A new school for boys in Berkeley signals a growing movement toward separating boys and girls.

When Jason Baeten was in elementary school, he remembers thinking, “I am so sick of the teacher talking. Can’t we just do it? Can’t we just play with it?” Now 30 years later, Baeten has just started a school where boys can do exactly that. At the East Bay School for Boys, a new private middle school opening on Holy Hill in Berkeley this month, boys will build things, take them apart, write down how to put them back together, construct their own desks, and start each day with a half hour of kickball or capoeira.

Baeten, a founding teacher at the successful 11-year-old Julia Morgan School for Girls in Oakland, has lost count of how many Julia Morgan parents with sons begged him to start a similar middle school for boys. Most of those families had to resign themselves to other campuses.

But for 18 sixth-grade boys, this fall means being pioneers at a school designed just for those born with a Y chromosome—often the running-around, impatiently sitting, touch-it-to-understand-it kids.

While launching a brand-new private school—especially an all-boys one that some consider an outdated model—may seem risky in these wobbly economic times, Baeten’s new venture reflects a growing concern in the United States with how boys are faring in the classroom. A recent report from the Center on Education Policy found boys of all ages in every state falling behind girls in reading. Other studies show that girls are more likely to earn college diplomas, receive higher grades, and avoid suspension. Recently, a group began pressing the Obama administration to form a White House Council on Men and Boys to match the White House Council on Women and Girls formed in 2009. In short, many believe girls are soaring in school and boys are tuning out—though there are strong voices, like that of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), who argue that the new, so-called boys’ crisis is not real.

Nevertheless, reports of struggling boys have prompted a host of widely read books, like The Minds of Boys and Raising Cain. This echoes a similar alarm over girls’ performance in school—partly in response to a disturbing 1992 AAUW report, “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America” and Mary Pipher’s 1994 book, Reviving Ophelia—around the time when the Julia Morgan School first opened its doors on the Holy Names College campus.

In fact, the number of single-sex schools nationwide, both public and private, is on the rise. In 2002, for example, there were 11 public schools offering single-sex education nationwide; now there are more than 540, says Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and author of Boys Adrift and Girls on the Edge. Run thoughtfully by teachers with careful training, Sax says, single-sex schools—while not an educational panacea—can be an excellent choice for many students.

The phrase “boys’ schools” conjures up images of young men in blue blazers and khakis, gathering for chapel on a rainy East Coast evening, everyone sporting names like Cabot and Lowell, at places like Exeter and Groton. For girls’ schools, it’s young ladies in white dresses, practicing hoop rolling and embroidery, separated from the frisky lads for their own good at Miss Porter’s or Winsor. But the current crop of single-sex schools—whether brand-new or decades-old—base their school climate and curriculum on new scientific research instead of tradition.

“There are still enormous misconceptions about single-sex schools, that you’re somehow cloistering children away from reality,” says Susanne Beck, executive director of the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools based in Belmont, Mass. “[People say,] ‘How will they ever learn to work with the other gender?’” This is not a modern-day version of, ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ This is not about isolation at all. Single-sex schools of today are anything but isolated. The people who are either starting them or administering them have a very clear and well-supported sense of why the single-gender aspect is important and how it can be powerfully transformative for many students.”

Unlike in the vaulted halls of boys’ schools of the past, students at the East Bay School for Boys are not being “trained to be the next captains of industry,” says Jennifer Villeneuve, whose son, Dylan, begins sixth grade at the school this month. And these days, you don’t need a trust fund to apply. While tuitions at these schools range from $12,000 to about $20,000, most schools offer some financial aid to about one third of students.

From giving boys hands-on activities and room to move around, to helping girls excel in math and science while emphasizing collaboration over competition, this new wave of single-gender schools is based on solid research showing that, despite the all-equal-all-the-time feminist message of the 1970s, girls and boys learn differently because of biology, not culture. With nature beating out pure nurture, these schools are an attempt to mold the classroom around the child instead of the other way around.

The East Bay School for Boys joins successful East Bay single-sex newcomers, the Julia Morgan School for Girls and the six-year-old Pacific Boychoir Academy, as well as the venerable Holy Names High School (142 years old). (The East Bay School for Girls, a private school for grades K-5, closed several years ago.)

