<p>In the middle school, the compliance/arts&crafts bias was obvious and huge with some teachers. (I will never forget sitting in a conference with a science teacher and having her say, in front of my S (!), “I know that X isn’t interested in science.” He had been reading things like Discover since age 6, was in the science G/T program, and is going to graduate from HS with AP Bio, AP Chem, and AP Physics. He was bored to tears by her program, which featured lots of arts& crafts and follow-the-directions stuff. She was known for being good at “interesting more girls in science.”)</p>
<p>At our HS one still sees the difference largely in the awards…nice, enthusiastic girls consistently selected for junior year NHS and junior year book awards over boys with better grades, more rigorous courseloads, and plenty of ECs. (My S was not one of those passed over, so it isn’t sour grapes. <g>)</g></p>
<p>Are there any single-sex high schools in America? The group of schools that my school was a part of catered to boys only, though we had partner schools that were all-female. We had plenty of statistics and so on to convince us that single-sex education would be more beneficial to kids as they move out of kindergarten and all. For example, I can recall a teacher (I think it was Maths) talking about how, when you plot them on a bell curve of academic achievement in the senior year, boys are spread out to quite a degree, while girls tend to clump together in the middle, with a few ‘outliers’ being the ‘overachievers’ or ‘underachievers’.</p>
<p>It’s true that boys mature later than girls. It’s part of the frontal brain cortex (if I remember correctly) that develops earlier in girls, and which corresponds to emotions, social interaction, and all those other signs of maturity. I didn’t even like academics until I hit the second half of junior year, when it all just…clicked, somehow.</p>
<p>We always had numerous functions with the girl’s school down the street anyway, so that didn’t separate us entirely from the influence of ‘the other gender’. Then again, in an all-boys school, there would be more sexual innuendo and comments made towards female teachers, either overt or whispered (though rarely intending harm, as I overhead quite a few in my time), and the comments about girls being unusually close to male teachers and all. And you’d get the usual “you’re all gay over there” comments as well, which I think you can’t really avoid with a single-sex school.</p>
<p>The odd thing is, the girls actually tended to be more rowdy and less academically focused than us boys, which was odd, although there were a few I could note that played pretty rough sports and did great in academics.</p>
<p>A co-ed school might cause the boys to become more focused on ‘landing’ the hot girls, or just girls in general, and that might be a reason for academic decline in boys. I don’t know if that actually ever happens, though I know quite a few of my friends were affected. Some were superstars in prep school, then fell towards the bottom of heap when it came to ‘girl-time’.</p>
<p>Actually, there seems to be a movement to experiment with public single sex schools where I live. My S went to an all-boys 1-12 grade private school that had an affiliated all-girls “sister” school a few miles away.</p>
<p>The all male situation was perfect for him, but the school self-selected for boys who could handle academics at a very high level. I’m not sure that these private experiences tell us much. But there are reports coming out of the few sex segregated publics that seem to show promising improvement for the males and females.</p>