ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 15, 1996 TAG: 9601150083
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Above
Inner-city Baltimore's first-grade classrooms are a long way from heavily endowed Virginia Military Institute, where the spit-shined campus is called a post even though only 18 percent of the men who graduate go on to military careers.
But Spencer Holland, a Washington, D.C., educator, doesn't care. He watched the test scores of the young black boys in experimental single-sex first-grade classes forge into the top 5 percent of Baltimore's city rankings a few years ago. He doesn't want their progress stymied.
That's why Holland, whose project has been careful to include single-sex classes for girls, signed on to a "friend of the court" brief filed in support of VMI's fight against the U.S. Justice Department to remain all-male. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case Wednesday.
"If VMI stays the same, it gives us more ammunition," Holland said.
Holland stands on one of two sharply drawn sides in the long-running case: The side that believes all single-sex education is threatened if VMI, a public school, is forced to admit women. This side contends that any school, public or private, that accepts federal funding of any sort - possibly even student loans - must answer to federal law. If a public single-sex school is outlawed, they contend, all others are threatened, too.
Nonsense, says the other side.
"If that were true ... every single college and university in the United States would be public," said Wendy S. White, a Washington attorney representing 26 women's colleges opposing VMI.
Those who have sided with the Justice Department see no legal mystery here: Women should be admitted to a public school, plain and simple.
"We draw some lines in this country. One of the lines we draw is the line against discrimination," said Joan Bertin, of Columbia University's Program on Gender, Science and Law.
"That's my response to the [educational] experimentation notion."
As the case has entered the Supreme Court, accompanied by a blizzard of "friend of the court" briefs from interested parties across the country, VMI's distinctive educational style is being questioned on more than legal grounds. Consider, for instance, the query posed in legal papers by a group of military women.
Why, they wonder, should VMI, "an institution dedicated to creating `citizen soldiers' ... maintain a program that is more `macho' than the United States Armed Forces?''
At the core of the VMI debate is the legal standard by which men and women must be treated under the Constitution. While racial distinctions are held to a line of unquestionable "strict scrutiny," gender rights are held to a lesser, "intermediate" level of scrutiny if an important government interest is served.
The courts, so far, have found that the value of single-sex education meets that test, which helps to explain why the Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership was set up last fall. It provides a "separate but equal" opportunity, rather than forcing VMI to admit women.
Now 157 years old, VMI was "started as kind of an experiment," said Diane Avery, a women's scholar at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Avery looked into the institute's history in the course of her legal studies and found that cadets originally created the "rat line" to the chagrin of school administrators and state officials. Officially called "adversative training," wherein freshmen are forced to eat or walk in a particular fashion by upperclassmen until well into the second half of their first year, the rat line has been cited in court as a unique training tool better suited to educating young men than young women.
"This school was not founded for reasons of diversity at all," Avery said.
But "educational diversity" in its public university system is the legal argument Virginia has used to convince lower courts to maintain VMI's men-only admission policy.
In 1990, the Justice Department sued VMI for sex discrimination on behalf of a still-unidentified young woman from Northern Virginia. In Roanoke, U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser found that admitting women to VMI would unalterably change the school, thereby denying both sexes the experience each sought.
On appeal, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond found VMI's males-only admission policy violated women's equal rights. The court gave the school three choices: Go private, admit women, or come up with another plan.
By the end of the summer of '93, with the blessing of Gov. Douglas Wilder, VMI came up with another plan. The idea was to create a diversity of military school offerings for the students of Virginia. Those who elected to go to an all-male school could attend VMI. Those in search of coed instruction could join Virginia Tech's Corps of Cadets, which copies the modern armed forces and uses positive feedback to motivate its forces.
The all-women's program would be The Virginia Women's Institute for Leadership.
If VMI wins the case, the newly opened institute at private Mary Baldwin College in Staunton will get $5.9 million in funding from VMI's private foundation. It already has received more than $650,000 from the foundation in start-up funding, plus $7,308 per student from the state of Virginia.
When the case was sent back to consider the constitutionality of the arrangement, Kiser agreed that what some called a "separate-but-unequal" plan satisfied the state's equal-rights obligation.
In a much-quoted phrase, Kiser wrote:
"If VMI marches to the beat of a drum, then Mary Baldwin marches to the melody of a fife, and when the march is over, both will have arrived at the same destination."
Since most of the country's other single-sex schools are private, the two Virginia institutes also offer the benefit of this particular type of education to students who otherwise might not be able to afford it.
Mary Baldwin authorities have made no pretense of trying to set up a military program exactly like the program at VMI, a point made repeatedly in court papers by those in favor of admitting women to VMI.
Mary Baldwin's objective has been simple: Set up a leadership program for young women that would build up their confidence with a nurturing, "you can do it!'' style, as opposed to VMI's tough tearing-down of its rats.
The women study with their freshman VMI classmates at Reserve Officer Training Corps class. They appeared at a mock Supreme Court oral argument of the case held at Washington and Lee University in the fall.
As they sat in the quiet light of W&L's Lee Chapel, the young women clearly resisted the endless comparisons to VMI.
"I don't personally care about upholding their tradition. I wanted to go to a women's leadership college," freshman Amy King said.
VMI's opponents, though, criticize the women's program.
They point to VMI's alumni network, to which women are denied access. The school reports a 95 percent job, school or military placement rate for young men six months after graduation, although VMI spokesman Mike Strickler said alumni connections are not tracked. The alumni also say they'll help the young women the best they can.
University of Virginia law professor Mary Anne Case, argued, however that VWIL "is not only separate but not equal. ... It's smaller, less funded, and based, top to bottom, on stereotypes."
Said Bertin: "There is a value benefit that is at stake here and is being reserved for a historic privileged class, and that is what the Constitution is all about.
"People talk about experimenting with education diversity, but there's virtually no resemblance to the history of discrimination and disadvantage that is represented in this case."
Holland, the Washington educator, thinks the nation's educational systems need to make room for experiments, though. In the mid-80s, a problem was becoming clear to him.
"What is going on that is causing the kind of failure we see in African-American boys" in cities? he asked.
"The boys were just beginning to reject women authorities. In the first 10 to 12 years of their lives, [they] have very few positive role models in their lives who are men. The men they know are already pushed out."
When the boys went to school, they learned to read between kindergarten and third grade.
But they were not paying attention to their primarily women teachers.
That was when Holland started to experiment. With sending in male mentors to the class. With separating the boys into their own classes with male teachers - just across the hall from the girls, who have their own classes in the same school.
And that's when the young boys of Baltimore's Robert Coleman Elementary School started having some of the best test scores in the city.
As for sex discrimination?
"I've always been a staunch supporter of the feminist movement," said Holland, now 56. "But as I turned 50, I said, `Hey, I don't have to be politically correct anymore, [but] I don't have to be an ogre.' Men and women are different. So much research shows [that].
"Gender is culture."
LENGTH: Long : 157 linesby CNB