More male teachers is not just about grades

It's about role models, mentors, coaches, representation...

When someone as thoughtful as New York Times writer Jessica Grose disagrees with you, that’s a challenge to take seriously. In her piece titled “The ‘Boy Crisis’ is Overblown” (July 23rd) Grose takes aim at me and others who are arguing for more representation of men in the K-12 teaching profession.

Grose first quotes Jordan Peterson who has said that the “vast majority of teachers are not only female but infantilizing female and radically left,” who tell boys that their “ambition is pathological”. About my own position she writes:

More liberal or centrist pundits, such as Richard Reeves, the author of “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It,” agree that part of the problem is a lack of male teachers, and track the problem back to 1972, when Title IX was passed; “within a decade, women had caught up and then just blew right past the men” in terms of college graduation rates, Reeves said.

I had long accepted the basic premise that a lack of male teachers drove the crisis of learning in boys, and that these problems are fairly recent.

Grose then goes on to argue that:

1. Girls have been outperforming boys in school for a very long time, way before feminism or the decline in share of male teachers

2. The evidence for the academic benefits of male teachers is mixed

3. We should not be “blaming” female teachers for the challenges of boys

4. We need to better understand why men aren’t going to college.

There’s much here I agree with her on. But I also think she’s framing the argument for representation in teaching far too narrowly, and in the process making it harder to address. I’ll address each of her points in turn, challenge some outlandish claims about Scandinavia, and finish with a plea not to falsely equate a positive movement for more men in our schools with a negative blame campaign against women teachers.

1. Girls have long been ahead of boys

Grose correctly writes that the gender gap in favor of girls in K-12 education is not a recent development, writing:

[T]he research that really surprised me was a meta analysis from 2014 by Daniel and Susan D. Voyer that showed that girls have been outperforming boys in school since 1914. This suggests that female academic achievement is hard to correlate with the post-1972 impact of Title IX or other downstream consequences of second-wave feminism. And going back further, I find it hard to believe that a teaching force trained before women had access to their own credit cards was somehow favoring girls, when the society around them wasn’t even sold on higher education for women.

But this is not breaking news to scholars in the field. If I may be permitted quote myself on this point, in Of Boys and Men I wrote:

Girls have always had an edge over boys in terms of high school grade point average (GPA), even half a century ago, when they surely had less incentive than boys given the differences in rates of college attendance and career expectations. But the gap has widened in recent decades.

Here I was drawing in large part on a well-known paper by Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz & Ilyana Kuziemko, “The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap”. This showed that girls have been ahead of boys in terms of grades in high school at least since 1957. To take just one finding, they showed that in the 1957 Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, the typical (median) girl ranked 21 percentile points higher than the median boy.

They show the female advantage in grades has remained, but that girls have also seen faster improvements in test scores, and in overall college readiness. They argue that girls mature earlier than boys, giving them an educational edge, especially in the crucial teen years. Once girls were able to apply those advantages to higher education, they not only caught up with boys but surpassed them. As Goldin and her co-authors write:

Because college preparation and applications must be done by teenagers, small differences in development can lead to large disparities in college outcomes…The reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, was due in part to the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females.

So Grose is right to suggest that

a) the gender gap in high school is not new and

b) that female teachers are unlikely to have turned against boys in the last half century.

But nobody is seriously arguing the other way. What has actually happened is that the natural developmental advantages girls have always had in the classroom, especially their early development of key skills, was revealed when we removed the artificial barriers placed in front of them, especially in terms of going on into higher education.

2. Do male teachers improve educational outcomes? Yeah, it’s mixed.

Grose is quite right that the evidence on male teachers and academic outcomes is mixed. Some studies find positive effects. Some find no effects. And there aren’t that many quality studies in the first place, especially specific to the U.S.

When an evidence base is mixed, we can all play the game of pointing to, or at least putting most weight on, the studies that support our own position and downplaying the others. I’m sure I’ve done so myself.

