Inside a Florida School District's Same-Sex Classes: Perfume for Girls, Electronics for Boys
Thanks to a new state law, the ACLU is worried that other schools will emulate the program in Hillsborough County.
| Tue May 20, 2014 6:00 AM EDT
A few generations ago, American families could send their daughters to private, all-girl finishing schools, where they learned how to sit properly and nab husbands. Today, Florida families have the option of sending their daughters to all-girl public schools, where girls get perfume for doing tasks correctly, and educators are taught that girls "struggle with abstract thinking," "use relationships as weapons," and prefer to read about "emotional agonies" over spaceship how-to books, according to a Title IX complaint filed last week by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU alleges that the Hillsborough County public school district—which includes Tampa, has more than 202,000 students and a $2.8 billion budget, and operates both single-sex classrooms in coed public schools and single-sex magnet schools—is implementing teaching methods that discriminate on the basis of sex. Galen Sherwin, staff attorney at the ACLU Women's Rights Project, says these methods may soon spread to other parts of Florida.
The ACLU filed its complaint one day after Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed into law a little-noticed bill that requires school districts that establish same-gender programs to mandate that educators participate in special training. Sherwin says that without federal or state intervention to ensure training programs do not promote sex stereotypes, it's likely that other schools will follow Hillsborough's model. (A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education says that she can't comment on the complaint, but noted that, according to the law's language, the school districts are in charge of training.)
So what does the Hillsborough program look like? According to the complaint, "trainings relied heavily on stereotypical emotional differences between boys and girls," such as the idea that "girls do not like to take risks and believe success is from hard work," while boys "show love through aggression." The complaint lists techniques employed in classrooms across theInside a Florida School District's Same-Sex Classes: Perfume for Girls, Electronics for Boys | Mother Jones: