The boys in the seventh-grade classroom wave their hands wildly and squirm in their seats, unable to contain their joy in a competition involving singular and plural nouns. Their teacher seems undaunted by the outbursts of cheering.
These are boys, after all. Sometimes they are loud.
In a struggling East Baltimore neighborhood, the middle-schoolers have begun their second year at an all-boys charter school whose creation marks a distinct shift in thinking about single-sex education in the public schools. Next fall its founders will open a college-prep school for boys, and a New York-based foundation will open one for girls in Baltimore. Meanwhile, in Prince George's County, a failing high school will attempt to improve by segregating the sexes for core academic classes.
Proponents argue that single-sex schools help students concentrate on academics and improve performance. Their resurgence has come about since 2006, when the U.S. Department of Education gave school districts more leeway to develop single-gender classes and schools, and there are now about 100 nationwide.
But the change also has ignited a debate over segregating students by gender, and the American Civil Liberties Union has opposed the nascent movement. In May, the ACLU filed a complaint in federal court charging that single-sex classes in a Kentucky middle school were illegal and discriminatory.
"In general, the ACLU is always concerned when we see gender segregation. But the situation of most concern to us is when students have no choice but to participate in single-gender classrooms or schools, or if students are shut out of valuable educational opportunities because of gender," said Bebe Verdery, education director of the Maryland ACLU.
While all-girls and all-boys schools are common among Baltimore-area private and parochial schools, only venerable Western High School for girls in Baltimore survived challenges that began in the 1970s, when the federal government forbade gender discrimination in public education. Loosening those rules has created opportunities for those concerned about a national decline in boys' achievement.
That was the motivation of three African-American men who considered opening a charter school to help the population they believed to be most in trouble in Baltimore: young black males. Black boys were being assigned to special education at higher rates and were more apt to be suspended and to drop out. Particularly alarming to Carl Stokes, one of the school's founders and a former school board member, was that they were in the minority at most of the city's top competitive high schools, even ones that had once been all-boys schools.
