KAREN STABINER: All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters

Best-selling author Karen Stabiner wrote All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters to see for herself if an all-girls’ environment made a difference. She spent a year with students at two very different schools – the 112-year-old Marlborough School in Los Angeles, a private school for grades 7-12, and The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem, a three-year-old experiment in public single-sex education, for poor and minority children.


She attended classes, went to dances and athletic events, met with parents, administrators, teachers and researchers – and she got to know a generation of girls who are the first to benefit from a revived interest in single-sex education. With new federal guidelines that will allow single-sex public schools and classes, the topic could not be timelier: schools around the country will be looking for ways to implement the policy, parents will want to know what works, and what doesn’t, and supporters and critics will debate whether separate can ever be equal. At the podium, Stabiner lays out the benefits of single-sex schools in an even-handed and thought-provoking presentation, based on hard research and her own observations, both as a journalist and as a parent.

Stabiner is the author of three other works of narrative nonfiction: The New York Times Notable Book and national best seller To Dance With the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer, the national best seller Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day, and Courting Fame: The Perilous Road to Women’s Tennis Stardom. She co-wrote The Valentino Cookbook, with award-winning restaurateur Piero Selvaggio, and wrote the novel Limited Engagements. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Redbook, Los Angeles Magazine, The New Yorker, and other national publications.

She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her husband Larry Dietz and their daughter, Sarah.

 

 

STABINER, Karen: All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters Riverhead Books, New York, 2002.