The fanfare that greeted D.C.’s first public college preparatory school for African-American and Latino young men—Ron Brown High School in northeast has given way to an inevitable nag from the ACLU. If they’re not going to admit young women, the ACLU says, then D.C. should at least give girls a school of their own. As it happens, the District still might.
“I’m 100 percent open to it,” the chancellor of schools Antwan Wilson told me Saturday, when I asked him whether an all-girls public school lay on the horizon. He had just addressed a predominantly African-American crowd of more than 250 D.C. public school girls, their parents, and teachers at an all-day event put on expressly for young women of color. The city initiative is called Reign: Empowering Young Women As Leaders, and it follows a program similar to the one for young men which led to Ron Brown High’s founding.
And Wilson is insistent that a school for girls was always a possibility. “As a matter of fact, when I launched the initiative,” he says, “I specifically said that a school for girls exclusively is absolutely still on the table. That is absolutely something that will be considered, as we learn what we’re doing, as we learn what is needed.”
Billed as “We the Girls: Young Women’s Leadership Conference,” the didn’t explicitly tackle the topic of all-girls education. But the girls, teachers, parents, administrators, scheduled speakers, and appointed role models who gathered at Howard University all seemed to value single-sex fellowship.
The D.C. Public School system’s consistent answer to the ACLU has been that boys and girls have “unique needs.” This message honors a permanent—though currently unpopular— truth about boys and girls: They aren’t wired the same. (Or, in the more soothing, educational parlance: “Different students need different supports.”)
“Young girls, many times they need more than they’re even telling us,” Wilson said. “We want them to like learning, we want them to like learning together in school.”
Every year the city conducts a climate survey to measure aspects of students’ school life that don’t show up on standardized tests. “We have data that show specifically that our students who are the least satisfied with their school experience are African-American girls,” he said. Only 77 percent of African-American girls expressed said they were satisfied with school in 2015’s survey. (That’s compared with 81 percent of African-American boys and 87 percent of Hispanic boys and girls. For Asian students of both gender and for white boys, the rate is more than 90 percent; it is highest—near 95 percent—for white girls.)
“We need to do work for our young men absolutely, but we also need to do work specifically focused on the needs of young women of color because they’re saying they are the least satisfied with school,” Wilson explained.
But reaching that dissatisfied quarter of the demographic means first getting them to talk about what’s missing. In “listening sessions” conducted by DCPS officials, 100 girls in grades four through 12 said they’re most interested in having an all-female community, a circle of sisterhood in which younger girls can learn from (and alongside) older girls—without being interrupted by the tensions that tend otherwise to consume adolescent life. “On all sides of the city and at all grade levels we really heard the same thing,” DCPS spokeswoman Michelle Lerner told me, “They did not want their own school, but what they talked about was time to spend with other girls, both in their school and across schools, and then to talk to girls who are ahead of them.”
Of course, it would have to take a rare young woman to say, particularly in the company of her peers, that she would rather go to a school with no boys. But Saturday’s conference was just the next phase in building the community these girls said they wanted, and it was a glimpse of what a girls’ school would be: a room, or several, of their own.
