women have been advancing in equality rights in the last century: they won the right to vote in 1920 and they have not stopped since then in removing any kind of social or legal barriers. Much progress has been made from the women’s suffrage movement to feminism to presidential women candidates. Coeducation is something natural to this trend. Boys and girls taking the same classes in the same learning environments seem the right way to go and that is why public and many private schools have been using the coeducation model with very well known results. Nonetheless, some education researchers have raised the question about the effectiveness of this option mainly supported in the evidence of boys and girls learning in different ways. There are several reasons for and against each alternative and none of them seems to be definitive. So, it’s up to parents to go over them and decide what suits best for their children. Here are the main arguments of single sex and co-ed schooling:

What single sex school supporters say	What Co-ed advocates say:
Boys and girls learn differently	Coeducation gives students the opportunity to witness and adjust to different learning styles
Co-ed settings encourage gender stereotypes	Coeducational schools are microcosms of society
Teachers may treat girls differently from boys in math, science, and computer related classes, giving them less attention and fewer learning opportunities	Stereotypes can be broken by experience of the range of gender behavior,
Single-sex settings are said to improve classroom behavior	Some studies have shown that there is no particular benefit to single-sex education,
Social pressures accompany a coed environment	Single-sex schools that have been found successful may have other causative factors contributing to their pupils’ achievement
	Some studies show that a single-sex environment leads to too competitive an atmosphere

The claims of single sex school supporters always start with the scientific fact of boys and girls learning differently. Many studies have shown that girls and boys have different patterns of brain development and that their way of processing information has a different relationship to the center of emotion. Besides, they have differentiated hearing sensitivity and tend to respond to stress in diverse ways. Based on this differentiation evidence, they argue, the best way to go is to respond coherently by differentiating their instruction and learning environment.

Another reason for single sex education is that any co-ed ambience encourages gender stereotypes. In our co-ed dominated education system there are some subjects stereotypically assigned only to boys or girls. Boys tend to avoid arts or advanced academic subjects because they don’t want to be identified as nerds or feminine. Similarly, girls avoid science or technology subjects because they don’t want to be identified as tomboys. In a single sex school, girls will do math and science as part of their normal curriculum and so will do boys with subjects such as art and music.

In addition, in co-ed schools many teachers pay more attention to boys in the traditionally assigned boys’ subjects. This habit of many teachers of treating girls differently from boys in math, science and computer related issues by giving them less attention and fewer learning opportunities would become impossible in a single sex classroom.

Classroom behavior is an omnipresent challenge for teachers in every school. Some studies indicate that single sex classes relieve girls of the consequences of the boy’s different maturity and behavior at their same age.

Finally, heavy social pressure accompanies a coed environment. It is said that most of this pressure may be reduced to a lesser extent by single sex atmospheres. Conducts like long hours mirror preening, stress causing dating, annoying show off, and classroom misbehavior would be largely lightened.

On the other hand, co-ed advocates say that coeducation gives students the opportunity to witness and adjust to different learning styles. What the single sex school supporters see as a threat to learning, the co-ed advocates see as an opportunity. Boys and girls can enrich from each other’s approaches and learn to collaborate by bringing their style in working for common goals. Learning differently helps expand knowledge out of the rigid structures of a single sex school.

Secondly, proponents of coeducational schools expose a very important argumentation when they talk about real life being set for woman and men alike to interact in places like home, work and almost any regular situation.  School then should be an environment in which gender differences come to be understood explicitly, preparing students for life. By doing this, students learn to deal with social issues that arise in mixed company rather than avoiding them.

The third reason exposed by co-ed supporters is that stereotypes can be broken by experience of the range of gender behavior. It is claimed that girls seeing boys in the math, science and technology classes gain evidence that these pursuits are not gender linked.

The fourth reason for co-ed is that some studies have shown that there is no particular benefit to single sex education and they mention the study of the American Association of University Women conducted in 1998 whose results found no evidence to support single sex education as better than co-ed. Some other studies have shown that only students from disadvantaged families benefit from single sex education.

The fifth pro co-ed reason is that single-sex schools that have been found successful may have another causative factors contributing to their pupils’ achievement. Some have suggested that results in the positive studies may be influenced by factors such as small class size, a rigid admissions policy or more emphasis in academics.

The last factor against single sex schools is that usually they lead to highly competitive atmospheres. In such cases, the co-ed schools atmosphere is recommended as healthier.