As the new year begins, we are excited to designate Crespi Carmelite High School our newest Gurian Center for Excellence.  About the GI partnership with Crespi, school president Dr. Ken Foersch has said, “The Gurian Institute provides us with the science and strategies for maximizing each student’s potential.  Our partnership with GI has helped us keep our promise to boys and their families as the best school for boys in Southern California.”

As a Center for Excellence, Crespi is poised not only to bring training and strategies to everyone in its own buildings but to provide this training throughout California.  GI is honored to work with Crespi.  In today’s blog post, inspired by our recent work with Crespi, Michael Gurian will explore a question Crespi staff find themselves answering in their communities quite often:  “Why choose a Boys School for your son?”

Both coed and single gender schools can be great schools.  GI works with every possible school.  In our new era of school choice, some schools focus heavily on the science of boys’ and girls’ learning.  These schools are often, though not always, boys and girls schools.

In my thirty years in this field, I have often been asked, “Which is better, coed or single gender?”  I’ve consistently argued that we should not pit one kind of schooling against another.  Yet, when I gave this diplomatic answer in a media interview recently, the response came back: “That’s a cop out—pick one!”

I don’t believe it is a cop out, but this zero-sum request did inspire three sub-questions I hope you will ponder as you look at best choices for your children.  As a boys school, Crespi promotes itself with this sentence:  “If you think boys and girls learn differently, Crespi is the school for you.”  The sentence is, to me, an implicit promise of success for boys made to boys’ parents by answering these three other questions in substantial ways.

1. Some single gender schools have gotten great results, so why not say single sex/single gender is just better?

Many coed schools get great results, too, but one of the reasons single gender schools often show quicker success results is the requirement in most of them that faculty and staff get trained in and practice fidelity to male/female learning difference strategies.  As science-based professional development is inculcated in these schools, teachers more quickly affect learning, discipline, and social-emotional development for boys and girls.

Without training in how boys and girls learn, however, either a coed or single sex/single gender school can make major systemic mistakes, thus they lose both male and female learners. Quite often, coed schools are slower than boys or girls schools to provide sex/gender-friendly training and science-based systemic analysis.  They are not focused on sex-and-the-brain; they try other kinds of PD or other curricula.  Their slowness to look at male/female brain difference results in old methods of teaching that work less well than we want them to for the brains of boys and girls.

To see success data for both coed and single sex/single gender schools that GI has worked with (thus, data we can track), please click http://www.gurianinstitute.com/single-gender-schools.html. That data illustrates two points: that coed and single gender schools can both flourish with training via the sex/gender lens training, and that single sex/single gender schools often show quicker results because of their deliberate use of science-based innovation.

2. Are there specific populations that single gender schools and classrooms might be best suited for?

Yes, it is possible that a single sex/single gender school or classroom will help certain populations in ways that a coed classroom may not (and vice versa).   Many shy and introverted girls, for instance, do not show the kind of leadership we want for them in coed classrooms, but they can shine in single sex/single gender classrooms. This is especially true in math/science at the middle school age, when there might be two or three very assertive, verbal, and math- or -science-smart boys who dominate the coed classroom.   It can also be true in any large coed classroom in which boy behavior confuses the teacher and creates classroom management issues which then affect girls’ learning to a detriment.  In the single sex/single gender classrooms, introverted girls will often talk more, answer questions more, and lead more.  Teachers who are teaching girls-only classrooms become good at bringing leadership qualities out of all these girls, without distraction.

Shyer boys, too, including boys who are raised without fathers and who, without enough masculine maturation, do not fully develop social-emotional and learning skills, might flourish in single sex/single gender classrooms.  There, they receive focus on the male mentoring.  Because teachers and administrators in boys’ schools often specialize in how to build character, social-emotional maturity, peer mentoring, and learning success for boys, the boys in these environments often start to make up for loss of male maturation influence at home by finding it in the school.  Furthermore, for any boy who is not doing well in a coed or traditional classroom, a single sex school or classroom can be just what he needs for success.  Because most coed classrooms don’t know how different boys and girls learn, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of boys around us who can benefit from single sex/single gender education.

