I agree with your position that more male teachers would be a good thing. However, I'm curious about two matters where I would like some clarity, if possible:
1) You write that "... we need more Mister Walzes ...". Leaving aside my differences with Mr Walze, I note that he left the teaching occupation after some 16 years of experience? Surely this is not what you mean. You'd want men to remain teachers, not so?
2) You quote the work of Jessica Pan (2010) regarding a 'tipping point' where male representation start to fall rapidly in a given field. In this paper Pan claims her intend is to "outline a simple model" based on the premise that the "location of the tipping point" is dependent on "the strength of males’ distaste for working in the same occupations as females". Do you subscribe to this model or are you only pointing to the data as evidence of a tipping point? If the latter, so you have a theory for the cause of the tipping point?
biggest thing i've seen to greatly increase a guys chances of becoming a teacher is a classical liberal arts education. My high school got a bunch of really really good male teachers from Thomas Aquinas College, a liberal arts college. Just an observation
Tim Walz is an inherently dishonest and cynical politician. He dithered in the aftermath of the Minneapolis riot and while the mayor of Minneapolis was BEGGING for the national guard and then he blamed it on the Mayor.
Prior to that he lied or deeply misled to make people believe he had deployed to Afghanistan.
He is a liar and a radical and has no place in anyone’s classroom.
What’s amazing to me is how all-female school administrations get offended if you raise this issue politely…we need gender diversity in the administration as well as teacher ranks, since the former make the hiring decisions…
All-women grade schools hurts girls too. My daughter was fabulous at math. Dissatisfied with her placement in grammar school, I went there and spoke to her female teachers. They told me that she was a bright girl, but « not as good as the boys. » I knew this to be untrue, but had no success during several grade levels. Finally, her new male teacher called my wife and I in to tell us that our daughter did not belong in the math class to which she had been assigned.
The difference was simple. In grade school, her teachers were education majors. They did not possess the math skills to judge our daughter’s abilities, so they resorted to stereotypes. Her middle-school math teacher had first been a civil engineer. He knew math.
Ultimately, our daughter competed nationally and very successfully on the math team, travelling to Alabama and Hawaii where she earned top scores. Unfortunately, education majors wrong-tracked my daughter. She did well, but it made it unnecessarily more difficult. Without involved parents and one great math teacher, she could have fallen by the wayside. Fortunately, she overcame the hurdles and excelled in high school, college, and grad school.
Education degrees are worse than worthless. Change my mind. The fact that multiple teachers could not recognize obvious talent in a student (one of the main jobs of a teacher) proves this.
Great article once again. I note the comments about tipping points. I assume the same could be said for health professions "it is harder to enter a profession where you will be in a clear minority." ?
I feel so lucky that my boys had the opportunity to have excellent male teachers in grade school. Why does grade school make such a difference you might wonder. In first grade, my eldest was a reluctant reader. Of course, the books in the classroom didn't help...his female teacher had many books that I would say boys or girls could read but the titles leaned heavily towards what girls would prefer. My son had a male second grade teacher, a wonderful man with books that ran the gamut. My son was so curious and intrigued with the grotesque images in "Ripley's Believe it or Not "that I bought multiple copies to have at home and he read them all. "Diary of a Worm", "Guinness Book of World Records" and lots of "I Survived." My son entered 6th grade as probably one of only 3 kids out of 75 at his grade school with phenomenal comprehension and reading speed. and I know that his teachers kindled this love of reading. His sixth grade teacher was also male and a fantastic role model of a powerful male educator. Do I wish more men like this would teach,...Oh yes. It is subtle, small details like the selection of books in a classroom library that hook a young person on reading. We don't just need more male educators, though, we also need to make sure that male educators are able to shape classroom experiences for all students with a special amount of attention paid to how they can share their love of teaching and learning at grade school through lessons plans, books and activities that serve rambunctious, easily distracted boys drawn to images of people with many safety pins stuck in their face. Even if we can't change the sex of the teachers, we can start by changing the books and activities and see if that helps shape who will teach down the road.
I would just make all non-laboratory, music and art classes optional and let kids read from books or YouTube or ChatGPT or whatever. High School is a prison.
I think that the main issue is that men have been actively pushed out of education by a movement that believes that men are “surplus to requirements”, when it comes to parenting, educating and mentoring children. That resistance needs to be countered.
