Not Just Blue and Pink: Symbols over Substance in Single-Sex Educational Reforms

Background and Purpose: No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have ushered in an era of reform and experimentation in U.S. public education, intended to equalize opportunity and achievement across race/ethnicity and class. To meet these goals, schools have implemented novel approaches, including single-sex education (SSE). Yet, there is no evidence that many of these approaches, including SSE, increase educational opportunity or achievement, and they may have unanticipated effects, particularly in areas of importance to social work. This study had two goals: 1) to document the perceptions and experiences of students and other stakeholders as an urban public school serving low-income African American students implemented SSE, and (2) to train youth as co-researchers, providing them with academic skills and mentorship and empowering them to participate in community change efforts.

Methods: This qualitative study used community-based participatory methods to explore stakeholders’ experiences the year that SSE was introduced. The research team included university researchers and students recruited from 11^th and 12^th grade classrooms at the school. Through regular meetings and a structured mentoring process, the research team conducted 27 individual and 4 small group interviews with students, teachers, social workers, and parents. All youth interviewed were African American; two-thirds of adults interviewed were African American and one-third White. The research team took ethnographic field notes at the school throughout the year. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and data from interviews and field notes were analyzed inductively through a collaborative, iterative process based on principles of grounded theory. 

Results: Students and other stakeholders at the school experienced the institution of SSE and associated reforms (including school uniforms, reorganized schedules, new discipline policies) as surface changes rather than substantive efforts to improve school climate and learning. Although the reforms were initially met with enthusiasm and hope, stakeholders ultimately felt that attention to such superficial concerns as separating students by sex and monitoring their dress were distractions from the larger challenges facing the students and school, including an ongoing lack of resources, increasing pressure on teachers and students to raise test scores rather than improve real learning, and a disintegration of relationships and trust between students and teachers.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings challenge neoliberal narratives of “reform” by exposing the changes as superficial and ultimately harmful to the students. Reforms ostensibly “did something” but ignored the underlying issues contributing to students’ low academic achievement. The study was successful in its goal of training and inspiring student researchers, who completed required graduation projects through their involvement. This work has important implications for social work. First, rather than spending limited resources on unproven interventions, social workers should advocate for additional resources (particularly more school social workers) and linkages with other child-serving organizations, as well as efforts to address underlying issues of poverty, racism, and unequal distribution of resources. In addition, this project demonstrates how CBPR can be effective in empowering participants to contribute to community change efforts and thus should be a method that social work researchers continue to employ, especially with marginalized youth.