I arranged a visit to the Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy here fully intending to look into the rise of single-sex public education, particularly schools that focus explicitly on educating girls of color.
In the decade since No Child Left Behind prompted changes in federal law that ultimately made it easier to create all-boys and all-girls schools, the number of single-sex public schools has exploded, many of them aimed at boys and girls of color. (Full disclosure: I attended an all-girls parochial high school.) CGLA is the first single-gender public charter school in Tennessee. More than 90 percent of its students are black or Latino. Nearly all are low income. The school’s brochure says it was founded “to improve educational opportunities for low-income, underserved girls in Hamilton County.” So it seemed like a good place to start.
Yet it became obvious minutes after my visit began that it would be difficult to glean any sort of broadly applicable insight into the the topic from looking at CGLA. Sure, proponents of single-sex and charter schools can point to its rising test scores and college-going rate as “evidence” that their respective causes are a good thing. And critics can point to research published in Science magazine that suggests single-sex schools don’t foster better academic outcomes and accuse charters of pulling resources away from neighborhood schools. (More on all of that from my fellow Atlantic writer Melinda Anderson here.)
But what became abundantly clear is that CGLA is more an example of how much of an impact school leadership can have—regardless of school type—than it is of anything else.
[For more of this story, written by Emily Deruy, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...y-goes-right/500999/]
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