School of Law
Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking
Single-Sex Schooling
Publisher: Yale UP
New Haven, CT
2003, 304 pages
This book offers a reasoned educational and legal argument
supporting single-sex schooling especially for disadvantaged
minority students. Drawing on court decisions, history, educational
research, and philosophical and psychological theories on sameness
and difference, the author corrects many of the misconceptions
surrounding single-sex education. In doing so, she shifts the
debate from the merits of the approach to the broader question of
how best to provide an appropriate education for girls and boys,
rich and poor, based not on group stereotypes but on informed
understandings of individual needs as they at times coalesce around
gender.
“A smart, objective, evenhanded examination of the debate over
single-sex education, and its benefits and drawbacks for girls and
boys; first-rate research, sharp analysis, and no axe to grind;
must reading in this important debate.”
–Susan Estrich, Professor of law, University of Southern
California