Girls' School Web Links

Here are some web sites with information about current and historic U.S. girls’ schools. To track down a particular school or find a girls’ school in your city, please visit one of the web sites run by school associations such as NCGS, NCEA or NAIS. (Each link will open a new browser window.)

• National Coalition of Girls’ Schools This umbrella group includes more than 100 public and private girls’ schools. The site includes a directory of member schools and their web sites, recent news articles on girls’ schools, and resources/links on girls’ education.
• The Julia Morgan School for Girls This is the Oakland, California, middle school whose story is highlighted in Where Girls Come First. It’s a good example of the “new wave” of girls’ schools created in the 1990s. Author Ilana DeBare is one of the founders of JMSG and serves as its current board president.
• National Catholic Educational Association This group includes Catholic schools of all kinds, both coed and single-sex.
• National Association of Independent Schools This group includes independent schools of all kinds, both coed and single-sex.
• Together 4 You This is a group of Catholic girls’ schools located in the Chicago area.
• National Association for Single-Sex Public Education This site has a huge amount of information on the advantages of single-sex education for both boys and girls; research on gender differences in learning; and recent news articles on single-sex education.
• The American Association of University Women This national group continues to advocate on behalf of girls’ education. The web site allows you to order copies of their research reports, including the landmark How Schools Shortchange Girls and their 1998 report on single-sex education.
• Emma Willard School archives This site provides a guide to the archives of the Emma Willard School, which was founded in 1821 by one of the pioneers of women’s education in the United States. EWS has an excellent collection of 19th century documents about Willard, her students, and the school. The site also gives you the complete text of Willard’s 1818 Plan for Improving Female Education, one of the most powerful arguments of its time for taking women’s education seriously.
• Prudence Crandall Museum Prudence Crandall became a cause celebre for the abolition movement in the 1830s, when this Quaker teacher was jailed for opening a school for African-American girls in her home. This site gives information about the museum that has been created in her home in Canterbury, Connecticut.
• “Is Single-Gender Schooling Viable in the Public Sector? Lessons from California’s Pilot Program.” Scholars Amanda Datnow, Lea Hubbard, and Elisabeth Woody completed the only study of California’s brief experiment with single-sex public middle schools in the mid-1990s. Datnow’s web site allows you to access the full text of their report in pdf format.
• “Single-Sex Schooling: Law, Policy and Research,” by Rosemary Salamone. This essay in Brookings Papers on Education Policy: 1999 (Diane Ravitch, editor) gives a good summary of recent legal developments and government policy on single-sex public education.