News

No girls here, no boys there

March 18, 2009

Berkeley Middle School sixth-grader Matthew Desmond said he loves learning in a single-gender program so much that he'd recommend to fifth-grade boys that they sign up next year.

Alex Steirt (left) reaches as high as he can along with his fellow classmates to answer a question in science class at Berkeley Middle School. The school offers single-gender classes in core courses.

In the single-gender classes, discipline problems among the same students have dropped 72 percent from last year, and absences are down 50 percent, she said.

Those are impressive early statistics for a school that didn't set out to start a single-gender program, she said.

Westberry started as principal at the school last year and learned immediately that "our girls outperformed our boys in every subject area and at every grade-level," she said.

The idea for single-gender classes was born as a method to help boys succeed, she said. But it's worked well for girls, too.

Chadwell said many schools in the state offer single- gender options because they give public-school parents a choice about the learning environment in which they enroll their children. State Education Superintendent Jim Rex is pushing for more choices in public schools, he said.

Chadwell also said the programs are easy and inexpensive to implement and don't require that schools purchase a lot of new materials. "There's no boys' curriculum or girls' curriculum," he said.

All that's really required is teacher training, Westberry said.

To help her teachers decide if they would be better at teaching boys or girls, Westberry tapped her pen loudly on her note pad throughout a meeting. At the end of the meeting, she asked teachers to raise their hands if they found it annoying. Those who did probably aren't well-suited to teach boys, who usually like to move and tend to fidget as they learn, she said.

Boys also tend to respond well to a fast pace, loud voices and competition, while girls often do better working face-to-face in a quieter, more colorful environment.

"It's all about strategies," Westberry said. "The kids love it and they're thriving."