SINGLE-GENDER EDUCATION H.B. 4264 (S-1) & 6247 (H-1):
FIRST ANALYSIS
House Bill 4264 (Substitute S-1 as reported)
House Bill 6247 (Substitute H-1 as reported without amendment)
Sponsor: Representative LaMar Lemmons, III (H.B. 4264)
Representative Bill McConico (H.B. 6247)
House Committee: Education
Senate Committee: Education
Date Completed: 8-18-06
RATIONALE
Under State and Federal law, public schools are required to offer equivalent educational opportunities to students, and are forbidden from discriminating against students based on sex. Many have interpreted the laws as prohibiting the separation of students according to gender, except in limited circumstances such as for physical education or sex education, or for remedial or affirmative action purposes. Where single-gender public schools have been proposed or established, they frequently have been the subject of lawsuits or complaints by parents or civil rights groups. Attempts by the Detroit Public Schools to establish three boys' schools in 1991 were met with a legal challenge, causing the district to abandon the plans. (Please see BACKGROUND for details.) Some believe, however, that students could benefit from a learning environment limited to students of one gender, and that such schools could be a way of providing a higher-quality education to disadvantaged students, particularly in struggling school districts such as the Detroit Public Schools. It has been suggested that Michigan law should be amended to permit that school district to offer single-gender instruction under limited conditions.
CONTENT
House Bill 4264 (S-1) would amend the Revised School Code to permit a first class school district to establish and maintain a single-gender school, class, or program under certain conditions.
House Bill 6247 (H-1) would amend Article 4 (Educational Institutions) of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to specify that the article would not prohibit a school board from establishing and maintaining a single-gender school, class, or program as provided under the Revised School Code.
House Bill 4264 (S-1) is tie-barred to Senate Bill 1296 (Public Act 303 of 2006, which amended the Revised School Code to permit the establishment of a single-gender school, class, or program within a public school district or public school academy). The House bill also is tie-barred to Senate Bill 1305 or House Bill 6247 (which are similar proposals). House Bill 6247 (H-1) is tie-barred to Senate Bill 1296 and House Bill 4264.
House Bill 4264 (S-1)
The bill would permit the board of a first class school district to establish and maintain a single-gender school, class, or program within a school if the district also made available to pupils a substantially equal coeducational school, class, or program and a substantially equal school, class, or program for pupils of the other gender.
The school district could not require any of its pupils to participate in the single-gender school, class, or program, and the school board would have to ensure that
participation in the school, class, or program was wholly voluntary. A pupil's participation would not be considered voluntary unless the district also made available to the pupil a substantially equal coeducational school, class, or program.
(Under the Revised School Code, a first class school district is a school district with at least 100,000 pupils enrolled on the most recent pupil membership count day. Currently, the only first class school district in the State is the Detroit Public Schools.)
House Bill 6247 (H-1)
Article 4 of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act prohibits an educational institution from discriminating against a person because of religion, race, color, national origin, or sex. The bill specifies that Article 4 would not prohibit the board of a school district or intermediate school district or the board of directors of a public school academy from establishing and maintaining a single-gender school, class, or program within a school as provided under Sections 475 and 1146 of the Revised School Code.
(House Bill 4264 (S-1) would add Section 475, as indicated above. Senate Bill 1296 amended Section 1146 to permit the establishment of a single-gender school, class or program.)
Proposed MCL 380.475 (H.B. 4264)
Proposed MCL 37.240a (H.B. 6247)
BACKGROUND
Legal Challenges to Single-Gender Schools
In 1991, the Detroit Public Schools announced its intention to establish three public boys' academies within the district. Some parents and students challenged the proposal in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan (Garrett, et al. v The Board of Education of the School District of the City of Detroit, 775 F.Supp 1004). The plaintiffs claimed that the establishment of males-only academies would violate Title IX (which prohibits sex-based discrimination in an educational program receiving Federal funds); the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 2 of the Michigan Constitution (which guarantee equal protection under the law); the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act; and other Federal and State statutes. The District Court granted the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction, and the Detroit Public Schools subsequently abandoned its plans for the proposed schools.
