Richard Fabes is the Dee and John Whiteman Distinguished Professor of Child Development in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and the director of operations for the American Council for Coeducational Schooling. The view expressed here is that of all the authors of the recent Science report.

The recent Science article by me and my colleagues has sparked much-needed discussion of single-sex education. Past reviews and our own peer-reviewed research led us to conclude that academic achievement is not superior in single-sex schools after controlling for qualities of children at entry (for example, socioeconomic status) and programs (demanding curriculums, for instance).

Single-sex education fails to produce academic benefits and inflates gender stereotyping.

Additionally, based on voluminous research of the negative effects of separating people into groups, we warned that single-sex classrooms would likely generate and exacerbate stereotyping and sexist attitudes. Rather than promoting gender segregation, public schools should be striving to teach a diverse body of students to work together and to respect each other.

For nearly a decade, proponents of single-sex schooling have argued that boys and girls differ so fundamentally in brain functioning, sensory abilities, interests, stress responsiveness and more that they cannot be taught effectively in the same classrooms. However, scientific data do not support these claims, and, indeed, many single-sex advocates have recently backed away from them. Nonetheless, such advocates have already trained hundreds of teachers (often at taxpayer expense) in mythic “gender-specific learning styles” that make a mockery of Title IX’s requirement to eliminate sex discrimination in schools.

Now these advocates are emphasizing “social justice” as their rationale, arguing that parents who cannot afford private, elite single-sex education deserve comparable educational options. But this argument is hollow given the evidence that single-sex schooling has nothing to do with a school’s success. Certainly, there is great social injustice in the quality differences between elite private schools and many public schools, but this injustice is never going to be remedied by segregating the sexes.

We and many other scientists and educators agree with the U.S. Department of Education’s demand for “educational practitioners to use ‘scientifically-based research’ to guide their decisions about which interventions to implement.” Anecdotes do not meet this standard but are frequently used to support single-sex schooling. If modern science has learned anything, it is to be highly skeptical of anecdotes.

The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates that single-sex education fails to produce academic benefits and inflates gender stereotyping.