How Context Mediates Policy: The Implementation of Single Gender Public Schooling in California

In this article, we present findings about the implementation of single gender public schooling in California--a movement that signifies a growing interest in school choice and private sector solutions to public education problems. We analyze qualitative data gathered in a study of 12 single gender academies (6 boys; 6 girls). As well-meaning educators responded to California’s single gender academies legislation, they designed schools and used resources to address the pressing needs of students in each community, such as low achievement, poverty, or violence, rather than to address gender bias. The impetus for single gender schooling in each context affected the organization, curriculum, and pedagogy in each academy, as did educators’ ideologies about gender. In the end, the politics surrounding the legislation, the resource interests of district and school administrators, and the lack of institutional support for this gender-based reform coalesced to structure the demise of most of the single gender academies. We consider the implications of these findings for the viability of single gender schooling as a public school option.

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Lea HubbardUniversity of California, San DiegoLEA HUBBARD is an assistant research scientist in the Sociology Department
at the University of California, San Diego. Her work focuses on
educational inequities as they exist across ethnicity, class, and gender. She
is the coauthor, with Amanda Datnow, of “A Gendered Look at Educational
Reform” Gender and Education, 2001.

Gilberto ConchasHarvard UniversityE-mail AuthorGILBERTO Q. CONCHAS is an assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. His research emphasizes inequality and sociocultural
processes within the school centext that structure variations in educational
opportunity for urban minority youth. He is the author of “Structuring
Failure and Success: Understanding the Variability in Latino School Engagement” (
Harvard Educational Review, forthcoming.)