Separate but equal?

Chicago's Board of Education is preparing to open its first high school for gay and lesbian students in either 2009 or 2010. The school will provide openings for a maximum of 600 students. Admission will be awarded by lottery from a pool of applicants. Community opinion to date appears to support opening such a school.

The idea of an all-gay school seems analogous to already existing African-American academies and all-girl schools, schools often opened under charter school arrangements. I can see the same benefits in all three cases. I also have the same reservations.

The Chicago school board cites the primary reason for opening such a school to be the high absentee and dropout rate among gay students, because of the hostility, bullying, and violence that they experience, or at least fear. Removal of those factors would make study and learning easier for them. Similarly, studies have shown that in some circumstances, girls and blacks are more self-confident and assertive in voluntarily-segregated environments. Blacks have the opportunity to develop confidence through participation in black studies programs, and girls may do significantly better in math and science when they are not worrying about how boys perceive them when they show interest and aptitude in such subjects.

My reservations about all such programs, especially for gays and blacks, arise from the fact that we don't live in a segregated society. In Brown v. Board of Education, as we recall, the Supreme Court found that segregated schools, at least for African-Americans, were inherently unequal. Unless handled very carefully, separate schools can lead to ghettoization, where students learn to be self-confident within their narrow peer group, but do not learn the social and behavioral skills, and the competiveness, necessary to assimilate and interact successfully with the broader society that they'll confront after graduation.

(Also, of course, a very large proportion of gay high school students feel comfortable attending high school with their straight peers -- or at least as comfortable as it's possible for anyone to be in high school -- but these are not the ones who would apply to a segregated school in any case.)

A less important consideration, especially considering the small relative population planned for such segregated schools -- but still a point to be considered -- is that the majority population learns to get along with minority groups through familiarity. An all white school does not prepare white majority students to work and live beside blacks in college and beyond. In the same way, homophobia, to a large extent, is a fear of the unknown. Gay high school students have won increasing acceptance and assimilation within the last generation, simply because of their increased visibility and prominence in the school population, at all social and leadership levels. This acceptance by others during their student years will carry forward into their peer group's adult lives.

In any event, the Chicago school is a worthwhile experiment by a well-intentioned school board. Herding all gay and lesbian students into separate schools would be -- as it would be with girls, blacks, Jews, or red-haired students -- a horrendous idea with serious civil rights implications. But schools tailored to help a certain limited number of students who are having a particularly difficult time "fitting in" during their adolescent years may be an experiment worth trying.

The results and consequences should be carefully monitored, as I suspect they will be.