School stops separating students by gender
BOISE – Kimberly Middle School has ended its two-year experiment in single-gender classes, hindered by a limited budget and unequal numbers of boys and girls.
“What it comes down to is that when you want to do single-gender classrooms, you need to have enough staff members to allow appropriate class sizes. Otherwise, you’re at the mercy of how many boys there are compared to how many girls,” said principal Jeff Jones.
School administrators made the recommendation to the school board after reviewing test scores since the switch was made. About 320 students attend middle school in the small town just southeast of Twin Falls.
“We looked at a lot of data from the last two years, and the big thing jumping out at us was the smaller the class size, the larger the gains,” Jones said. “If class size is such an issue, then why would we be willing to sacrifice that to continue with same-sex classes?”
The district began segregating boys and girls in some middle school core classes in 2002, at the request of teachers who thought the move would help the students focus on their studies.
Though school officials acknowledged at the time that research on the matter was limited, they pointed out that preteen and teenage students generally feel insecure about interacting with the opposite sex. They hoped that dividing the boys and girls would encourage female students to ask more questions and keep boys from acting out in class.
And initial reports were glowing. Former principal Judy Watson, who resigned because of a serious illness earlier this year, said in 2003 that students were having fewer disciplinary problems and teachers were holding them to a higher standard for classroom behavior. As news of the experiment spread, schools from around the nation began calling Kimberly Middle School administrators seeking advice on starting their own single-gender classes.
But in some grades, there were drastically more boys than girls, said Jones. Dividing the kids by gender meant that some classes had more than 30 students while others had about 20.
“One of the things we committed to in the first place was that it would be fair and equal for everyone. But this year, we would have had in one eighth-grade algebra class almost 40 boys – you just can’t do that,” he said. “So if we want to continue single-gender classrooms, then we have to hire more teachers and we don’t have the money to do that.”
Test scores show that students in the smaller classes, regardless of their gender, improved more than students in the larger classes, Jones said.
“It was a significant difference, and it didn’t matter whether it was an advanced pre-algebra class or a class of students who struggled in math. The smaller the class size, the larger the gain,” Jones said. “This isn’t a mystery to teachers, of course. We know that one of the biggest factors that either helps or hurts learning is class size.”
Funding for schools in Idaho is limited at best. The amount the state spends on public schools has remained fairly flat for the past few years because of the economic slump while costs for textbooks, maintenance and supplies have continued to rise.
School board member Kent Allen said the door is not entirely closed on single-gender classes.