Males and Schooling – Part 1

Talk about disparities …

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my friends and neighbors works for the American Federation of Teachers (a teachers’ union) and is also a member of the local school board.  A few years ago, she was on an education policy panel at an SXSW conference, and she posted the following on Facebook:

What does her support for excluding males from an education policy panel say about her and the other panelists’ understanding of gender disparities within the public education system as it exists today?  That’s the subject of this series of essays.

As Alia Wong writes in the Atlantic magazine:

[T]he gender distribution in the [teaching] profession has strangely grown more imbalanced, according to recently released data, largely because women are still pursuing teaching at far greater rates than men. According to the study, led by the University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Ingersoll, the nation has witnessed a “slow but steady” increase in the share of K-12 educators who are women. During the 1980-81 school year, roughly two in three -- 67 percent -- public-school teachers were women; by the 2015-16 school year, the share of women teachers had grown to more than three in four, at 76 percent.

And as Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution writes in his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, the situation is particularly lopsided in early education:

Early years education is close to being an all-female environment. It ought to be a source of national shame that only 3% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers are men. There are now twice as many women flying U.S. military planes as there are men teaching kindergarten (as a share of the professions).

As Reeves adds:

“If the trend continues, we may see a day when 8 of 10 teachers [in the U.S.] will be female,” write Richard Ingersoll and his colleagues in a 2018 report from the University of Pennsylvania. They add that “an increasing percentage of elementary schools will have no male teachers … Given the importance of teachers as role models, and even as surrogate parents for some students, certainly some will see this trend as a problem and a policy concern.” Honestly, I don’t know how anyone could not see this trend as a problem. But it is important to spell out why. For one thing, if children grow up seeing care or education as women’s work, this reinforces gender stereotypes across generations. As Gloria Steinem said in 1995, “The way we get divided into our false notions of masculine and feminine is what we see as children.” … There is also solid evidence that male teachers boost academic outcomes for boys, especially in certain subject areas like English. The potential upsides here are quite large. Education researcher Thomas Dee estimates that if half the English teachers from sixth to eighth grade were male, “the achievement gap in reading [between girls and boys] would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school.” (Notably, the performance of girls in English seemed not to be affected by teacher gender.) A separate study in Chicago found that in classes with a male teacher, the gender gap in ninth-grade GPA was almost halved.

(Side note: I’ve been substitute teaching in our local public schools since the beginning of the school year.  I was subbing in an elementary school art class and as the line of students walked in, three boys at the front of the line were staring at me.  I asked them “What’s up, guys?”  They paused for a moment, then the first kid in line said “You’re a man!”  I said yes, I was.  And then the three boys spontaneously started chanting “It’s a man!  It’s a man!  It’s a man!”  I mentioned it to the regular (female) teacher and she was amused, but not surprised.)

What to do about potentially making schools more hospitable to male learning habits? With so many self-professed educational leaders focusing on only “politically correct” disparities, Reeves points them to much more salient priority:

[O]ne school reform would dwarf all [other school reforms]: more men at the front of our classrooms. In the U.S, the proportion of male teachers is low, and falling. The male share of K–12 teachers is now 24%, down from 33% at the beginning of the 1980s. Male teachers are especially scarce in elementary and middle schools, as figure 10-1 shows.

Here’s Reeves’ proposal:

As an initial step, we should set the target of reaching 30% male representation in K-12 teaching. School districts could be asked to pledge to reach the goal … Philanthropic foundations serious about gender equity should be flooding the education market with generous college scholarships for men who want to pursue a career in early years education, just as they have supported girls interested in STEM careers.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine some uniquely challenging situations boys face at school, situations aggravated by the stark lack of male presences among teachers.

Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.