All-boys schools: What do we know?

What’s good about boys’ schools?

Several common themes emerged from conversations with both practitioners and academics. Both groups highlighted several school-wide factors as important ingredients for student success, though interviewees diverged on how best to provide them. Some thought that co-ed settings could accomplish this, while others, including many of those working inside all-boys schools, saw single-sex schooling as a uniquely effective way to deliver them.

Key takeaways included:

• Relationships are critical. Many identified close, high-quality relationships with boys as keys to their success. Boys benefit when staff express genuine interest in their lives and go out of their way to understand their experiences.
• Effective schools help boys understand who they are. Relationships improve when teachers and staff help boys self-reflect and articulate their thoughts and feelings. Practitioners mentioned activities like talking circles or senior speeches as particularly important for their student bodies.
• Shared values, traditions, and practices turn schools into communities. Expert interviewees frequently emphasized the importance of ritual and ceremony as an important mechanism for developing character and inculcating shared values.
• Teachers must understand boys’ and girls’ unique developmental needs. One size does not necessarily fit all, and many interviewees felt strongly about giving staff and teachers the professional development they need to address boys’ educational needs.
• Experiential, active learning is important. Classroom structures should channel boys’ need for physical movement, challenge, and social connection. Interview participants stressed the value of project-based learning, exposing students to new environments, and getting them outside as opportunities for more transformative experiences.

These ideas are obviously not the exclusive preserve of all-boys schools. Co-ed schools could potentially capture the gains seen in strong boys’ programs by embedding structured relationship time (advising, mentoring), identity-reflection rituals, and active learning. Doing so with the same fidelity as a dedicated all-boys school may be a challenge, however. In particular, deliberately allocating blocks of time to mentoring or sustained staff training on male developmental needs requires administrative buy-in and can be easily squeezed out by conventional academic priorities.

Big knowledge gaps persist

Taken as a whole, even with many decades worth of studies, large blind-spots remain:

• We need more longitudinal studies examining outcomes across students from various educational settings through college and into their careers.
• Most single-sex public schools in the United States are urban, majority-minority, and in low-income neighborhoods. We need methodologically rigorous research specifically examining outcomes for this subset of boys.
• There are a range of non-academic outcomes like social-emotional skills, identity development, and motivation that need further exploration and understanding.
• Many public charter schools use lottery systems and it would be useful to see strong quasi-experimental research on public single-sex schooling in a U.S. context that exploits this.
• More investigation of the developmental timing question is needed, specifically when and for whom single-sex education might be most beneficial.
• More resources should be directed toward understanding which specific elements of school environments most benefit boys.

Single-sex education is neither a panacea nor a relic. At its best it bundles proven ingredients like strong mentoring, purposeful rituals, and experiential learning into a format that helps boys succeed and which could potentially be implemented in co-ed settings. However, because the most credible studies are international, we still lack rigorous evidence on U.S. public boys’ schools that might help us understand the unique context in which they operate. We need rigorous (experimental, quasi-experimental, lottery-based) U.S.-centered studies to learn which students truly benefit from single-sex models, and we need to better understand the potential benefits beyond academics.