There's been a lot of discussion of single-sex education in blogdom recently, in the wake of new rules allowing more single-sex schools. Matt Yglesias offers links, and Kevin Drum expresses concern:
It turns out, though, that my real fear is just the opposite: what if we try it and Becks turns out to be right? What if it works? Does that mean we just give up on the whole idea of figuring out how to make co-ed education work? I can't be the only one who thinks that would be a bad idea, can I?
There are all sorts of problems of race, gender, class, religion, and so forth that can seemingly be ameliorated by simple segregation. But that just caves in to the problem, essentially declaring it unsolvable, rather than acknowledging it and continuing to search for solutions. I have a hard time believing that this does anybody any good in the long term.
In this case, I'm actually willing to make a fearless prediction of what will happen as a result of these rules: Nobody will be able to agree on the results. There will be some schools and studies where single-sex education appears to be a roaring success, and there will be other schools and studies where it appears to be a complete disaster, and people on both sides will pick and choose the ones that best support their previously chosen position, and nothing will really change.
I'm confident in saying this because education is complicated, and highly individual. No one policy is going to be an ideal solution for everyone, and things that work brilliantly for some students will fail miserably for others. We'll never give up on co-ed education, and we'll never be rid of single-sex education, because there will always be people who are convinced that one or the other is the One True Approach, and there will always be some evidence to support those positions.
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Ah, wisdom and irony in a single package; "...no one will argree on the results..." I think that about sums it all up. You just can't get good 'controls' across classrooms, ergo, the successes of some experiments and the failures of others is a given. Heck, sometimes it's tough to get control within a single classroom. Of course, given the polticized environment of education, it's even unlikely that you could get consensus on what constitutes a success and a failure.
A lot of the problem is secondary effects in both cases. In the mixed group, the problem really boils down to the presence of a "natural" dominance heirarchy. It is possible for a skilled instructor to counter dominance effects, at least in a small group... but it takes special effort, even training. And if the group is too large, you end up trying to train too many instructors, not to mention dealing with their dominance ladder. On the other hand, segregated groups can all too easily decay into "separate and unequal", even despite the best intentions of most of the concerned parties. I'd say the gripping hand is, this is a fundamentally difficult goal, which requires consistent and sustained leadership to get anywhere.
I've been starting to form a concept of "social-hard" problems in management and leadership, comparable to "AI-hard" in computer science. This would be a classic example.
Anybody else here actually attended a single-sex school? Here's a data point from one who thanks his parents for sending him to one - to be precise, the #6 academically ranked one in the country at the time; it's main purpose in life seemed to be providing a steady stream of Oxford/Cambridge undergrads; as a result of this the underlying expectations were for high academic performance. The school achieved this in part by successfully sublimating the pubescent male hormones into an academically based hierarchy. All my siblings and most other early friends went to coed schools, and their attention there was primarily focussed on sexually based hierarchical activities. And their academic performance reflected that. So was mine, once I became an undergrad in a coed college. School uniforms significantly muted differences by race and economic discriminants. Living in a country with a state religion (Church of England) meant that the (required by statute) morning services were C of E, but those of other (and no) pursuasions were not required to attend. Those that took advantage of this were seen as getting a break, not as being somehow different therefore inferior. One hymn and one prayer. And one class on comparative religion per week. I do not recall anyone there being particularily overtly religous, or forming clicques based on any religious separations. The only outlet was larning, and we were rewarded for originality. Even with classes of 30 the teachers managed to find the time to understand and mark what we submitted for its own merits, and not by whether or not we gave the precise answer in some dogma. as long as it still worked. We got extra merits for surprising them even. But the school did have one measure of segregation from the general populace that has become non-PC: to get in one had to pass a tough entrance exam, so the average IQ in classes was quite a bit higher than 100. And even at that there were 5 layers of streaming.
My data point then suggests single sex classes are probably a good thing for the top streams with teachers that can accept individuality and originality from the students. If high academic achievement is not a priority, then single sex might well lead to more problems and become an obstruction.