There’s also company across the Bay in San Francisco with girls’ schools, the Hamlin School (147 years old) and the Katherine Delmar Burke School (102), and boys’ schools, the Town School (71) and the Cathedral School (53).

“The single-sex schools in the East Bay really have a character that’s different from single-sex schools in the rest of the country,” says Ilana DeBare, a founding board member of Julia Morgan and author of Where Girls Come First: The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Revival of Girls’ Schools. “We’re not a rich community but we are rich in ethnic diversity. These are not schools you would find on the Upper East Side of New York.”

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At the end of a recent East Bay School for Boys information night, Baeten observed the following: A prospective student walked out past the slide projector’s enticing white beam shining towards the wall, and then quickly darted his hand in front of the light.

“I got a glimpse into his brain. He was walking out, he looked at the thing, covers it. There was nothing about whether he should ask an adult, whether this was okay. He wanted to play with the light; he wanted to figure it out,” says Baeten, a youthful 38-year-old who grew up in central Wisconsin as one of nine, with five brothers. Although Baeten has no children, today he’s uncle to 20 nieces and nephews.

A girl, Baeten explains, would most likely have looked around for a grown-up, maybe asked permission. Or she might have considered sticking out her hand but then thought better of it. “This is why a single-gender environment can work,” says Baeten, in a May interview in his sunny math classroom at Julia Morgan, filled with chairs individually decorated by students. “That boy who does something impulsive—he will be seen as bad [in a coed school]. Having an impulse based on curiosity is seen as a negative thing.”

At many schools, boys will be reprimanded or disciplined for such an impulse, perhaps forced to miss recess—which some find a curious punishment for a wiggly student—or visit the principal. At Baeten’s new school—a site selected in part due to its location near the winding paths and streams of Codornices Park and the Cal campus, where the boys will have space to move—teachers recognize that most boys think and develop differently than most girls, and have designed the school’s layout and curriculum with that in mind.

“What are we doing to our boys if during their formative years in which they’re developing their identity and sense of self, they keep getting this message that they’re wrong or bad?” says Love Weinstock, assistant head of the East Bay School for Boys, who helped start the Making Waves Academy charter middle school in Richmond, which aims to help students in underserved areas succeed academically. “What is the greater impact of that on how they learn, on their relationships and their self-context?”

Different impulse control is just one of several reasons that boys’ schools supporters believe in teaching boys alone. Compared to most girls the same age, most boys also have shorter attention spans, do not multitask as well, are more apt to struggle with reading and writing, and find it easier to learn when they touch and handle objects. Of course, girls benefit from hands-on curriculum, too—no theory applies to all boys or all girls—but they are better able to excel in situations that rely more on spoken instruction.

Kindergarten curriculums today, for example, are not the same as they were 20 years ago, when naptime and free play filled the short day. Instead, the expectations are similar to what was once required of first-graders, and today’s 5- and 6-year-olds have homework, must read by the end of the year, and spend far more time sitting down than in the past. Since boys typically lag about two years behind girls in language development, these requirements have proved particularly hard for them. Also most teachers are women, and classrooms have become places better suited to the female style of learning. This can set many boys up for failure in school from a young age, agree experts like authors Michael Gurian and Michael Thompson.

Leonard Sax, the family practice doctor and head of the single-sex public school association, has not always been in favor of single-sex schools. In fact, 10 years ago, “I regarded boys’ private schools as an antiquated relic of the Victorian era.” Then he visited a third-grade classroom in a private Maryland boys’ school. “I saw some things that were new to me,” he says. “There were no chairs in the classroom. I said, ‘Where are the chairs?’ [The teacher] said, ‘We have no chairs. Everyone knows that when third-grade boys sit down their brains shut off. Boys in second and third grade do better when they’re standing.’”

At the East Bay School for Boys, the inaugural class of sixth-graders (a seventh- and eighth-grade class will be added in the next two years) will build their own telescoping desks—ones that move up and down so students can choose to sit, stand, or lean. The daily half hour of physical activity before classes each morning “prepares their brains for learning,” says Weinstock, who notes that her son (an active 8-year-old) and daughter (a studious middle-schooler) are classic examples of how boys and girls learn differently.

