Girls’ Schools Are Best for Girls : Co-ed settings not only bring missed opportunity, but also dropping out and early pregnancy.

There is a growing national pattern of female academic failure and underachievement in this country that is directly tied to the way we educate girls and young women and that has consequences that resonate throughout our society.

The recent decision by three California coeducational schools to institute all-girl mathematics classes again raises the issue of the appropriateness of single-sex education, especially in public schools. Despite such criticism, it remains the best way to counter an increasingly serious trend of poorer gains by girls and young women in co-ed classrooms.

Beginning with the examination of worldwide education for girls commissioned to mark Mount Holyoke College’s Sesquicentennial in 1987, study after study has found that girls are overlooked and undervalued in most coeducational classes, especially in math and science. David and Myra Sadker’s “Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls”--a 20-year study of education at all levels due to be released next month--found that students who have survived this treatment in middle and high school experience a continuing erosion of self-confidence in many colleges and universities.

There is no doubt that girls show up on their first day of grammar school just as ready, willing and able to succeed as do boys. But as the Sadkers will show in their survey of classroom settings across the country, teachers call on boys more frequently, spend more time with them and encourage their initiative and inquisitiveness more than they do girls. By grade six, girls have become more tentative, far less likely to call out answers and more reluctant to take part in class demonstrations.

Once children enter middle school, the situation worsens. Girls who have previously held the edge in subjects, including mathematics, begin to lose points in every category of national tests. This decline, most precipitous in math, continues throughout high school, so that by the time juniors take national Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Tests, boys outscore girls by an average 50 points. While 18,000 boys typically reach the highest PSAT categories, only 8,000 girls do.

Crucially, the Sadker study will document a “self-esteem slide” for girls that takes hold most strongly in the middle-school years. Tests show that girls fall approximately 10 points behind boys in confidence in their academic abilities during grammar school. During the three years of middle school, that confidence drops another 16 points. By high school graduation, only 29% of girls tested think they can do their work.

This erosion cannot be tied entirely to the difference in attention by teachers. It is also closely tied to the growing pervasiveness of sexual harassment in high schools and middle schools. This problem has grown to such proportions that conversations with 150 high school and middle-school students in California last year revealed nearly all had seen, experienced or participated in some form of sexual harassment. Our schools are becoming threatening places in which girls seek to avoid calling attention to themselves and move to the rear of the class. This movement, especially in math and the sciences, is reinforced by stereotyping among teachers. Thus, the number of male college graduates gravitating toward fields dominated by math and science far eclipses the number of females, although the percentages of women’s college graduates pursuing these fields is markedly higher than graduates of co-ed institutions.

In 1979, Mount Holyoke College started an intensive summer mathematics program for 15-year-old girls and their teachers that has become a national model. SummerMath gives girls the opportunity to conceptualize problems, translate life situations into numerical formulas and visualize changing relationships of numbers. In nearby Holyoke, one of the least affluent cities in Massachusetts, the college joined the city in 1988 in instituting a successful magnet school that pays special attention to the learning needs of the girls. The results have been astonishing. The program has bolstered success for all: Academic performance has skyrocketed, attendance has improved and pregnancies are few.

The problem of subtle but still unequal education for women has more serious consequences than the disproportionately small number of women scientists, mathematicians, researchers and engineers. The Mount Holyoke College study showed that the only single, universal predictor of early pregnancy was truncation of education.

I will be the first to call for coeducation at Mount Holyoke, the country’s oldest women’s college, when single-sex education becomes obsolete. We are a long way from that. Single-sex education for girls is a proven method for ensuring that they reach their fullest potential. Let those who want to abandon it propose more effective ways to educate young women.