The District Court based its ruling, in part, on a 1982 decision of the United States Supreme Court, Mississippi University for Women v Hogan (458 U.S. 718), in which the Supreme Court laid out specific criteria to determine when the consideration of gender was appropriate. In that case, the Court ruled against a state-supported university that denied men entrance to its nursing program. The Court rejected the university's argument that Congress, in enacting Title IX, expressly authorized the university to continue its single-sex admissions policy by exempting public undergraduate institutions that traditionally have used such policies from the statute's gender discrimination prohibition, and through that provision, limited the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. According to the Court, "[T]he party seeking to uphold a statute that classifies individuals on the basis of their gender must carry the burden of showing an 'exceedingly persuasive justification' for the classification...The burden is met only by showing at least that the classification serves 'important governmental objectives, and that the discriminatory means employed' are 'substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.'" In regard to the university's argument, the Court stated, "[N]either Congress nor a State can validate a law that denies the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment."
In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court applied the Hogan criteria in United States v Virginia, et al. (518 U.S. 515), in which the Court ruled against the Virginia Military Academy (VMI), a state-funded school that limited enrollment to men. Initially, the U.S. District Court upheld the school's admission policy and rejected the equal protection challenge; the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit disagreed and ordered Virginia to remedy the constitutional violation. In response, the state proposed a parallel program for women: the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership (VWIL). The state returned to District Court, which decided that the plan met equal protection requirements. The Fourth Circuit affirmed, finding that the state's purpose of providing single-gender educational options was legitimate, and the exclusion of men at VWIL and women at VMI was essential to that purpose. Since its analysis risked bypassing an equal protection scrutiny, the Circuit Court added another test it called "substantive comparability", and found that the educational opportunities at the two schools were sufficiently comparable. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. Applying the Hogan criteria, the Court concluded that Virginia had shown no exceedingly persuasive justification for excluding all women from VMI and had violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Finding that Virginia had not shown substantial equality in the separate educational opportunities it supported at VWIL and VMI, the Court ruled that the proposed remedy did not cure the constitutional violation.
Title IX
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was enacted to ensure that students of both genders receive equal educational opportunities. The statute specifies, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...". According to the U.S. Department of Education, the current regulations implementing Title IX prohibit the development of single-gender classes, but since admissions to nonvocational elementary and secondary schools are not covered under Title IX, the Department has said that the statute does not prohibit single-gender schools, provided that the district creates comparable equal schools for students of both genders.
The Secretary of Education suggested in 2002 that the regulations should be revised to ease restrictions on single-sex schools, and proposed revisions were distributed in March 2004. The proposed revisions would permit the establishment of single-sex schools as long as comparable educational opportunities were available for students of the other gender, either in a single-sex school or in a coeducational environment, and also would permit the creation of single-gender classes within coeducational schools. The proposed rules have been the subject of much debate and have not been finalized, although they still are under active consideration, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education.
ARGUMENTS
(Please note: The arguments contained in this analysis originate from sources outside the Senate Fiscal Agency. The Senate Fiscal Agency neither supports nor opposes legislation.)
Supporting Argument
A growing body of evidence indicates that boys and girls develop at different rates, and respond best to different teaching techniques. Leonard Sax, director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, has cited research indicating that young girls develop language and fine motor skills at an earlier age than boys do, while boys develop skills using spatial relations and geometry at an earlier age (Dayton Daily News, 7-28-05). Girls also are more attuned to color and texture, while boys tend to focus on motion. Sax claims that these traits are due to physical differences in the brains and eyes of young boys and girls. Although the differences even out as children grow older, studies show that boys and girls in elementary and secondary schools could benefit from different learning environments that take advantage of those developmental characteristics. For example, one study evidently found that boys performed best in a classroom at a temperature of 69 degrees, while girls worked better at 75 degrees (Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 8-14-05). According to Sax, girls prefer a quiet classroom, while boys tend to be less bothered by noise and distractions.