And because transitions can be difficult for boys, they will have their most challenging academic classes—science, math, and humanities—in the morning. Says Baeten, “It’s really important just to think, ‘I only have to learn two things before lunch.’” Afternoons will be set aside for reading and writing, group problem-solving (this year’s sixth-graders will research how to clean up and plant the school’s weedy flower beds), music, Spanish, woodshop, drama, cooking, and more P.E. Every week will close with school games involving teachers and students. Also, an outdoor education program focused on earth science will send the boys on at least three overnight trips this year.

While some single-sex education critics say that isolating the genders only re-emphasizes their differences, proponents claim that just the opposite happens. In fact, studies show that boys in boys’ schools are more likely to paint, act, and write poetry without girls around, while girls build robots and play football at recess more readily without the boys. The single-sex environment actually encourages boys and girls to be less boy- and girl-like.

“We’re not just going to sit there and give them gadgets and let them hyper-focus and not ask them to multitask and not ask them to read. It’s actually quite the opposite,” says Baeten, who believes in giving boys ample time and space to read, combined with plenty of choice in reading material.

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The castle-like brick-and-stone building that houses the East Bay School for Boys recalls boys’ prep schools from movies like Dead Poets Society and books like A Separate Peace. Designed by Berkeley architect Walter Ratcliff, the English Gothic building is also home to the Unity Church of Berkeley, Tapestry Ministries, and New Spirit Community Church. In fact, though, the East Bay School for Boys’ tenure in the building was directly preceded by that of another trend-bucking boys’ school, the Pacific Boychoir Academy, which starts the fall semester at a new location near Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. At the end of school last spring, the 37 Pacific Boychoir Academy boys tumbled into a wood-paneled room with a stage before heading outdoors for P.E. A fifth-grader bantered with school administrator Jim Gaines about how to store an instrument. The cheerful tumult continued just outside the music room where these boys, in grades four through eight, study music for an hour and a half each day.

Modeled after boychoir schools in Europe, the Academy, with its three-time Grammy Award–winning choir, gives students an unusual chance to sing and learn together.

While the school’s main mission is to gather boys to form the best choir around, Gaines says all that singing in harmony leads to harmony of a different sort. “It’s so rich for these boys,” he notes. “Music provides a pattern and a thread.”

“There is a dearth of opportunities for boys to tap into excellence,” adds Gaines, who attended boys’ schools in London before enrolling at the former all-women Vassar College in New York. “The process of forming an extraordinary choir has an extraordinary character and cognitive development effect on these boys.”

Behind Gaines’s desk hangs a sign: “Boy Spoken Here.” The school deliberately keeps classes small—never more than 15 in each grade—so teachers can give close direction to distractible boys. They focus on the battles while studying Greece, on competing in games during math, and have stress balls to squeeze with antsy fingers while listening.

The middle-school years are crucial for boys, Gaines believes. “All of a sudden they’re riding on two wheels instead of four; they’re teetering and tottering. The choir gives them something to latch onto.”

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Perhaps the most crucial aspect of an all-girls or all-boys school is the overall feeling, tone, and atmosphere—what educators like to call the culture of the school. While single-sex classrooms within a coed school may help boys and girls learn better, a school dedicated exclusively to one sex or the other is preferable, some experts say.

“The all-boys school creates an opportunity to establish an alternative culture where it’s cool to be a gentleman, cool to be courteous, to be smart, where it is cool to be an athlete and cool to be a scholar,” says Sax, who laments kids’ current negative perception of their straight-A classmates. Sax cautions that there are plenty of all-boys schools around, but only the ones that are thoughtfully conceived are worth considering. A well-run boys’ school, he says, will encourage boys to express their feelings and accept non-macho behavior, ultimately broadening the definition of what it means to be a boy.

On the wall at the Julia Morgan School hangs a poem regularly quoted to her students by Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Florida in the early 1900s: “The times demand strong girls, good girls, true girls with willing hands . . . Girls who possess opinions and a will . . .Tall girls, sun-crowned girls whose voices cry aloud and give a challenge to the whole world’s thinking.”

Explains Marcia Bedford, assistant head of the school and director of admissions, “In this society, girls tend to defer. Girls are often on the outside of the circle, making sure everything is okay.”

Shoring up girls’ self-esteem in middle school became a goal for many educators and parents after the 1992 AAUW report, which found a plunge in middle-school girls’ self-confidence, particularly in math and science.

