Equal Protection and Public Education Essay Single-sex schools and education are not a new concept in public school education. Throughout the nineteenth century, public education was single-sex from primary school to college. It was during the Progressive Movement, from about 1890 to 1920, that schools became coeducational, such that by 1995 there were only two single-sex public schools in the country, both for girls (Vanze, 2009). In 2001, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was reauthorized and called No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA), which allowed public schools to offer same-sex schools and classrooms (Brown, 2011). As the desire to improve student achievement increases and the achievement gap widens for all students when compared with international students, not solely low income or students of color, school districts began experimenting with different methods including single-sex education in the …show more content…
One such case involving secondary education was Vorchheimer v. School District of Philadelphia, where the Third Circuit court approved single-sex high schools in Philadelphia’s public schools because there were parallel school for both boys and girls and both had high admission standards and offered college preparatory classes (Hutchison, 2001). However, in classes where the court struck down single-sex education, again in the case of higher education, it was because there was no comparable alternative as in the case of United States v. Virginia. In that case, the court found that the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), having a male only admission policy did violate the Equal Protection Clause of the fourteenth amendment because Virginia failed to show an “exceedingly persuasive justification" for VMI's gender-biased admissions policy and had not provided a comparable alternative for women (U.S. v. Virginia,