Teaching by gender gains converts in some Las Vegas-area schools

By: Associated Press - | Monday, January 8, 2007 7:05 PM PST ∞

LAS VEGAS -- After teaching remedial English to boys and girls separately for three months, Stephanie Luiere found success.

"Every student passed," said Luiere, who is continuing to separate the genders this school year at Mannion Middle School in Henderson. "Some of them by a narrow margin, but everyone passed."

"This year, the achievement by the kids is much higher," Luiere said of her classes, including one with 10 boys and another with 11 girls. She said the class grade average hovers around 75 percent.

Mannion is not the only school in the Clark County School District that separates students by gender. At least five other Las Vegas-area middle schools and one high school are using the technique. Some programs focus only on students in remedial classes. Others are more inclusive.

Cheyenne High School has offered gender-based classes for four years. Ninth- and 10th-grade students are isolated by gender in the core academic classes of English, math, science and social studies.

Principal Jeff Geihs said the technique allows students to focus more on their lessons while letting them be uninhibited when they have classroom discussions.

"Boys aren't trying to show off. Girls aren't trying to show off," Geihs said. "We're talking about teenage kids -- 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds. Your mind is not always on the books at that age."

Sophomore Ryan Buchanan said he went from being a C student in middle school to a B student at Cheyenne because he's not as distracted by girls. He said the pros outweigh the cons.

"The cons, of course, are no females," Buchanan said.

Crystal Garcia, also a sophomore, said her grades improved from D's to B's. But she observed that some girls don't get along with each other.

"There's a little bit more drama," she said.

Geihs said most of Cheyenne's students aren't seeing as much improvement, and a University of Nevada, Las Vegas researcher who studied the program did not find any link between dividing the classes by gender and improved student achievement.

Geihs said the program had merit if students and parents were happy with it.

"That in itself is enough for me," Geihs said. "At the very least, what it did was provide a more regimented atmosphere that is more conducive to learning."

Leonard Sax, author of "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences," is a consultant for the program at Cheyenne.

He said boys perform better in a single-sex environment when they are younger because they might not have learned to dislike school.

He said girls tend to do well in separate classes at all ages because putting them in an all-female environment tends to decrease stereotypes placed on them.

"We live in a sexist society. And coed schools, even with the most enlightened leadership, tend to reproduce society's sexist views," Sax said. "Students at coed schools tend to be pushed into blue and pink cubby holes."

-- Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com

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