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A school for just one sex? Boys first
By MARY SANCHEZThe Kansas City Star
“Why not a school dedicated solely to girls?”
The question of gender equity deserves airing in response to Superintendent John Covington’s plan for an all-male preparatory academy.
Here is the disturbing but necessary reply: Because academically, girls are not failing like boys. And not nearly enough research or public awareness is cast toward boys’ relative lack of achievement and motivation.
Women earn high school degrees at higher rates than men, and they earn more college and postgraduate degrees as well. And this isn’t true just for urban school districts like Kansas City, where Covington envisions an all-male school opening by 2012. It’s true for all races, ethnicities and class levels.
Young women today are better educated than their mothers. But young men today are less well educated than their father’s generation, according to a study tracking education attainment from 1940 to 2008.
That’s a disturbing trend no matter what your gender. Any sort of blaming of girls, claiming they have somehow made gains at the expense of boys, is a cop-out. Both boys and girls should be achieving and well prepared for successful careers.
And it’s not that girls wouldn’t also benefit being in a single-gender public school. Many would, especially during the middle school years, when too many girls veer off course from initial interests and aspirations.
Theoretically and certainly legally, a strong case can be made for an all-girls school as well. But I’d ask that critics hold off. Unless benefactors and interest rain down for two schools, the district should create a boys academy first.
Again, more research is needed. But one common theory is that coed schools tend to punish what is innately “boy behavior” — excess energy, trouble settling down, speaking loudly. Boys are twice as likely as girls to be suspended, labeled learning disabled or diagnosed with attention deficit or attention deficit hyperactivity.
Some argue that a school designed for boys could react to such behavior differently, with fewer out-of-school suspensions as one example. Covington proposed Chicago’s Urban Prep Academies as a model.
Finally, here is a nugget for anyone leery of the district’s chances of creating an academically advanced school primarily for urban boys. Did you miss the news about Lincoln College Prep?
The Kansas City school had the highest ranking — by a long shot — of the six schools in the metropolitan area named among the top U.S. public schools last month. Schools were judged by graduation rates, college matriculation, test scores and advanced placement courses.
How groundbreaking it could be if the all-male Kansas City Preparatory Academy eventually joined the annual list.