Individual Choice: Single Sex or Coed Schools?

Attending school with the mentality set to study and get good grades for a better future yet, the constant distractions that keep disturbing your education are in every direction, starting with that cute football captain to the right or the pretty cheerleader to your left. One cannot truly concentrate when they are so close, daydreaming all your fantasies causes you to fail a test later on , the class. Would you prefer to be without all of those distractions to actually concentrate on your education? Well, you can.

Single-sex education will provide the required environment you want or need. Yet, if you prefer to attend a school with coeducation, it is quite fine too. One may ask what are the dissimilitudes -is one more favorable than the other -well advocates for both have said that it clearly depends on the individual.

Single-sex education popularity has been increasing since 2002, when the Law of No Child Left Behind also known as NCLB, was passed allowing local educational agencies to use advance program funds to support same-gender schools and classrooms (Novotney).

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People were skeptical about single-sex education since it was a completely new idea but they were convinced by the benefits that it offered. Some of the benefits were that if a particular school misses the adequate yearly progress, also known as AYP, for three years in a row, it must offer free tutoring. Furthermore, of the consequences of the school missing the AYP for three years there are consequences as well if the school misses two years in a row.

If the school misses the AYP for two years in a row it has to authorize the students to transfer to a better-performing public school.

Factors that contributed to the long acceptance of single sex educations caused everything to slow down, it was not until January 8, 2002 that NCLB was signed into a law officially by President George W. Bush. After the law was passed it required for states to test students in particularly two subjects, reading and math from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. The schools must report the results, for both the student population as a whole and for particular “subgroups” of students, including English-learners and students in special education, racial minorities, and children from low-income families(Klein).

Single-sex education backs up with a certain study that proved the brain differences as evidence and for the benefits of separating girls from boys in the classroom for them to receive a better education. A 2007 longitudinal pediatric neuroimaging study led by a team of neuroscientists from the National Institute of Mental Health that validates the various brain regions develop in a different sequence and tempo in girls compared with boys (Novotney). The studies by the National institute of Mental Health consisted and showed that, “[By] Using 829 brain scans gathered over two years from 387 subjects from 3 to 27 years old, researchers found several remarkable differences.

The occipital lobe, for example — the one most associated with visual processing — shows rapid development in girls 6 to 10 years old, while boys show the largest growth in this region after 14 years old. Other studies have also shown disparities in language processing between the sexes, concluding that the language areas of the brain in many 5-year-old boys look similar to that of many 3-year-old girls.” This study ratifies the fact that girls and boys learn at a different rates and for that reason it is better to provide an education that is appropriate to them, attending a single sex education school.

Coeducation, also known as mixed education, is a more modern type of education that consists of males and females in the same schools and classrooms. Coeducation is the opposite of single-sex education, this type of education encourages the mix of females and males being together learning. Coeducation supporters and researchers stress that by separating students by gender can lead to greater gender discrimination causing a great difficulty for students to deal properly with the opposite sex later in life. An advocate of coed education, Halpern, a former American Psychological Association president says, “School is preparation for adult life-How can boys and girls learn how to interact as equals in the workplace if they have no experience interacting as equals in school?”.

Coeducation teaches students to interact and learn social, emotional and even their self esteem, they will also learn to respect and cooperate with each other. It is very important to know how to work effectively with the opposite sex, we are currently in century were females and males are for the most part seen as equal.

Coeducation is not for everyone. A study made by Bruce Goldman and Gérard DuBois called, “How Men's and Women's Brains Are Different”, shows that females and males process information differently and why:
But why are men’s and women’s brains different? One big reason is that, for much of their lifetimes, women and men have different fuel additives running through their tanks: the sex-steroid hormones. In female mammals, the primary additives are a few members of the set of molecules called estrogens, along with another molecule called progesterone; and in males, testosterone and a few look-a-likes collectively deemed androgens.

Importantly, males developing normally in utero get hit with a big mid-gestation surge of testosterone, permanently shaping not only their body parts and proportions but also their brains. (Genetic defects disrupting testosterone’s influence on a developing male human’s cells induce a shift to a feminine body plan, our “default” condition.)
The study provides information to identify that not only do our body parts differentiate us but our brain does too. Not every individual can adapt to coeducation and for that reason single-sex education may be better.

They are indeed very different yet, they have a main similarity. Both types of education, single-sex and coeducation, just want the best for each individual to be able to succeed. Both tend to adapt in their teaching overall, if they identify that something is working better they will implement it more, and vice versa if something is not working it will stop. In both types of educations who ever wants to succeed will. It is a fact that males are structured to compartmentalize learning because of it, girls tend to be better at multi-tasking ,and have better and greater attention spans. For that reason coeducations will adapt and try and do different ways of teaching so both genders can learn.

There is no prove that authenticates if single-sex education or coeducation is better than the other one, yet for an individual one may be more effective than the other one. A pair of shoes does not fit every one, everyone is different. If making the decision of attending a single sex or coeducation consider the most effective way of learning and were they implement it better. Education is for people to succeed, which type of school to attend should be a choice an individual should make.