Thanks for spotlighting this, Richard - both in this blog and also in your book, "Of Boys and Men". Reach Academy for Young Men Summer Institute is an LA-based post-pandemic response to boys' engagement in learning. All of the teachers are male-identifying and they represent a broad diversity of masculine presentation. I saw first-hand how the boys at Reach responded to their male teachers - and how free they felt to inquire, explore and challenge through relational pedagogy. The boys at Reach felt seen and understood in a way that permitted them greater agency and trust than they felt in their academic year schools. As Ted and Nancy Sizer stated years ago, "the students are always watching". The boys at Reach Academy were watching to see how the masculine behaviors of their teachers might be emulated by their future selves. This is pretty valuable, especially during these times when boys are struggling to "find their why" in school, and their purpose in life. This is not meant to suggest male teachers are advantageous to female teachers; rather, it's an observation that something changes with boys when they see themselves in front of the classroom and wouldn't it be a good thing if this could occur more frequently on the K-12 educational pathway. www.reachyoungmen.org
Honestly I think the salaries are the biggest thing. Right or wrong, I suspect most guys who have the ability to go to college and get white collar-type jobs still want to support — or at least substantially contribute to the income of — their households. They may or may not know the gender ratios in teaching, but they surely know that they could make more money in almost any field. Meanwhile salaries in education seem like they are designed as secondary incomes (ie you have a spouse making more money, so you have the freedom to pursue something low paying).
I agree - teachers' salaries have shrunk significantly in real value during the last few decades, in some places to the point where they can only be propped up by a better-remunerated spouse/partner or by a second job (although god knows how you'd find the hours on a teachers' weekly schedule!) And yes, young men are probably still more commonly encouraged (implicitly or explicitly) to factor financial rewards more fully into their career choices than young women are. And with insufficient numbers of male schoolteachers to serve as role models, young men are perhaps increasingly unlikely to feel the 'vocational awe' that draws people into teaching careers (and holds them there, sometimes to their detriment).
Maybe one solution is to create clear socio-cultural AND material incentives encouraging middle age people to consider going into teaching after successful careers in other sectors. However, I have no idea what educationalists now think about older teachers in the classroom, especially when it comes to educating boys - and the problem of class disparity between such teachers and their students wouldn't help, I suspect.
Re: older teachers as they relate to boys, I think it might just work out really well. Older men like Walz tend to have (or give off the aura of) the stability of a father figure or uncle or something, which can be a hugely positive force for these kids, especially the ones without a stable father figure already in their lives, which is still a big problem for a lot of kids of both genders and affects them both uniquely. I think it's a great idea! I bet Walz himself would love it
Agreed this is a salary issue for both men and women. My last male friend to become a teacher taught in the US long enough to realize how underpaid he was. He became the union rep for his school district to fight for real wages. Then he and his partner had a child and moved to the Middle East where he could get paid twice as much as a US trained teacher and didn't need to hold car washes for school funds. I would note that Walz did not stay in the field either - as governor he makes $127,629 - a job that doesn't even require a master's degree.
This is a cool idea. A kind of Teach for America, but for early stage retirees would be a really cool thing. I can think of a bunch of men who retired in their late 50s and early 60s — so potentially with a decade of productive life. These guys didn't need money, and in some cases were looking for ways to still be productive, but in the end tended to just while away their time on nothing. Imagine the impact if they had instead become teachers.
Yes - a female friend of mine about 50, who has been a museum director near London for quite some years now, told me recently that she's resigned and started studying to become an elementary school teacher. She feels she's done what she wanted with her first career, wants to give younger curators a chance to move into her role, and wants to grow in a new direction that allows her to be home more with her children. Win win, though she does have the financial cushion...
Having taught in both elementary and university settings, I whole-heartedly agree that teaching is a critical area for men to serve in society. Speaking in generalizations, I think one of the elements that keeps men from pursuing this career is a sense that there is little mobility in the profession. The only way "up" is into administration, which is a) a very different career often requiring considerably more education and b) difficult to get into as the number of those roles is far fewer. Part of an answer would be to re-structure educational administration so it is more of a shared governance model. That is, allow teachers (men and women, of course) to serve in administrative positions for a term - 5 years? 4 years with a possible renewal for a total of 8? - and then return to the classroom. That would allow senior teachers to have some flexibility without having to abandon the classroom forever. It would provide more in the education profession the chance to exercise leadership gifts and gain perspective on those roles. It would "seed" every school with people who have served in administrative leadership once they're back in their teaching positions. It would allow everyone (but I do think this is particularly important for men) to see the teaching profession as not just a permanent classroom assignment for 30+ years, but a career with mobility, flexibility, new challenges, and change over the course of time. I would argue that even more than the pay (though that isn't inconsequential) the perception that teaching lacks growth potential is a deterrent for many men.
Good insight. I was just reading and writing about how in surveys men tend to rank career progression/advancement more highly than women when considering a job.
"And it is bad news for boys, who are less and less likely to have male role models in the classroom."
the role model presence in school is truly important. This essay just give me another situation to concern in this modern society.