In a single-gender setting, teachers can take advantage of these differences by designing classroom conditions and lesson plans to meet the developmental needs of their students. Such adjustments are not possible in a classroom containing both boys and girls, where teachers must compromise between the techniques best suited for boys and for girls. Schools that have experimented with single-gender education have shown impressive results, improving the quality of education for both boys and girls, often in struggling school districts containing high proportions of disadvantaged or minority children. It is likely that the Detroit Public Schools could benefit from similar schools or programs.
Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, located in a low-income neighborhood of Seattle, was considered to be a failing school with significant discipline problems and low academic achievement. In 2000, the school was converted to a gender-separate format, and student performance improved immediately. In the first year after the transition, standardized test scores at Thurgood Marshall rose dramatically for both boys and girls. Attendance improved, and discipline problems decreased (Education Week, 3-2-05). Single gender-schools in other states have reported similar results. The Young Women's Leadership School in East Harlem, New York, was established in 1996 to provide an all-female learning environment for disadvantaged girls. Although the school has been criticized by some civil rights groups, the benefits to the student body, which consists almost entirely of minorities, have been significant. According to Insideschools.org, an online reviewer of public schools in New York, seniors graduating from the school have a very high college acceptance rate, and the classes place a heavy emphasis on discussion and writing. Students transferring from other schools reportedly experience a noticeable change of attitude, attributed to the school's sense of community and its dedicated teachers.
As the successes of these schools become more widely known, an increasing number of districts in a variety of states are instituting single-gender schools and programs, and there is a large demand for these programs from parents who believe that their children would benefit from a single-gender educational environment. Private boys' and girls' schools have been commonplace throughout the nation's history, and many of the most highly respected schools in the country are limited to students of one sex. Many parents, however, cannot afford the expense of sending their children to private schools. The benefits of single-gender instruction should be available in public schools, not only to advantaged students in private schools.
Given the apparent benefits of single-gender education, and the success of similar programs in other struggling districts, the Detroit Public Schools should be given the latitude to establish boys' and girls' schools or programs, which could offer significant benefits to at-risk students in the district. The Detroit schools have been working to improve the quality of education for students in the district, and any efforts in that regard should not be restricted. Single-gender education represents another tool that could help to reach some students.
Opposing Argument
Segregating students on the basis of gender could lead to the reinforcement of gender stereotypes, a return to the days when girls were taught home economics while boys attended shop class. American history has progressively moved toward integrating students of different races, genders, and backgrounds, and society has benefited from that diversity. The bills would undo some of that progress by retreating from integration. Although some promote single-gender education as a way to address sexual harassment or unequal treatment of boys or girls, a better approach would be to resolve and remove those problems. As students move into adulthood, they need to be able to work well among members of both sexes, and separating them as students would do nothing to prepare them for future challenges they will face.
In addition, there is little consensus that single-gender education offers any benefits to students. Many of the studies purporting to show such effects are fundamentally flawed. In most cases, the improvements in performance, attendance, and behavior can be attributed to other factors, such as increased funding, better facilities, higher-quality teachers, parental involvement, and the self-selection of more motivated students who might want to participate in such programs. These positive conditions could be replicated in a coeducational environment, producing comparable gains without the problematic segregation of students.
Currently, the Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act prohibits separating students based on sex, race, or other factors. Those provisions were placed into law to protect students from unequal treatment. Allowing exceptions for single-gender schools could lead to unequal educational opportunities for different students. Although House Bill 4264 (S-1) would require that the Detroit schools provide substantially equal schools, classes, or programs for both genders, the bill does not specify what "substantially equal" would mean. Schools cannot be identical in every way, and funding disparities, varying teacher qualifications, and different course offerings could end up creating divergent educational opportunities in schools that were nominally equivalent. Students should be allowed to choose the best educational opportunities available, regardless of their gender. If a girls' school established under the bills were to outperform a boys' school, or vice versa, on what grounds could the school district deny a boy the opportunity to attend the better school? The bills would limit choices, reinforce gender stereotypes, and undermine the progress made toward educational equality for both girls and boys.
