WHY DO BOTH George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton favor creating single-sex public schools? Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but this alliance seems downright bizarre.

This is the question I've been wrestling with ever since I read that the Department of Education plans to make it easier for public-school districts to offer voluntary single-sex classes or schools as long as "substantially equal" opportunities are available in co-ed classes.

Bush and the religious right, for its part, may want to use single-sex education as a way to promote vouchers for parochial and private education. Or, they may believe that single-sex education can best implement sexual abstinence among young people.

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But why -- 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate but equal schools to be inherently unequal" and 30 years after Title IX extended the concept to sex -- have Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, joined forces to promote this goal?

It turns out that in 2001, Clinton and Hutchison asked the Department of Education how it could amend Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally assisted education programs.

Last week's announcement of relaxed rules was the department's response to their request.

My first response was profound skepticism. School is supposed to prepare us for the real world, and last time I looked, that includes both men and women.

But I kept an open mind, because I only went to co-ed public schools. I asked the president of Mills College in Oakland, Janet Holmgren, who persuasively argues that "girls' schools often provide models for focusing on women's/girls' academic development" and for achieving "the self-esteem and leadership that are often lacking in coeducational settings."

Then, I read Oakland writer Ilana DeBare's recently published book, "Where Girls Come First: The Rise, Fall and Surprising Revival of Girls' Schools" (Penguin, 2004), an evocative and riveting history of the benefits and pitfalls of girls' and women's education. Woven into this splendid narrative is DeBare's vivid account of her own effort to co-found Oakland's Julia Morgan School for Girls, a middle school that next September moves to the Mills College campus.

DeBare's book convinced me that single-sex classes or schools -- especially for vulnerable middle-school girls -- can be a healthy reprieve from obsessive concerns with appearance and male approval.

When a piano needs to be moved, for example, the girls don't stand around helplessly waiting for the boys to do it. When a computer crashes, girls turn to each other to fix the problem. When the class president and editor of the school newspaper are all female, girls realize that they, too, can become leaders.

A revived interest in girls' education arose a decade ago when Mary Pipher's best-selling book, "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls" (1994) and the American Association of University Women's "How Schools Shortchange Girls" (1995) exposed how young adolescent girls seemed to lose the self-esteem and self-confidence they had enjoyed as children. Between 1991 and 2001, 30 new girls' schools opened, from Harlem to Silicon Valley.

Many feminists, however, fiercely oppose single-sex education. As DeBare told me, "The issue of single-sex education is particularly inflamed because it is being pushed by the Bush administration."

Marcia Greenberg, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, predicts that it will "set back progress that women and girls have made for over 30 years." LeShawn Y. Warren, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, accuses the Bush administration of basing its new option on incomplete research and declares the proposed change to be unconstitutional. President Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women says "the establishment of sex-segregated public schools or classes would expressly discriminate on the basis of sex."

DeBare, however, reminds us that "Bush won't be running these schools. It's local communities and school boards who have the responsibility to make sure that schools offer truly voluntary and comparable educational opportunities."

True enough. I grant that Bush may be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Still, I remain wary of the Bush administration's ultimate educational agenda. These proposed changes offer the federal government a cheap way of getting out of paying for a decent public education for both girls and boys. Until that happens, only tiny numbers of students are going to enjoy the excellent public education they deserve.