Stephanie Luiere of Mannion Middle School teaches a remedial English class to girls. Luiere has seen student achievement go up since she separated the class by gender. Photo by Gary Thompson.

Mannion Middle School teacher Stephanie Luiere began an experiment last school year that separated boys and girls in the remedial English class she teaches.

Luiere said the three-month trial run paid dividends, even though at one point, so few girls were involved she had to make the class exclusively for boys.

"Every student passed," she said. "Some of them by a narrow margin, but everyone passed."

Luiere is continuing her teaching strategy of separating the genders this school year. She is teaching one class to a group of 10 boys and another to a group of 11 girls.

"This year, the achievement by the kids is much higher," Luiere said, noting that the class grade average hovers around 75 percent.

Mannion is not the only school in the Clark County School District that separates students by gender. At least five other middle schools and one high school are using the technique in some form or another. Some school programs focus only on students who need remediation, while others are more inclusive.

Cheyenne High School has offered gender-based classes for four years. Ninth- and 10th-grade students are isolated by gender in the core academic classes of English, math, science and social studies.

Principal Jeff Geihs said the technique allows students to focus more on their lessons while letting them be uninhibited when they have classroom discussions.

"Boys aren't trying to show off. Girls aren't trying to show off," Geihs said. "We're talking about teenage kids -- 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds. Your mind is not always on the books at that age."

Sophomore Ryan Buchanan said he went from being a C student in middle school to a B student at Cheyenne because he's not as distracted by girls. He said the pros outweigh the cons.

"The cons, of course, are no females," Buchanan said. "That's really all we're missing, females. ... estrogen."

Crystal Garcia, also a sophomore, said her grades have improved from D's to B's. However, she did say there is one disadvantage.

"Some girls don't get along with each other," she said. "There's a little bit more drama."

But Geihs said most of Cheyenne's students aren't seeing as much improvement as Buchanan and Garcia.

Geihs said a researcher from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas studied the effects of the program at the high school last fall.

The researcher, who could not be reached for comment for this story, did not find any link between dividing the classes by gender and improved student achievement, Geihs said.

Regardless, Geihs said, the program has merit if only because students and parents are happy with it.

"That in itself is enough for me," Geihs said. "At the very least, what it did was provide a more regimented atmosphere that is more conducive to learning."

Dr. Leonard Sax, author of "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences," said boys and girls learn differently. But it's incorrect to assume that each gender learns in a particular way.

"There are a lot of variations," Sax said. "There are some girls who would rather play football than play with Barbie. There are some boys who would rather write poetry than play sports."

Sax, who is a consultant for the program at Cheyenne, said boys generally tend to do better in single-sex classrooms at a younger age, while girls tend to thrive in the atmosphere through the high school years.

Sax said boys perform better in that environment when they are younger because they might not have learned to dislike school.

He said even kindergarten classes have evolved into courses focusing on academics, instead of less structured tasks such as finger painting.

"Boys develop negative attitudes toward school, because they are just not ready to sit still and be quiet at that age," Sax said. "It's not developmentally appropriate to ask a 5-year-old boy to sit still for hours at a time."

Sax said that negative attitude can increase as boys move on through their educational career, unless it is stemmed at a young age.

"If the negative attitude hasn't solidified into concrete, you can change it," he said.

Sax said girls tend to do well in classes at all ages because putting them in an all-female environment tends to decrease stereotypes placed on them.

Their math abilities tend to decline between the ages of 10 and 14 in traditional school settings, he said. But that's not the case in schools where only girls are in class together.

"We live in a sexist society. And coed schools, even with the most enlightened leadership, tend to reproduce society's sexist views," Sax said.

He said rising student achievement in gender-divided classrooms has indeed been documented, particularly at the elementary level.

But Sax said it's not all about "grades and tests scores" because schools that divide classes by gender break societal molds and might help students discover talents and passions they might not have otherwise known about.

"Students at coed schools tend to be pushed into blue and pink cubby holes," he said.