So far, parents and kids at Julia Morgan give the faculty an A plus for counteracting this trend. “At Julia Morgan she was doing Lego robotics at a Google competition and dropping bras off the third floor to test relativity,” says Villeneuve, about her daughter, Cassidy, a Julia Morgan grad who arrived at Berkeley High School a year ago “knowing herself, being confident, speaking out, and being super-organized.”

Other graduates of Julia Morgan report that they are often the only girls in their new high school classes who have the courage to raise their hands, ask questions, and approach the teachers. Current students are already learning how to assert themselves.

“Over the years, I’ve become more confident in myself,” says seventh-grader Aliya Robin during a sunny break on the sport court at Julia Morgan last spring.

“I was really shy in elementary school. In class I never raised my hand,” says Wenonah Washington, another Julia Morgan seventh-grader, who says her hand is up all the time now.

It was partly because of Cassidy’s positive experience at Julia Morgan that Villeneuve chose the East Bay School for Boys for her son, Dylan. “Not that all boys need to be up in a tree house doing advanced math,” says Villeneueve, who has a Ph.D. in learning theory and education policy. But, she goes on to explain, for her son, the chance to learn while doing and inventing was too appealing to pass up.

Many families are also attracted to the school because of Baeten’s commitment to creating what he calls “a special place for boys to be boys and to learn how to be men.” Says Baeten: “We push them into adulthood sooner than we should and we produce adults with infantile behaviors. We have a lot of men who are kind of boys, not taking responsibility for themselves. Their manhood is based on the toys that they own, instead of contributing to their community.”

But not all educators support single-sex education—nor do all feminists. Some women who fought to pass the 1972 Title IX—which prohibits discrimination in federally funded education on the basis of gender, but is best known for its effect on funding for women’s college sports—see single-sex schools as a return to a separate but not equal world. Prominent defenders of civil rights like the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union cringe at its echoes of segregated schools and officially oppose public single-sex education. If we go back to separating boys and girls, they argue, how does that not lead to separating whites and blacks?

Six years after its report on girls failing in schools, the AAUW came out against single-sex schools. Their current position paper argues that “single-sex education is not a silver bullet to improving performance in our public schools. Where programs are established separately for both boys and girls, they have tended to be distinctly unequal.”

Catherine Hill, AAUW’s director of research, says, “We don’t have a good history in this country of separate but equal working well. It’s very sexy to study the effectiveness of single-sex education but you can also find many effective coed institutions. That’s somewhat overlooked.”

And some people’s bad memories of their old-fashioned schools still linger. On his last day at the strict and traditional Webb School in the late 1960s, then a private boys’ high school in Claremont, Calif., Steve Cohen burned his blue blazer (required at school for dinner and chapel), which explains his recent reaction to the news about the East Bay School for Boys opening this month.

“I thought boys’ schools were gone. We think of those things as a relic of the past. It seems like a counter trend,” says Cohen—now a Berkeley parent whose older daughter just graduated from the all-female Scripps College, also located in Claremont.

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Until recently, almost all single-sex schools in the United States were private, either independent (in other words, not affiliated with a larger governing body like a church) or Catholic. But in 2006, as part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education eased the Title IX rules to allow public schools to include single-sex classrooms or go completely single-sex. This inspired many districts to try single-gender public schools—equally offering girls’ and boys’ education in separate buildings—with varying success.

Almost 10 years earlier in California, Governor Pete Wilson initiated a 12-school pilot program of single-gender schools—six each for girls and boys in six districts—including the San Francisco 49ers Academies in East Palo Alto. The 1997 project quickly failed mostly because of lack of essential teacher training, says Sax. “If the school can survive the first few years, the teachers may figure it out on their own,” he notes. The East Palo Alto schools are the only ones remaining from Wilson’s experiment. At this point, there are no single-sex public schools in the East Bay or the greater Bay Area. Other states have had more success with the idea, particularly in neighboring Nevada.

Organizations like the AAUW criticized the change in the law, citing fewer resources for girls when they are separated from boys.

“As girls and women continue to make gains in education, it is important to remember that these successes do not come at the expense of boys and men,” reads AAUW’s official position on public single-sex education. “These civil rights protections have been hugely successful, and now is not the time to roll back the clock.”