Dear Dr Reeves
I agree with your position that more male teachers would be a good thing. However, I'm curious about two matters where I would like some clarity, if possible:
1) You write that "... we need more Mister Walzes ...". Leaving aside my differences with Mr Walze, I note that he left the teaching occupation after some 16 years of experience? Surely this is not what you mean. You'd want men to remain teachers, not so?
2) You quote the work of Jessica Pan (2010) regarding a 'tipping point' where male representation start to fall rapidly in a given field. In this paper Pan claims her intend is to "outline a simple model" based on the premise that the "location of the tipping point" is dependent on "the strength of males’ distaste for working in the same occupations as females". Do you subscribe to this model or are you only pointing to the data as evidence of a tipping point? If the latter, so you have a theory for the cause of the tipping point?
TC
biggest thing i've seen to greatly increase a guys chances of becoming a teacher is a classical liberal arts education. My high school got a bunch of really really good male teachers from Thomas Aquinas College, a liberal arts college. Just an observation
Tim Walz is an inherently dishonest and cynical politician. He dithered in the aftermath of the Minneapolis riot and while the mayor of Minneapolis was BEGGING for the national guard and then he blamed it on the Mayor.
Prior to that he lied or deeply misled to make people believe he had deployed to Afghanistan.
He is a liar and a radical and has no place in anyone’s classroom.
What’s amazing to me is how all-female school administrations get offended if you raise this issue politely…we need gender diversity in the administration as well as teacher ranks, since the former make the hiring decisions…
All-women grade schools hurts girls too. My daughter was fabulous at math. Dissatisfied with her placement in grammar school, I went there and spoke to her female teachers. They told me that she was a bright girl, but « not as good as the boys. » I knew this to be untrue, but had no success during several grade levels. Finally, her new male teacher called my wife and I in to tell us that our daughter did not belong in the math class to which she had been assigned.
The difference was simple. In grade school, her teachers were education majors. They did not possess the math skills to judge our daughter’s abilities, so they resorted to stereotypes. Her middle-school math teacher had first been a civil engineer. He knew math.
Ultimately, our daughter competed nationally and very successfully on the math team, travelling to Alabama and Hawaii where she earned top scores. Unfortunately, education majors wrong-tracked my daughter. She did well, but it made it unnecessarily more difficult. Without involved parents and one great math teacher, she could have fallen by the wayside. Fortunately, she overcame the hurdles and excelled in high school, college, and grad school.
Education degrees are worse than worthless. Change my mind. The fact that multiple teachers could not recognize obvious talent in a student (one of the main jobs of a teacher) proves this.
Great article once again. I note the comments about tipping points. I assume the same could be said for health professions "it is harder to enter a profession where you will be in a clear minority." ?
I've seen research indicating that one reason men won't take healthcare jobs is that they're coded female.
I feel so lucky that my boys had the opportunity to have excellent male teachers in grade school. Why does grade school make such a difference you might wonder. In first grade, my eldest was a reluctant reader. Of course, the books in the classroom didn't help...his female teacher had many books that I would say boys or girls could read but the titles leaned heavily towards what girls would prefer. My son had a male second grade teacher, a wonderful man with books that ran the gamut. My son was so curious and intrigued with the grotesque images in "Ripley's Believe it or Not "that I bought multiple copies to have at home and he read them all. "Diary of a Worm", "Guinness Book of World Records" and lots of "I Survived." My son entered 6th grade as probably one of only 3 kids out of 75 at his grade school with phenomenal comprehension and reading speed. and I know that his teachers kindled this love of reading. His sixth grade teacher was also male and a fantastic role model of a powerful male educator. Do I wish more men like this would teach,...Oh yes. It is subtle, small details like the selection of books in a classroom library that hook a young person on reading. We don't just need more male educators, though, we also need to make sure that male educators are able to shape classroom experiences for all students with a special amount of attention paid to how they can share their love of teaching and learning at grade school through lessons plans, books and activities that serve rambunctious, easily distracted boys drawn to images of people with many safety pins stuck in their face. Even if we can't change the sex of the teachers, we can start by changing the books and activities and see if that helps shape who will teach down the road.
I would just make all non-laboratory, music and art classes optional and let kids read from books or YouTube or ChatGPT or whatever. High School is a prison.
I think that the main issue is that men have been actively pushed out of education by a movement that believes that men are “surplus to requirements”, when it comes to parenting, educating and mentoring children. That resistance needs to be countered.
This is simply not true, there is no evidence at all to support this.
