Do Girls Benefit from a Single-Sex School Environment?

As a graduate of a women's college and a coeducational college, I have always been fascinated by single-sex education. Did it help other girls and women the way it helped me or am I just abnormal? Are the statistics that say that girls benefit from a single-sex environment correct? What do the studies actually say? Why is it that the most successful women are those that were educated in a single sex environment? These questions were in the back of my mind as I was lurking in the stacks of my local library and I came across All Girls: Single Sex Education and Why It Matters by Karen Stabiner and why I added the book to my already overflowing bag of books to bring home.

Karen Stabiner is a journalist who follows students around two very different all-female schools during the course of one year. She shadows students at Marlborough High School is an elite, college prep school in Southern California and the Young Women's Leadership School, a struggling, new all-girls' public school in East Harlem, New York. Stabiner alternates chapters between schools and attempts to outline the dreams and struggles that each girl undergoes at her perspective schools.

If you are looking for a book that provides the studies to you and analyzes them, then you will be sorely disappointed by this book as there are no numbers to be found anywhere in the book. This book was more a sociological, narrow comparison of two very different schools. It also focused on two high schools, as opposed to a history of women's collegiate education in this country, which I was looking for. The only time discussions of colleges came up was when Strubiner's students were applying to college. What was interesting is that very few of her subjects applied to women's colleges, such as Wellesley or Bryn Mawr. Strubiner didn't touch on this phenomenon at all and I would like to have seen more about this subject. Did the girls themselves not want to go to a single sex college after going to a single sex high school? Or did they not think that a single sex environment aided them in any way?

The cast of characters tended to be overwhelming at times, as well. There were over twenty different players, all of whom were important. With the book alternating chapters, it was often difficult to keep the players straight in my mind.

I enjoyed how Strubiner portrayed each school: she did not impose any of her own views or commentary and simply conveyed what she observed. It was immensely readable; it did not read like a study at all and was more like a novel. It didn't isolate me at all while I was reading it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though it could have done with more analysis of the benefits or lack of benefits inherent in single sex education.