Government Loosens Single-Sex Restrictions on Public Schools

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Public schools districts nationwide will be able to offer more single-sex classes and extracurricular activities and open more single-sex schools under a federal regulation that will go into effect this November.

In an announcement yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, said final Title IX single-sex regulations would loosen 30-year-old restrictions on single-sex education in public schools while upholding nondiscrimination requirements.

“Research shows that some students may learn better in single-sex education environments,” Ms. Spellings said in a statement. “These final regulations permit communities to establish single sex schools and classes as another means of meeting the needs of students.”

Previously, federal regulations allowed the separation of students by gender only in special circumstances, such as sex education classes or for contact sports. Single-sex schools were allowed only if comparable public schools were also offered to the other sex.

Opponents of single-sex education said the new regulations would endanger progress in the education of female students over the past three decades and said the administration had ignored widespread public opinion in opposition to changing the regulations.

“The regulations will disadvantage all students by allowing vastly expanded sex-segregation in our nation’s schools without proper safeguards against discrimination and stereotyping,” the co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, Marcia Greenberger, said in a statement.

Advocates for single-sex education were ecstatic about the Bush administration’s announcement, which they said they have been expecting for several years.

“A lot of districts have been lying in wait for these new regulations to come out and now that they’re out. I think there’s going to be an explosion” of single sex schools, the president of the Foundation for Education Reform and accountability, Tom Carroll, who is also chairman of two single-sex charter schools in Albany, said. “We literally have people lined up around the block several times trying to get into these single-sex schools.”

Under the Bloomberg administration, nine single-sex schools have opened in the city since 2004 and other co-ed schools have begun offering single-sex classes. The Department of Education said it was still unclear how the new regulation would affect schools in the city.

Many districts and schools have been expecting the change and have “jumped the regulatory gun,” the chairman of the National Board for Single Sex Public Education, Leonard Sax.

The new regulations will bring such schools out of the legal shadows.

“There’s been a big legal cloud hanging over all these schools,” Mr. Carroll said. “They have put up a bright green light.”

Dr. Sax said the push to change the regulations gained momentum in 2001, when Senator Hutchison of Texas, joined by Senator Clinton, drafted an amendment to the No Child Left Behind law supporting the expansion of single-sex education. In their campaign for the amendment, the senators cited the success of a New York City all-girls public school, the Young Women’s Leadership School in Harlem.


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