Thanks for spotlighting this, Richard - both in this blog and also in your book, "Of Boys and Men". Reach Academy for Young Men Summer Institute is an LA-based post-pandemic response to boys' engagement in learning. All of the teachers are male-identifying and they represent a broad diversity of masculine presentation. I saw first-hand how the boys at Reach responded to their male teachers - and how free they felt to inquire, explore and challenge through relational pedagogy. The boys at Reach felt seen and understood in a way that permitted them greater agency and trust than they felt in their academic year schools. As Ted and Nancy Sizer stated years ago, "the students are always watching". The boys at Reach Academy were watching to see how the masculine behaviors of their teachers might be emulated by their future selves. This is pretty valuable, especially during these times when boys are struggling to "find their why" in school, and their purpose in life. This is not meant to suggest male teachers are advantageous to female teachers; rather, it's an observation that something changes with boys when they see themselves in front of the classroom and wouldn't it be a good thing if this could occur more frequently on the K-12 educational pathway. www.reachyoungmen.org
Honestly I think the salaries are the biggest thing. Right or wrong, I suspect most guys who have the ability to go to college and get white collar-type jobs still want to support — or at least substantially contribute to the income of — their households. They may or may not know the gender ratios in teaching, but they surely know that they could make more money in almost any field. Meanwhile salaries in education seem like they are designed as secondary incomes (ie you have a spouse making more money, so you have the freedom to pursue something low paying).
I agree - teachers' salaries have shrunk significantly in real value during the last few decades, in some places to the point where they can only be propped up by a better-remunerated spouse/partner or by a second job (although god knows how you'd find the hours on a teachers' weekly schedule!) And yes, young men are probably still more commonly encouraged (implicitly or explicitly) to factor financial rewards more fully into their career choices than young women are. And with insufficient numbers of male schoolteachers to serve as role models, young men are perhaps increasingly unlikely to feel the 'vocational awe' that draws people into teaching careers (and holds them there, sometimes to their detriment).
Maybe one solution is to create clear socio-cultural AND material incentives encouraging middle age people to consider going into teaching after successful careers in other sectors. However, I have no idea what educationalists now think about older teachers in the classroom, especially when it comes to educating boys - and the problem of class disparity between such teachers and their students wouldn't help, I suspect.
Re: older teachers as they relate to boys, I think it might just work out really well. Older men like Walz tend to have (or give off the aura of) the stability of a father figure or uncle or something, which can be a hugely positive force for these kids, especially the ones without a stable father figure already in their lives, which is still a big problem for a lot of kids of both genders and affects them both uniquely. I think it's a great idea! I bet Walz himself would love it
Agreed this is a salary issue for both men and women. My last male friend to become a teacher taught in the US long enough to realize how underpaid he was. He became the union rep for his school district to fight for real wages. Then he and his partner had a child and moved to the Middle East where he could get paid twice as much as a US trained teacher and didn't need to hold car washes for school funds. I would note that Walz did not stay in the field either - as governor he makes $127,629 - a job that doesn't even require a master's degree.
This is a cool idea. A kind of Teach for America, but for early stage retirees would be a really cool thing. I can think of a bunch of men who retired in their late 50s and early 60s — so potentially with a decade of productive life. These guys didn't need money, and in some cases were looking for ways to still be productive, but in the end tended to just while away their time on nothing. Imagine the impact if they had instead become teachers.
Yes - a female friend of mine about 50, who has been a museum director near London for quite some years now, told me recently that she's resigned and started studying to become an elementary school teacher. She feels she's done what she wanted with her first career, wants to give younger curators a chance to move into her role, and wants to grow in a new direction that allows her to be home more with her children. Win win, though she does have the financial cushion...
Having taught in both elementary and university settings, I whole-heartedly agree that teaching is a critical area for men to serve in society. Speaking in generalizations, I think one of the elements that keeps men from pursuing this career is a sense that there is little mobility in the profession. The only way "up" is into administration, which is a) a very different career often requiring considerably more education and b) difficult to get into as the number of those roles is far fewer. Part of an answer would be to re-structure educational administration so it is more of a shared governance model. That is, allow teachers (men and women, of course) to serve in administrative positions for a term - 5 years? 4 years with a possible renewal for a total of 8? - and then return to the classroom. That would allow senior teachers to have some flexibility without having to abandon the classroom forever. It would provide more in the education profession the chance to exercise leadership gifts and gain perspective on those roles. It would "seed" every school with people who have served in administrative leadership once they're back in their teaching positions. It would allow everyone (but I do think this is particularly important for men) to see the teaching profession as not just a permanent classroom assignment for 30+ years, but a career with mobility, flexibility, new challenges, and change over the course of time. I would argue that even more than the pay (though that isn't inconsequential) the perception that teaching lacks growth potential is a deterrent for many men.
Good insight. I was just reading and writing about how in surveys men tend to rank career progression/advancement more highly than women when considering a job.