Because single gender classes/schools can be beneficial to many girls and boys, I hope they will be increasingly available and optional for American schools. I believe, too:  if we insist, culturally, on “better than coed” or “worse than coed,” this “versus” language will create ongoing backlash that is not good for our schools, teachers, or students, whether single sex or coed.  Schools like Crespi Carmelite H.S. provide a template for successful single sex schooling that is not combative; the school makes this template available for close-up observation of what is working there.

3. But won’t single gender classrooms lead to dangerous segregation and gender stereotypes?

This is the most widely posited “disadvantage” of single gender schools that I hear wherever I travel or do media.  This objection generally divides into these parts:

*”If we separate boys and girls, not only will we be increasing gender stereotypes, but we will do children a disservice because adult, family, and work environments in their future will be coed.”

*”Separation of the genders is segregation, it is discriminatory.  Separation didn’t work for the races so it should not be practiced with the genders.”

As to the first “disadvantage’:

*Both coed and single gender classrooms can teach gender stereotypes. These stereotypes are part of our social fabric and so we battle them on all fronts.  They are no more extant in single sex schools than anywhere else.

*Meanwhile, some of the most successful people in the world went to single gender schools, including numerous Senators and Presidential runner-up, Hilary Clinton.  These successful people know how to relate to others in the workplace.

*There is no evidence that spending a few years in a single sex/single gender school makes a person a bad spouse.  Interestingly, some researchers have found just the opposite.

Researcher Patti Crane and her team in the late 1990s interviewed spouses of men who had gone to coed schools and spouses of men who had gone to boys’ schools (please see more of my discussion with her in A Fine Young Man).  The researchers wanted to see if there were differences in male social emotional skills.  Surprising Crane and her colleagues:  the spouses of the men from boys’ schools reported better aggregate communication and emotional interaction skills in their husbands than did the spouses of the men who had gone to coed schools.

Crane, who had gone into her research assuming the “gender stereotypes” argument would prevail and the boys from boys’ school would make worse spouses, came to realize why she got the result she did.  Boys in boys’ schools do not have girls around to “do the emotional work for them, they learn to do that emotional work for themselves.”  Crane’s findings turned the “dangerous gender stereotypes” and “male segregation makes for bad husbands” arguments on their heels.

*Segregation language is false language for sex and gender because single sex/single gender schools utilize brain science.  Racial segregation in the 1990s was based in no discernible science.  The genetic, neural, and biochemical differences between males and females are profound, while brain differences between males of different races or females of different races are not. Various aspects of culture can be somewhat different between races, but race is nothing like sex difference in the brain, molecular, and chromosomal human being.

Single sex/single gender learning is a science-based option that shows a schools understanding of how important the sex and gender lens can be used for learners and for people in everyday life.  As you look at making the best decision in your communities—whether you choose coed, single sex/single gender, Montessori, Waldorf, International School, or any other modality, it can be crucial to avoid non-scientific ideologies.

On www.michaelgurian.com you can click the About page and find “Research Reference List.”  There, you will discover more than one thousand science-based studies illustrating male/female brain difference. Even a brief perusal of those studies will illustrate how robust is the need to innovate educationally for both sexes, wherever they fall on the gender spectrum, and in both coed and single sex/single gender schools.

While no one can confirm whether single sex or coed is better for every child—nor should we—we can say this:  the greatest unheralded tool of school success is teacher, staff, and parent training in male/female brain difference.  If we pay attention to learning through the sex and gender lens, each structural approach to learning can flourish, and boys, girls, and everyone on the spectrum get education specifically tailored for them.  This is the best education in the world.  One of the reasons Crespi became a Gurian Center for Excellence is to provide this training to every school in the LA region that wants it.

If you have not looked at Crespi Carmelite High School’s Center for Excellence, we hope you will check it out.  You can learn more about it on our Gurian Institute website and also by visiting www.crespi.org.  If you are in southern California and have a son coming up on high school age, we hope you’ll visit crespi.org to get to know the school.  You can also personally reach out to Director of Admissions, Rob Kodama, at rkodama@crespi.org to learn more and to set up a school visit.

Rob Kodama, Dr. Alan Swaney, and Daniel Parlato from Crespi will be presenting at our Virtual Summer Training Institute June 24-25, 2023.  To learn more about that event and to register, click:  https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2023/.

–Michael Gurian