Girls Boarding Schools Help Girls Achieve More
Are Girls Boarding Schools the Answer for Girls Struggling in School?
Teachers are often stunned when they watch videos of themselves leading their classes. Time after time a video is clear evidence that a teacher favors boys over girls. Professors David and Myra Sadker spent over a decade and thousands of hours in American classrooms watching and taking notes on sexist teaching methods. They published their results in their groundbreaking book, Failing at Fairness, and also appeared on television shows like Dateline to expose sexism in co-ed schools.
What they found is that teachers are more likely to call on boys and then go on to reinforce, praise and encourage them. When a boy gives a wrong answer, a teacher will spend time to help him reason out the correct answer. However, when a girl answers, a teacher is likely to either respond with a bland "okay" to her right answer or simply to move on to another student if her answer is incorrect.
More and more research is showing that students achieve and learn better in single-sex schools. In a twenty-year Australian study of 270,000 students, Dr. Ken Rowe found that both boys and girls performed between 15 and 22 percentile points higher on standardized tests when they went to separate schools. In a 1995 experiment in Virginia, 100 eight graders separated for math and science. The girls immediately began to achieve more, become more confident and participate more often in class.
College professor Robin Robertson said she could identify students from girls schools on the first day of class. "They were the young women whose hands shot up in the air, who were not afraid to defend their positions, and who assumed I would be interested in their perspective."
Girls boarding schools teach girls to be tomorrow's leaders. Many educators believe girls learn differently. For example, girls tend to learn verbal skills earlier than boys, whereas boys tend to do better in math earlier. The gap occurs when girls are taught like boys. College prep boarding schools often fall into the same "one size fits all" approach to teaching girls. For this reason, the all girls private schools that understand the learning style of girls give these students the best opportunity to succeed in ALL subjects.
The all-girls boarding school also may be the best opportunity for girls who may feel pressured by the co-ed classroom experience. Some girls feel intimidated by the aggressiveness of boys. They may even pretend to know less than they do so as not to draw negative attention from boys in the classroom.
Girls may even do less well academically as they become interested in the attention of boys. Social pressures may cause girls to focus less on math and science as they are thought of as "male" fields.
Parents who have become concerned that their young women are not getting the attention and direction they deserve might consider the more nurturing and focused environment of girls' boarding schools.
