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Saturday, Jul. 18, 2009

Wilkinson's single-gender classes appear successful

The first year of dividing boys and girls into separate classes at Wilkinson County Middle School led to test-score gains by both genders in most areas of this year’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.

The experiment was enough of a success for school officials to say they’ll keep the gender-separate classes for the 2009-10 school year to more fully measure whether boys and girls do better learning apart.

“We just got our final CRCT scores and did some charts,” said Ginger Jackson, Wilkinson County Middle School’s principal. “We’ve been very pleased with what we’ve seen.”

The middle school, located in Irwinton, launched single-gender classes last August. Boys and girls are separated for their core subject classes, but they take electives and physical education together.

A provision was added to the No Child Left Behind law three years ago allowing schools to offer single-gender programs.

There were 542 public schools nationwide offering gender separated classes as of May, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in Pennsylvania.

About 17 schools in Georgia now offer such programs.

In Wilkinson County, school officials hoped to keep more boys from being retained and to curb bad behavior, while getting girls to speak more freely in class and get them interested in subjects such as computer sciences.

Jackson said the school still is compiling retention rates and discipline reports from the 2008-09 school year and comparing them with the previous year, but she said teachers and administrators believe the numbers were better this year, especially among their targeted males.

“We’ve talked amongst ourselves and we definitely all say it’s worth it, and we’ll go for it again next school year,” she said.

The middle school released its 2009 CRCT test scores broken down by middle grade levels and gender showing that sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade males scored better than they did in their previous grade levels in almost all subject areas. Those include reading, English/language arts, math and science.

The only exceptions: Sixth-grade males didn’t improve in science compared with their scores when they were fifth-graders, and eighth-grade males did worse in math compared with their seventh-grade scores.

Sixth- and seventh-grade girls made gains in reading and the English/language arts portions of the CRCT compared with those classes as fifth- and sixth-graders.

And both sixth- and seventh-grade boys and girls made significant gains in math this year.

For instance, 90 percent of seventh-grade girls passed the math section of the CRCT this year compared with 63 percent of those girls as sixth-graders in 2008.

Eighth-grade girls, however, dropped in math, and the girls still struggle to make gains in science.

“We’re still analyzing the data. ... We’ll break it down by classroom level and individual (student) levels, and it will be reviewed by our school council for suggestions,” said Kathy Culpepper, the school system’s assistant superintendent.

So far, she said, the board of education hasn’t had complaints from parents or students about the single-gender classes.

School officials have also considered implementing single-gender classes for fourth- and fifth-graders at Wilkinson County Elementary School and for ninth-graders at the high school, but nothing would happen this coming school year.

“If we feel like it’s a route we want to go, we would talk to stakeholders and get them involved,” said Superintendent Aaron Geter, who started the middle school single-gender program.

The move, he hoped, would not only improve scores among males and females, but also among minority students.

To contact writer Julie Hubbard, call 744-4331.