School for boys

Our view: Single-sex schools are an idea worth trying

How many people remember middle school as the best years of their life? Hardly anyone, we'd guess, and for good reason: It happens during that awkward, fidgety purgatory called adolescence, when the growth spurt sets in and kids' minds and bodies are so painfully out of sync that girls and boys seem to inhabit different planets. With all those raging hormones, it's a wonder anybody ever learns to diagram sentences or convert fractions to decimals.

You'd think there had to be a better way, and in fact there always was. Among private schools, there's been a long tradition of separate institutions for boys and girls. Single-sex schools remove the distraction of the opposite sex and allow educators to tailor instruction to the different interests and learning styles of boys and girls.

That's why former City Councilman Carl Stokes' concept of an all-boys middle school for public school students seems to hold a lot of potential. The Bluford Drew Jemison Science Technology Engineering Math Academy on Caroline and Biddle streets is a public charter school that was founded last year, and Mr. Stokes and his colleagues plan to open a college prep high school for boys next year on the city's west side.

State school Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, a graduate of Western High, the state's only other single-sex public school, says she's excited by the prospect. The interests of boys and girls are so different during the middle school years that specifically targeting the needs of boys could bring big dividends in academic performance, she believes. Boys need more help with organizational skills and study habits. They also need to measure their progress against other boys rather than against girls, who are more usually mature than boys at that age.

There are a handful of other single-sex programs around the state, but most of them are in co-ed schools that have one or two single-sex classes. A Montessori charter school in Frederick applied to open an all-girls school but was turned down by the county school board. Baltimore's experiment could be a laboratory for programs that might make such a difference in the lives of at-risk African-American boys that graduates could well look back on their experience there as some of the best years of their lives.