In addition, the bills could be in conflict with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." In a number of U.S. Supreme Court cases, including United States v Virginia and Mississippi University for Women v Hogan, the Supreme Court has ruled that excluding individuals based on gender violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Changing the State law would do nothing to resolve this constitutional violation.
Response: In those cases, no equivalent school was available for members of the other gender. The bill would require that students have access to an equivalent class, program, or school that was limited to students of the opposite sex, as well as an equivalent coeducational option. Providing these options for parents and students should meet the requirements of equal protection.
Opposing Argument
The bills would violate the basic precept of integration by permitting so-called separate-but-equal schools. In deciding Brown v Board of Education in 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the establishment of "separate but equal" educational facilities for minorities was unconstitutional, and that schools segregated on the basis of race were inherently unequal, reinforcing social stereotypes and propagating racial divisions in society. The bills would create similar divisions along gender lines, and could have similar negative effects, magnifying gender differences and fostering unhealthy attitudes and assumptions. For example, a female teacher at an all-boys' school in Maryland suggested that what the boys liked best about the class was that there were no girls in it (Washington Post, 1-8-05). Also, many of the teaching techniques recommended by proponents of single-sex schools reveal assumptions about the propensities of boys and girls. According to Dr. Leonard Sax of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, teachers should speak in softer tones to girls than to boys, who may respond well to yelling, and girls prefer cooperative activities, while boys are more competitive and responsive to confrontation (National Post, 3-3-03). Attempts to modify curricula to address perceived differences between males and females would inevitably incorporate society's preconceived notions about the abilities and preferences of men and women. To the extent that those preconceptions and stereotypes stifle children or channel them in one direction or another, educational practices based on those beliefs would be discriminatory and unjust to both boys and girls, in much the same way that racial segregation was unjust to minorities.
Response: Allowing boys and girls to attend separate classes or schools would not reinforce stereotypes; in fact, it could help to overcome some gender-based barriers. For example, offering all-girl science and math classes could encourage more females to enter science and engineering, currently male-dominated fields. Many educators are concerned that girls' performance in math and science falls behind that of boys as they progress through school. Some research indicates that girls do better in these areas when separated into all-girl classes. This legislation would give the Detroit Public Schools another tool for improving the quality education for all students, both boys and girls. Furthermore, the program would be completely voluntary. If a student or parent objected to the idea of single-gender education, the student could remain in the coeducational school or program.
Also, voluntary single-gender schools bear no resemblance to forced racial segregation of the past. In segregated schools, students did not have the option of choosing which school to attend, while under the bills parents would be free to choose the best school for their children, whether single-gender or coeducational. Unlike racial segregation, which was implemented for social reasons and was not purported to have any educational benefits, single-gender education has been shown to have positive effects on children's academic achievement.
Legislative Analyst: Curtis Walker
FISCAL IMPACT
House Bill 4264 (S-1)
The bill would have no fiscal impact on State government.
A district of the first class (Detroit Public Schools) choosing to establish a single-gender school, class, or program could see increased costs if the establishment of such single-gender instruction (along with the mandated provision of substantially equal coeducational instruction, and substantially equal instruction for the other gender) would require the district to hire additional personnel for the school, class, or program.
House Bill 6247 (H-1)
The bill would have no fiscal impact on State or local government.
Fiscal Analyst: Bill Bowerman
Kathryn Summers-CotyAnalysis was prepared by nonpartisan Senate staff for use by the Senate in its deliberations and does not constitute an official statement of legislative intent. hb4264&6247/0506