3
students, and alumni came together to embrace the dawn of a new era, rather than simply
to mourn the passing of an old one. A few months after I graduated, Central welcomed
an incoming freshman class that was over 50% female. Like most people at the time, I
expected that Girls' High would either integrate or close sometime soon, and the last,
remaining vestiges of single-sex public education would fade into memory as a quaint
practice from a by-gone age.
Imagine my surprise, then, when on June 28, 2006—almost twenty years to the
day after my graduation ceremony from Central High School—the Philadelphia School
Reform Commission approved plans to open a new charter high school called The
Southwest Philadelphia Academy for Boys. Southwest Academy, which has been in
operation since September 2007, has joined a growing number of public primary and
secondary schools across the United States experimenting with single-sex education.
Over the past twenty years, the number of public schools offering single-sex educational
opportunities has risen dramatically—from fewer than 5 in 1990 to over 360 today. In
the coming years, this number is widely expected to surge, propelled by recent changes in
U.S. Department of Education guidelines which significantly ease restrictions on sex
segregation in public schools.
2
The rationale and goals behind the single-sex public education movement have
shifted significantly since the early 1990s, when demands for sex segregation in public
schools first rose to national prominence as part of a concerted campaign to improve the
educational opportunities available to “at-risk” youth, particularly African-American
boys living in the nation’s most troubled urban school districts. In this early phase, sex
segregation most often was promoted in the context of reforms, such as the adoption of
Afrocentric curricula, which foregrounded issues of racial and economic inequality.
Faced with the threat of lawsuits challenging the legality of racial segregation in public
schools, however, advocates for single-sex education began to shift course in the mid-
1990s. Over the next several years, claims concerning class-based and race-based
discrimination increasingly have been subordinated to assertions of "natural," "hard-
wired," "genetic," and "biological" sex differences in education reform debates. Despite
2
34 CFR Part 106. See
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20061800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2006/pdf/E6-
17858.pdf.
Convention