page_title: Single-sex education
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Single-sex education / By region / United States
caption_attribution_description: English: The Philadelphia High School for Girls from Broad Street, at 1400 W. Olney (Broad and Olney) in the Logan neighborhood of Philly. This building should not be confused with the Julia R. Masterman School, whose building formerly occupied by the Phila. HS for Girls, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. To add to the confusion Central High School and Widener Memorial High School are nearby.
context_page_description: Single-sex education, also known as single-gender education and gender-isolated education, is the practice of conducting education with male and female students attending separate classes, perhaps in separate buildings or schools. The practice of single-sex schooling was common before the 20th century, particularly in secondary and higher education. Single-sex education in many cultures is advocated on the basis of tradition as well as religion, and is practiced in many parts of the world. Recently, there has been a surge of interest and establishment of single-sex schools due to educational research. Single-sex education is practiced in many Muslim majority countries; while in other parts of the world it is most popular in Chile, Israel, South Korea, and English-speaking countries such as Singapore, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. In the Western world, single sex education is primarily associated with the private sector, with the public sector being overwhelmingly mixed sex; while in the Muslim world the situation is the opposite: public schools are usually single sex, while many private schools are mixed sex.
context_section_description: Until the 19th century, single-sex education was the norm in the US, although this varied by region. In New England there was more mixed-sex education than in the South, and girls in New England had more access to education in general. With the generalization of elementary education in the 19th century, mixed-sex education started to spread rapidly. According to Cornelius Riordan, "By the end of the nineteenth century, coeducation was all but universal in American elementary and secondary public schools (see Kolesnick, 1969; Bureau of Education, 1883; Butler, 1910; Riordan, 1990). However, higher education was usually single-sex, and men's colleges and women's colleges were common well into the 20th century. A form of education strongly associated with sex-segregation is that of Catholic schools, although many Catholic schools today are coeducational. The idea of educating students differently by sex, formally or informally, was common until the 1970s.
  A controversy regarding single-sex education in the United States is its association with racist ideologies in the 1950s in the American South. After the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruled racial segregation in education unconstitutional, therefore paving the way to educating together black and white children, many conservatives reacted very negatively to the idea of black boys and white girls socializing together, potentially leading to interracial romantic couples. As such, segregation by sex in schools became quite common during that era across the Southern US, with many single sex educational institutions being established.
  A major event that affected single-sex schooling in the US was when the Title IX amendments of the Education Amendments of 1972 were passed. The Encyclopedia of Women and Gender explains Title IX as being, "Founded on the premises of equal opportunity, equal access, and full integration, it focused on providing complete access to participation in all functions of schooling, regardless of gender" (Sex Segregation In Education, 2001). Many feminists fought for the passage of this law. The goal was to ban all sex discrimination in any education program which received financial aid from the government. It was stated specifically on the Department of Education website as, "No person in the US, on the basis of sex, can be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance".
  The main cause which led to the start of more public schools having single-sex classes or entire schools was when the reforms to the Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 were passed in 2006. Originally Title IX had allowed separation of males and females in certain areas in school prior to the new changes. For example, they were allowed to have single gender classes for physical-education when there were contact sports involved and also for sex-education classes. Kasic (2008) indicates that the new regulations allow nonvocational public schools to still receive funding if they offer single-sex classes or entire single-sex schools, but in order to start these programs they have to have a governmental or educational objective. These programs are also required to be voluntary, so public schools cannot be required to offer these single-sex programs and if they do they cannot force students to participate in them. Diana Schemo explains in a New York Times article, "Until now, publics school districts that offered a school to one sex generally had to provide a comparable school for students of the other sex. The new rules, however say districts can simply offer such students the option to attend comparable coeducational schools" (Schemo, 2006, p. 2).  Since these regulations were approved the number of public schools offering single-sex programs has been on a steady incline due to the fact that the rules are more flexible.
  In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of single-sex public education in the 1996 case of United State
caption: Philadelphia High School for Girls in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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