Why Are Single-Sex Schools Successful?

Abstract

We exploit two unusual policy features of academic high schools in Seoul, South Korea-random assignment of pupils to high schools within districts and conversion of some existing single-sex schools to the coeducational (coed) type over time-to identify three distinct causal parameters: the between-school effect of attending a coed (versus a single-sex) school; the within-school effect of school-type conversion, conditional on (unobserved) school characteristics; and the effect of class-level exposure to mixed-gender (versus same-sex) peers. We find robust evidence that pupils in single-sex schools outperform their counterparts in coed schools, which could be due to singlesex peers in school and classroom, or unobservable school-level covariates. Focusing on switching schools, we find that the conversion of the pupil gender type from single-sex to coed leads to worse academic outcomes for both boys and girls, conditional on school fixed effects and time-varying observables. While for boys, the negative effect is largely driven by exposure to mixed-gender peers at school-level, it is class-level exposure to mixed-gender peers that explains this disadvantage for girls.

Gender Differences in Academic Achievement in Saudi Arabia: A Wake-Up Call to Educational Leaders

“…In addition, the study revealed that singlesex schooling strengthens females' self-confidence (Eisenkopf, Hessami, Fischbacher, & Ursprung, 2015). Likewise, findings from South Korea documented robust evidence that students in single-sex schools outperform their peers in co-educational schools (Dustmann, Ku, & Kwak, 2018). A study based on a single-sex education program in Chicago called "separating the males from the females" (Patterson, 2012, p. 37) showed that gender separation improves the academic achievement of both females and males.…”

“…Single-sex education exists in both developed, developing, and transitional countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia (Baki, 2004), Malaysia (Jelas et al, 2014), Italy (Contini, Di Tommaso, & Mendolia, 2017), Ireland (Doris, O'Neill, & Sweetman, 2013), the United States (Crawford-Ferre & Wiest, 2013;Pahlke & Hyde, 2016;Patterson, 2012), Switzerland (Eisenkopf, Hessami, Fischbacher, & Ursprung, 2015), and South Korea (Dustmann, Ku, & Kwak, 2018), to cite only a few.…”

Within-District School Lotteries, District Selection, and The Average Partial Effects of School Inputs

“…The effect of single-sex education has become an active area of economic research in recent years. See Jackson (2012Jackson ( , 2016, Park et al (2013), Lee et al (2014), and Dustmann et al (2017) for effects of single-sex schooling and Hoxby (2000a), Whitmore (2005), and Lavy and Schlosser (2011) for gender peer effects.…”

“…Apart from proposing a robust weighted average method, we also point out the possible inconsistency of the commonly used district(-year) fixed effects estimation under endogenous district selection. This point is neglected in empirical studies on school quality effects that rely on within-district random school assignment (Park et al, 2012(Park et al, , 2013(Park et al, , 2018Lee et al, 2014;Choi et al, 2015;Sohn, 2016;Dustmann et al, 2017;Hahn et al, 2018). This point is also relevant in studies that use the same design as Project STAR and school fixed effects (e.g., Krueger, 1999) and studies that use lottery fixed effects in comparing students who win the lottery for their chosen school with students who lose (Cullen et al, 2006;Deming, 2011;Deming et al, 2014).…”

“…Our econometric framework can be applied to any (quasi-)experiment with a two-stage assignment where selection among experiment sites is endogenous and assignment between treatment and control groups within sites is random. 6 5 Park et al (2013), Lee et al (2014), Sohn (2016), and Dustmann et al (2017) study the effect of single-sex education using various datasets on standardized test scores and secondary school characteristics in Seoul. Except for Sohn (2016) whose estimates are not directly comparable, these studies find a positive association between single-sex education and student performance on standardized test scores.…”