EDUCATION UPDATE ONLINE
Review of Learning Like A Girl: Educating Our Daughters In Schools Of Their Own
By Merri Rosenberg
Learning Like A Girl: Educating Our Daughters In Schools Of Their Own
by Diana Meehan
Public Affairs, New York, 2007: 324pp.
I’ve read many worthwhile and significant books during the past few years as a reviewer for these pages.
Until now I haven’t come across a book that I wish some Hollywood producer would option for a movie, or even a television movie-of-the-week.
But Diana Meehan’s thoroughly engaging, engrossing, accessible and brilliantly written story about her efforts, with similarly committed colleagues and advocates, to found a girls’ school in Los Angeles is one I’d love to see on screen.
The story is compelling, complete with the drama of reluctant neighbors protesting the arrival of a girls’ school in their community (and not only a girls’ school, but a school that embraces Caucasian, African-American, Latina and Asian students) as well as Meehan’s personal drama centering on a health crisis (fortunately resolved with a good outcome). Plus there are quirky anecdotes about the challenges of launching a school from scratch, including raising funds, selecting board members and teaching staff, and finding classroom space to making sure there’s something as mundane—and necessary—as toilet paper in the bathrooms for the first day of school.
She’s so good at what she does, and how she tells her tale, that you come away believing that given enough passion, determination and sheer strength of will, anyone could accomplish what the founders of the Archer School in Los Angeles did only a decade ago.
Meehan is too modest by half. Obviously she and the other founders brought something special to the table that made it possible for the Archer School to become a reality and to flourish. Not everyone, after all, can get Academy Award winning song writers like Alan and Marilyn Bergman to write the school song, for example.
But this is not about glitz or privilege. The Archer School is very much about giving girls from a diversity of backgrounds the chance to become “the best they can be. Given a chance, they create worlds better than our dream for them.” (p. 205), through rigorous academics and a deep understanding of girls’ need to learn through networks and connections rather than competition.
It is a school that has learned from the examples of other distinguished single-sex girls’ schools around the country, such as the Emma Willard school in Troy, NY; the Atlanta Girls’ School, The Young Women’s Leadership School in Manhattan, Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago, IL, and the Irma Rangel School in Dallas, TX, among others.
As an academic who specializes in media and its messages, Meehan is especially smart at explaining precisely why a girls’ school is needed to counteract the predominant consumer culture that values brand names, shopping and popularity rather than academic achievement and intellectual pursuits. Founding a girls’ school is, quite simply, a provocative counter-cultural move, especially in an era when educators were beginning to worry about how boys were being left behind. Meehan and her colleagues understood that there needs to be a place where “there must be acceptance and support for taking a challenge.” (p.190)
She’s also good at explaining the research into how girls learn, and what those differences may be, whether she’s citing Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, :Peggy Orenstein or Myra and David Sadker, among others. The take away message is simple: “Girls’ schools are good for girls.” (p. xvi).
And the results are impressive. The first graduating class earned acceptances to some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, such as Harvard, Vassar, Princeton, Stanford, and the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Even more important, perhaps, Meehan writes poignantly and eloquently about the metamorphoses many of the students undergo, thriving in the school’s unique atmosphere to emerge as academically strong students and impassioned leaders. These portraits are vividly brought to life through Meehan’s deft descriptions—one wants to meet each and everyone of these students to find out more about them.
And the school community, as led by school head, Arlene Morgan, absorbs and integrates the unswerving missions of the school. As Meehan writes, “ At Archer, students adopt honesty, respect, and responsibility as official shared values, and they talk about applying those values to interactions with teachers and among themselves in the classroom, in peer counseling, on the sports court, on the bus. There are unstated values, too, shared by this communal body, which include a commitment to hard work and high expectations to become what a girl named Sofi identified as “tomorrow’s dreamers and tomorrow’s leaders.”(p. 172)
As the product of a historically single–sex high school (Brooklyn’s Berkeley Institute, now known as the Berkeley Carroll School) that went co-ed my sophomore year, as well as Barnard College, I am biased in favor of education that supports girls’ specific development.
Read this. I defy you to read it without getting a lump in your throat or a tear in your eye. It will make you believe in the power of education, as demonstrated by gifted, caring teachers who Meehan notes are truly “present” for their students, and the transformations that can result when students and teachers are truly allowed to do their best.
PROFILES IN EDUCATION:
Dr. Diana Meehan, Founder,
Archer School for Girls
By Emily Sherwood, Ph.D.
It is a story that's been repeated a thousand times in a thousand coed American classrooms: The boys assume the role of class clowns, exhibiting aggressive and spontaneous behavior. The girls conduct themselves so cautiously and courteously that they miss out on opportunities to participate, leading teachers to pass them over in favor of the more outspoken boys. It is this female behaviorism that author and educator Diana Meehan has termed "the girl pause" - and it was concern for her pre-adolescent daughter's intellectual and personal growth against this all-too-familiar backdrop that led Meehan in 1995 to co-found the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles.
