By Megan Rosenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 26, 1998; Page A16

BALTIMORE – From the outside, Harford Heights Elementary is a bleak, windowless bunker of an inner-city school, mired between a McDonald's and a church parking lot. Homeless men panhandle at the nearest intersection, dismal, scuffling specters of adult misery.

But inside this school of 1,609 students – the largest elementary in Maryland – things are bustling. Among the many programs shepherded by principal Goldye Sanders – which include special education for the mentally retarded and the emotionally disturbed, as well as full-day Head Start and kindergarten – is an ongoing experiment in single gender classes.

In Gilbert Brown's third grade class one day this fall, about half of the 22 boys were in school uniforms and the others were very well-dressed, some in suits like their teacher. Every time Brown asked a question, hands shot up, and students – as is required of every child in the school – phrased their answers in complete sentences. But it was clear there was more being taught here than reading, writing and arithmetic.

When they got up, the boys had to place their chairs underneath the desks neatly, "like gentlemen." When they walked down the hall to the lunchroom they kept their hands clasped behind their backs. When one boy had trouble answering a question, Brown asked the others, "Who can help his brother?"

After a lesson about using the library, Brown led his students through a familiar litany.

"Where you live, is it bad or good?"

"Where I live, it's bad," answered one boy. "They's a lot of people hangin' on the corners."

"Why are they hanging on the corner?"

"They're hanging on the corner because they didn't learn nothing in school. They probably didn't learn how to read and write. They couldn't get no job."

"What do you have to do if you want to be a football player or a police officer?"

"You have to do the right things in school and work hard."

"And make good what?"

"Choices."

The boys, most of whom are poor enough to qualify for free school lunches, seemed to enjoy this catechism.

"What have you learned in the all-boys class?"

"Not to laugh at your brothers," said one.

"How to use my mind when I'm fightin' and not my hands," said another.

"I learned not to go out on the corner and get hurt," said a third.

"I learned you don't have to be bad to get attention," answered a fourth.

"I'm proud of you," said Mr. Brown. The boys beamed.

Baltimore has had single-gender classes for both boys and girls in their public schools since 1994. About 2,900 children, 2.6 percent of the school population, are enrolled in single gender classes. Similar experiments have been going on in a half dozen other major school districts around the country (none of them in the Washington area), usually focused on helping African American boys or girls in math and science. The ACLU and the National Organization for Women have filed suits claiming discrimination, which stopped the classes and separate single-sex academies in several places, but Baltimore's continue because they are neither required nor offered unequally to either gender.

"I think it should be an option," said Principal Sanders. "It's not for everyone. But we find that aggressive boys often do better in these classes – they become competitive rather than combative. The fellas who are not as verbal do well in them, too. And girls become more assertive and develop a potential for leadership." She has not compared the test scores of those in single-sex classes with children in coed classes, she said, but the school's overall scores on the Maryland performance assessment, which is given to third- and fifth-graders, have gone up between eight and 10 percentage points since the single gender classes began.

Students enter a single-sex class after a parent's request or a teacher's recommendation.

"It is rare to see a boy from the all-male classes in my office for anything," Sanders said. She has worked hard to hire male teachers – the 20 men among the 150 teachers at Harford Heights is above the national average of 9 percent in elementary schools. They make a huge difference for her inner-city boys, many of whom come from single-mom households and thirst for positive role models, she said.

Some of the school's practices would probably raise hackles among true-blue feminists. Just as the boys are taught to behave like "gentlemen," the girls are expected to be "ladies." There are bright colors and a toy stove in one of the all-girls classes, and there was a Thanksgiving "banquet" where the boys went over and escorted the girls into the cafeteria. But, Sanders says, her inner city youngsters seem to learn respect for themselves and others through instruction in these kinds of social niceties.

Boys schools used to be the norm in the world of elite private academies, although few remain. But they provide a research venue – admittedly limited demographically – for people interested in how to help boys thrive. Diane J. Hulse, the head of the middle school at the all-boys Collegiate School in New York City, presented the results of a study at last August's American Psychological Association convention during a forum called "Rescuing Ophelia's Brothers." The forum was organized by William S. Pollack, a psychologist writing a book about boys. Hulse administered four standard psychological tests to 186 boys at Collegiate and to 239 boys and girls at a similar private coed school to measure attitudes toward self-esteem, gender roles, school and susceptibility to peer pressure.

She found that the students at Collegiate were less defensive and less susceptible to social pressures, had a higher sense of control over their school performance, felt more comfortable about their relationships with girls, and had more egalitarian attitudes about women's and men's roles in society.