thelastpsychiatrist.com - All Girls School Or Coed? Which Is Better? Adnotated.

"Graduates of all-girls schools show stronger academic orientations than coed graduates." What?

The study is one of the largest of its kind. It also addresses a crucial flaw in many other studies, by comparing single sex schools to coed private schools, eliminating the "private is better" confounding variable.

6500 womenⁱ from 225 single sex high schools compared to 15000 women in 1200 coed private high schools, across the country. It also separates out the Catholic schools, and controls for race, income, etc, etc.

• 62 percent of s-s students spend 11 hours or more per week studyingⁱⁱ, compared to 42% of coed school's female students.
• 81 percent of s-s women graduates rate themselvesⁱⁱⁱ "above average" or in the "highest 10 percent" for academic ability, compared to 75% of coed women graduates^iv.
• 60 percent of s-s women rate themselves "above average" or in the "highest 10 percent" with regard to intellectual self-confidence^v, compared to 54 percent of coed women.^vi
• 48 percent of female graduates of s-s women rate their math ability "above average" or in the "highest 10 percent" compared to 37 percent of coeds.

Two seconds spent staring at this lead to the obvious question: are they better students, or worse students who are also delusional?^vii If they spent 11 hours or more studying, was it worth it?^viii

Higher SAT Scores. Women who attended single-sex schools tended to outscore their coeducational counter-parts on the SAT. Mean SAT composite scores (Verbal plus Math) are 43 points higher for single-sex graduates.

I'm not sure if that was meant to be a joke or not. 43 points may be a lot (which it isn't) but it's hardly reason for a group of students to have such a bloated sense of self-esteem that they consider themselves in the top 10% (I look forward to your emails.) Or, the reverse: 43 points is hardly a reason for another group of students not to have an bloated sense of self-esteem.

Clearly, there is merit in fostering intellectually curiosity and ambition, but things like this:

Single-sex graduates also report more time talking with teachers outside of class, where 37 percent of single-sex graduates reported spending three or more hours per week meeting with teachers apart from class

Seem to me a solid reason to home school.^ix

My point here is not to disparage single sex schools, there may be/are excellent reasons to send a kid to a single sex school.^x It simply appears, based on this, one of the largest and most important studies on the question, that self-esteem goes up disproportionately to any concrete metric of achievement.^xi Contrasting opinions/information are welcome. I am entirely ambivalent on the question of same-sex education; my own was vigorously no sex, with the resultant negative effects on my own self-esteem. Now I write a blog. Plan accordingly.

1. What were women doing in all-girls schools ? [↩]
2. Eleven hours per week ?! Holy shit what happened to the sixty hour week! What the fuck is this, a hospital ship !? [↩]
3. Self-ratings, always good for a chuckle. [↩]
4. Holy shit how can 70-80% be above average, let alone in the top decile ?! What the fuck are these dumb cunts "studying", Obnoxious Impudence 400 ? [↩]
5. What the fuck is that ?! If you rate yourself highly urinarily self-confident you're saying you believe that you believe you won't pee the bed, and if you rate yourself highly intellectualy self-confident you believe what ? That you're stupid, as per the oldest definition of stupidity, "the idiots think they know everything while intelligent people are full of doubt" ? What sort of functionally illiterate nonsense is this! [↩]
6. Yeah, how about "it's easy for dumb cunts to think they're maybe not as dumb while among themselves, without seeing any males to compare with". You know, much like white kids think they're pretty good at science for as long as they don't have to go to class with any azn kids. I bet you girls born and raised in Boise, Idaho who also go to highschool there think themselves pretty debonair and cosmopolitan and whatnot, as compared to girls born and raised in Boise, Idaho going to highschool in Chicago. What the fuck provincial nonsense is this ?! [↩]
7. Better question : what sort of moron makes a study about academic achievement on the basis of self-reporting ?! Who the fuck permits this nonsense to be published ? What does it say about some study, to have been published in the same place as this imbecile atrocity ? You realise that everyone who ever went to UCLA is now utterly fucking suspect, yes ? Because this will be all that comes to mind, "oh, you hung out with those morons for four years". Explain this away if you can, I'm all ears.

   Imagine yourself at UCLA. This is where bold research and real-world solutions happen. This is where the movers and shakers are housed. This is where the next generation of education and information studies professionals are being prepared to address some of the most pressing challenges.

   Nope, not doing it. Try something else. [↩]

8. Moreover, what do they even think "studying" means ? Maybe they're doing their nails -- as long as they're doing each other's nails it's practically Sociology, neh ? Just as good as anything in the Boas school, anyways. [↩]
9. Seriously. What's the idea here, that those really sad butch dykes preying on all-girls' schools are somehow better than the baseline dr. Talcs of the world ?! Gimme a break. [↩]
10. Yes : mental retardation.

    If your child isn't mentally retarded, sending him to study among a group of same-age idiots selected by any other criteria than the purely academic is pure folly. I went to highschool in the single thirty-strong class at that level for the entire country -- thats 30 seats for about 700`000 people in the age range, putting each of us comfortably in the top 0.005% academically, by nominal criteria. Nobody was there because they were a girl, or because their parents witnessed the right Jehova, nor because anything the fuck else nonsense. Yet you know what ? Nobody really thought all that much of themselves, either! Principally because nobody gave a shit, and secondarily because absolutely everyone understood nominal criteria aren't even remotely as important as school administrators'd like them to be, and go about pretending they are.

    In a word : nobody among an "objective" elite of kids above one percent of the one percent -- yes, get that, by the time you take the one percent of the one percent smartest best & greatest kids you're still merely halfway there -- spent very much time figuring out whether they "feel" like they're in the top 10%, nor likely would have said yes if asked. They might have agreed with your math if you showed them the math, but they likely wouldn't have agreed with their own math if they had to figure it out in isolation -- mostly because among all the kids they knew, they still figured kinda around the midmark (obviously, by virtue of their not knowing all that many idiots, very skewed social group). And besides, what the fuck difference does it make, among a set of kids who haven't yet done anything, who is the tenth of a % grade better than who !? They're fucking grades, devised by intellectually inferior people for their own fucking needs, how the hell is anyone going to figure the morons coming up with exam questions are gonna meaningfully order the smartest kids in a generation ? The ordering of the smartest kids is a harder problem than the being the smartest kids! By far! And those adults weren't the smartest kids back when they were kids anyway, because if they had been they'd be working in "International Trade" and "Computation Technology" research, not fucking Education Inspectorating.

    All-girls "schools" are glorified repositories for mongoloid females, nothing more and nothing else. [↩]

11. Self-esteem goes up in direct proportion to socio-cultural isolation, which is how the patently idiotic population of North America ended up with its otherworldy notions of itself, both in the overall and in groups however selected. [↩]