Fast forward twelve years. Dr. Meehan, who holds a Ph.D. in Communication from USC and is a founding director of its Institute for the Study of Women and Men, has just written a highly acclaimed book, Learning Like a Girl: Educating Our Daughters in Schools of Their Own , (see the review online, August 2007 at www.EducationUpdate.com) detailing her quest to educate her young daughter, her creation of The Archer School, and her research into other successful girls' schools around the country. Education Update caught up with Meehan on a recent east coast trip and got a rare opportunity to learn first-hand about her motivations, triumphs and challenges in promoting single sex education for women.
Meehan's journey to achieve her vision of an all girls' school reads like one of her husband's (TV writer/producer Gary David Goldberg) TV scripts, complete with unexpected twists and turns, angry villains, and shining heroes. In fact, she and Goldberg had already embarked on a national search to select a single-sex school for their daughter, Cailin (the Gaelic name's literal translation is "female hero"), and they had actually identified three contenders that shared their educational philosophies while offering a college prep curriculum and a dynamic, innovative and inclusive mission. "I was unconsciously seeing what really good education for girls looked like," reflects Meehan. Ultimately, she and Goldberg grew reluctant to uproot the family and move from their home, so Meehan began to collaborate with two women, Vicky Shorr and Megan Callaway, to start an all-girls, Grade 6-12 school in their Santa Monica neighborhood. Despite a clear mission and a positive working dynamic, what Meehan never anticipated was a neighborhood opposition so powerful ("there was everything--political opposition, betrayal, corruption and financial insecurity," she recalls dramatically) that it took four years to wage a series of daunting, often dispiriting zoning and partisan battles. "Some of our opponents were misinformed, some were misguided, and some were misogynists. We won over the first two groups, who later apologized," adds Meehan, whose highly coveted Archer School for Girls now garners the support of such luminaries as Tom Hanks, while purposefully embracing students of limited financial means.
With twelve years of operation under her belt since The Archer School's 1995 inception as well as insightful research on a variety of other successful all-girls schools in the country, Meehan is prepared to offer up her formula for success. Underpinning the school's mission is a powerful body of research indicating that coed schools can undermine the abilities, achievements, and independence of girls and that within a single-sex environment they can become active, assertive, and self-actualizing. Pedagogically, the Archer School utilizes empathy as a tool for learning and stresses the "wholeness of environment" and "connected learning." In short, the girls learn not just in the classroom, but "through relationships, crises, family and communities... Because they feel a connection to the outside world, they take charge in ways that women in coed schools could never do...They see themselves as leads in their own play, actors in their own lives," explains Meehan passionately, noting that the girls are guided by the notion that "I as a person can make the world a better place." In one poignant example, the girls started a NASA-sponsored robotics team, competing nationally to make the best rocket. But when they realized that there were very few all-girls teams (and virtually none west of the Rockies), they created a foundation to fund the mentoring of girls' robotics teams. Ultimately, they mentored nine middle and high school robotics teams; in a singular touch of irony, one of the teams they mentored recently beat The Archer School team in the regional championships. "Our girls were incredibly gracious. In this kind of environment, it's really about what can we do together," sums up Meehan.
Another important cornerstone of The Archer School is a commitment to racial and cultural diversity, with both the student body and faculty reflecting the same socioeconomic and racial diversity that exists in the mixed Santa Monica neighborhood. Meehan has developed a strong development initiative to raise scholarship monies for students who can't afford the school's tuition. Likewise, there's a de-emphasis on the trappings of materialism that one might expect in the Los Angeles milieu. One hundred percent of the girls are either bussed, carpooled, or walk to school, so there are no shiny BMW's parked in the lot. And every student is required to wear a uniform: "This outfit says, 'I'm here to work,'" explains Meehan succinctly.
Archer's statistics speak for themselves. One hundred percent of the students go on to college, many to Ivy League schools. Archer has demonstrated a remarkable track record in obtaining financial assistance for its needy college-bound students, amassing an impressive $1 million in college scholarships. And Meehan has no doubt that her young charges, imbued with the self-esteem that comes from their education in an all-girls institution, will continue to follow in the path of success so brilliantly laid out before them: "These girls will go out into their communities and they will help solve society's problems," says Meehan with utmost certainty. "They will be the leaders of the twenty first century."
QUOTE FROM TOM HANKS
“The creation of a school must be the same as the birth of a City–State, where human beings share common necessities – like shelter and water – at the same time each has individual needs — like prescription eyeglasses and relief from allergies. A school, particularly one made from scratch and meant to educate only girls, will need the familiar stuff like desks and restrooms. Much more than that, the school has to accept each girl as a quirky, one–of–a–kind human, then strive to transform her into the best of herself. Without that mission statement, all the school would be is desks and restrooms.
The City–State may start from random chaos and never recover. The school will have the same origins, but can somehow, perhaps miraculously, leapfrog the requirements of the brick–and–mortar needs, and getting straight on into the nitty–gritty, turn a girl’s high school years into a hair–raising adventure.
Diana Meehan, along with a team of allies that would give The Justice League of America a run for its money did just that. She took that dream of an all–girls school and wrestled it through chaos that seemed, at times, insurmountable — juggling, fighting, begging, and negotiating all the way. And she succeeded.
The result is The Archer School for Girls, a place that lives up to the last line of its School Song, sending their graduates out into a world where they will become “everything they can be.”
From the perspective of a father of an Archer Grad, a single sex all girls’ school may not be for every young woman. Just those who want to one day rule our City–State and the world.”
—Tom Hanks
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