These words have angered many girls’ school supporters, who argue that today’s girls’ schools are a far cry from the white-gloved, tea-serving institutions of the past and that they help to empower women, not weaken them.

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Just to the left of the main entrance of the all-women Mills College in Oakland, which began as a girls’ school in 1852, is the former Ming Quong Home for Chinese orphans, designed by Julia Morgan in 1924. The elegant building sits away from the road, behind green lawns and a soccer field, with its own courtyard and fountain. Inside the front doors a grandfather—oops, make that grandmother—clock presides over the red-tiled foyer of the Julia Morgan School for Girls.

As classes change, the front hall fills with chatter as at any other school, except the timbre of the voices stays high—there are no boys here, only 180 middle-school girls.

These girls filled the hall last May with “dream houses,” small architectural models they had built, complete with elaborate roof gardens, loft beds, and libraries.

“When they get on the other side of this tumultuous time, they have a much better sense of who they are,” says Bedford, the school’s assistant head, who graduated from the all-women Simmons College in Boston. “You come to a school like this, you do everything.”

And indeed, Julia Morgan girls fill every last school role, from A-student to class clown, computer jock to drama star. They also routinely assume leadership of events including assemblies, school tours, information sessions—and their own graduation ceremonies.

The Julia Morgan School was founded partly to combat the disturbing pattern of strong, confident girls fading into the background in middle school. Once they reach sixth grade, girls raise their hands less in class, begin struggling in math and science, and report lower self-esteem all the way through high school, according to research by the AAUW and others. The school’s creation was part of a growing movement toward girls’ schools, which has continued as the number of girls’ public schools doubled to 54 in the last six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Contrary to stereotype, the first American girls’ schools in the 1800s began not to promote the deportment of young ladies, but because the boys’ schools wouldn’t let the girls in. Powerful women like Emma Willard and Clara Spence worked to offer a comparable education to girls everywhere. In the 1960s, as feminism and the idea of equal opportunities for women took off, many men’s colleges and schools began accepting women, shrinking the number of girls’ schools, according to DeBare’s book, Where Girls Come First.

But with schools like Julia Morgan opening across the country, the idea of educating girls by themselves has regained popularity—and then some—in the last 15 years. In its first year, Julia Morgan had more applicants than openings in its inaugural sixth-grade class. Since then there are usually about 130 applicants for the 60 spots in each of the three grades.

Across town at Holy Names High School, the girls’ post–high school experiences reflect the benefits of the all-girls classroom. “We teach them to claim their voice,” says Sister Sally Slyngstad, principal of the school, which is run by the Sisters of the Holy Names, not by the Oakland Diocese. Holy Names graduates offer the same feedback that Julia Morgan grads do—that they take with them the courage to speak up in class and voice their opinions. Founded in 1868, Holy Names moved to upper Rockridge in 1931 from its original Lake Merritt location.

Some of that confidence is due to school climate, but much of it is also because these schools help teach girls in their own style.

“Women and girls learn best in contextual situations. We like to relate things,” says Sandra Luna, head of Julia Morgan. “This is not as crucial for boys.”

According to a 2009 study from the UCLA graduate school of education, girls’ school alumnae say they are more self-confident than their female classmates from coed schools. The study’s other findings are equally compelling. Compared to their counterparts at coed schools, three times as many girls from girls’ schools are interested in engineering careers, the report noted. These grads are also more likely to be confident in public speaking, academic performance, and discussing politics; they’re also more apt to consider graduate school.

“For me this school is a feminist act,” says Baeten, the head of the East Bay School for Boys. During his years at the Julia Morgan School, he says, “We did all this work with the girls on being confident, capable, and being direct. Then they would go to a dance and they would deal with a boy who was doing all this objectifying and posturing that was flying in the face of what we were teaching the girls.”

Perhaps the boys’ schools of today—or at least of the East Bay—will bring a new twist to feminism.

“It’s important that we also teach the boys words for emotions and how to communicate,” Baeten says. “If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter how courageous our girls are.”

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A former education reporter, Sarah Weld is co-editor of The Monthly, as well as a freelance writer and editor. During six years of coaching soccer to boys (fidgety) and girls (not fidgety), she finally realized that her boys’ teams focused better and wrestled less when every soccer drill involved a race to win. She wishes she’d figured that out earlier. She lives in Oakland with her husband and son and daughter.