In fairness, the single study Grose cites is a pretty good one by NaYoung Hwang and Brian Fitzpatrick, using administrative data from Indiana. (You can worry a bit about including “year of publication” in a regression model if you like, but that’s one for the true nerds). Hwang and Fitzpatrick’s conclusion was as follows:

For girls, having female math teachers is associated with improved math achievement. For boys, despite a great deal of popular discussion that young male students are better off with a male teacher, we find evidence that being assigned to male teachers likely does not enhance male students’ academic achievement. Nevertheless, the magnitude of effects presented here are on the small side. Given that teachers affect varies by context, we recommend further research on teacher gender and student learning.

Seems like a reasonable interpretation of the results of their own study. Seems pretty solid stuff. I’ll make just a couple of points on the study itself.

1. The academic outcome measure is test scores, not grades. I’m not saying this a bad thing, just that it’s important to know which outcomes we’re talking about. It is striking to me that while there is a big gender gap in high school GPA, there is not on the SAT. And of course different researchers draw on different datasets and outcome measures. One of the papers I’ve cited showing a positive effect of male teachers, by Thomas Dee, uses test scores as a outcome measure. Another, from Chicago, uses 9th-grade GPA scores. It seems plausible that teacher gender might effect grades more than test scores, through various possible pathways, including engagement and application on the part of students. But it’s unclear whether Grose is basing her argument about gender gaps in grades, or test scores, or a bit of both. And that matters, as the previous discussion indicated.

2. Elementary and middle school only. The study looks at elementary and middle school but not high schools. Again, this is not a criticism. They used the data they had. I used to worry more about the lack of male teachers in the earlier grades, in fact, but I’ve come to worry at least as much about the trends in high school as in elementary school. It is true that the male share is greatest in high school, but this is also where the drop has been sharpest, from 48% in 1987 to 36% in 2020. I worry that even high school teaching might reach a tipping point soon where it is seen as a female profession. And I’d love to see more research on teacher gender in high school as well in the earlier grades.

So, Grose is right to say that there is no conclusive empirical evidence that more male teachers will improve academic outcomes for boys. It’s no silver bullet. The evidence base is mixed. But does that mean that representation in the teaching profession therefore doesn’t matter?

Hardly.

As any teacher will tell you (including my own son, who teaches 5th-grade), it’s not just about grades and tests, important though those are. Valuing teachers only for the measurable impact on test scores and/or grades does a disservice to their broader influence on the development of children and young adults.

One in three (31%) of male teachers coach sports, compared to just 7% of female teachers. This may of course reflect differences in their own childcare responsibilities; but is still a fact. It is possible that the decline in the share of boys playing school sports is related to the decline in male teachers.

A recent study by Matthew A. Kraft, Alexander J. Bolves and Noelle M. Hurd published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that having an informal mentor in high school improved educational performance across a range of measures; most impressive was a 9% increase in college attendance. One other finding stood out to me too: male teachers make up 59% of high school mentors, even though they account for only 38% of high school teachers. So male teachers are stepping up in a big way to mentor both boys and girls.

I can’t find a good U.S. study on teachers as role models, but in the UK one in two men say that a male teacher was an important role model to them growing up.

3. Don’t blame women teachers

I couldn’t agree more here. The argument for more male teachers is not based on a negative evaluation of female teachers. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It is based on the idea that representation matters.

The same is true in many fields where women are underrepresented. Arguing for greater representation of women in policing, for example, does not require an accusation against the men currently working in the profession. It just means we think our police force should aim to represent the population they are policing; and I think the same argument applies at least as strongly to teaching.

The implication of Grose’s argument is that we need not worry about the declining share of men at the front of our classrooms. The profession was 33% male in the 1980s, is 23% now, and it can just keep going down. The lack of men simply doesn’t matter, by the logic of her argument, because there is no cast-iron evidence that more male teachers would improve academic outcomes.

But even if that’s true - and as we’ve seen, we don’t really even know that for sure - I think it does matter for a wide range of other reasons. I think having an all-female or indeed an all-male teaching profession would be bad, even if nobody could conclusively prove a negative educational impact for girls or boys in either scenario.

This raises a question I’ve honestly struggled with: when does representation matter, and why? At one end of the spectrum, I think it really matters in politics. I’ve actually argued for some kind of quota system to increase the share of women in Congress. At the other end of the spectrum maybe we don’t need to worry too much if almost all smoke jumpers (the folks who parachute into wildfires) are men, or most cosmetologists are women.

