An Ethnographic Study of Single-Sex Schooling

Abstract

We conducted an ethnographic study of the implementation of single-sex schooling in the 5^th grade at an elementary school in northeast Georgia. The student body at this school is 99.8% Hispanic with 96.4% of students on free or reduced lunch. In 2006, Title IX was reinterpreted to allow single-sex schooling in public schools and since that time the number of schools implementing single-sex educational programs has dramatically increased. However, there is little in the literature on single-sex schooling in public elementary schools and even less on high poverty, diverse populations. We were interested in how this implementation changed the dynamics of classrooms, as well as student performance on high-stakes tests, with an emphasis on science and mathematics. A number of critical observations have been made. First, the teachers in the 5^th grade had no formal training and were not prepared individually or systematically for single-sex schooling. Second, there has been no systematic improvement in student achievement on high-stakes tests. Third, students are adapting to the single-sex environments on their own, developing strategies for life and learning in sex-segregated classrooms. There is an on-going debate in scholarly literature regarding the efficacy of single-sex education, we hope to contribute to this debate.