I think we know that representation matters more in some professions than others. But it is not always clear why. It would be good to be as clear as possible about this. My intuition is that it matters most for jobs that fall into one or more of these categories:

a) wield a lot of power (eg politics, journalism, law)

b) make a lot of money (eg. finance, consulting, tech)

c) serve the general population (eg health, policing, teaching)

And so I’d put educators towards the representation-really-matters side of things under category c). Teachers interact with children and young adults on an almost daily basis. They make an important contribution to the kind of adults our children become. Not the most important, for sure, but pretty important nonetheless. As such, they can be potentially important role models. As the women’s movement has taught us, “you can’t be it if you can’t see it”. I think it would be a step backward for teaching to become an even more gender-segregated profession. I’d like us to be breaking down gender stereotypes about what kind of jobs men and women do, not strengthening them.

Perhaps it’s useful to think about higher education as a parallel case. Would it matter if all our college professors were still men? I think so, and I’m very happy that there is now essentially gender parity here. I suspect Grose would agree.

But I also don’t think it would be good if the professoriate become all-female; I wonder whether Grose would agree about this too? Maybe not, unless she can find good studies showing a negative impact of some kind. There’s a danger of a double standard here, in which arguments for more male representation are subjected to demands for a strong empirical justification, while arguments for more female representation are accepted as self-evident.

Students should be able to see themselves in their teachers, at least some of the time. And that includes boys. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it is even more important to have more men in teaching, than it is to have more women in construction, science or engineering.

Why men aren’t going to college

Again I agree with Grose on this point: “We should figure out why fewer men than women are choosing to go to college.” It is one of the things we’re working on over at AIBM.

I also think she is right that some of this could be related to the relationship between gender, socialization and education. As she writes:

[O]ne of the reasons [why men don’t go to college] could be the way boys are socialized…it’s seen by some as unmanly to study, and there’s less of a social cost to girls to be nerdy and to be seen trying to do well.

But of course, some of the socialization about gender and education takes place in the classroom itself. If part of the problem is that studying is seen as “unmanly”, doesn’t that make the decline in male teachers more worrying, not less? It seems odd to argue for breaking down gender stereotypes about getting educated, but not about who should be the educators.

Oh, and on that Scandinavia thing…

There’s one thing in the article that I have to take a quick detour on. Daniel Voyer tells Grose that gender gaps in education are “smallest in regions like Scandinavia because they are very strong on gender equity”. You can see why Grose is attracted to that argument. But it doesn’t stand up at all. The Voyer paper does indeed suggest that in terms of grades, boys don’t lag behind girls as much in Scandinavia as in North America. But it’s very hard in fact to do good comparisons of grading systems across nations.

The story is starkly different if we look at the more readily comparable gaps on internationally-standardized test scores. Iceland, Denmark and Norway have, respectively, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest gender gaps in tertiary education out of all the 37 nations in the OECD. Sweden ranks 9th. (In case you’re wondering, Slovenia has the widest of all).

Finland and Norway also share 1st place in the OECD for the widest gender gap (of +40 points) in literacy skills between 15 year-old boys and girls, according to the PISA data.

In most OECD countries, boys do slightly better on math (the OECD average is +9 points in favor of boys, compared to the +24 advantage on literacy for girls). But not in Finland, where the girls are +5 points ahead, or Norway and Sweden where there is no gap at all on math.

On these more robust measures, then, Scandinavia’s commitment to gender equity coexists with the biggest educational gender gaps in the developed world.

Debate is good, but…

Over on the comments field of her article, Grose responded graciously to some of the pushback she’s getting (she’s getting plaudits too, I should add). One of her repeated points is that we should not blame female teachers. As I say, on that point we agree. She also says in the piece that boys mature a little later than girls, and again I agree, which is one reason I’ve suggested that maybe boys should get a bit more pre-K before entering school.

This is not about blame. It is about representation. I have nothing but admiration for our teachers, male and female alike. But allowing the teaching profession to become less representative with every passing year has been a mistake, and one that we need to correct urgently.