Some Chicagoland districts down to 11% male teachers
Interesting Chicago Tribune story about the dwindling number of male teachers. I remain skeptical that this lies at the core of the boy troubles, but the lack of male role models certainly doesn’t help.
chicagotribune.com
Fewer male teachers are in K-12 classrooms in Illinois
Men cite obstacles to taking the jobs, and many educators believe teachers’ gender gap isn’t good for how young boys and girls learn
By Joel Hood
Tribune reporter
August 19, 2009
For two years Chezare Warren taught math at a middle school on Chicago’s South Side, weathering the kind of situations that keeps so many men from pursuing teaching careers at elementary and secondary schools.
There were the usual jokes from friends about his low pay and cushy workday. There were the awkward moments with women who sometimes belittled his profession. There was the occasional whisper or suspicious glance from parents who questioned why a young man would choose to spend so much time with children.
Most troubling for Warren — one of six male teachers on a staff of more than 30 — was the look in the eyes of many of his young male students each semester who, lacking positive male role models at home, seemed to latch onto him for fatherly guidance.
“I learned early on to draw lines and establish boundaries with students,” Warren said. “I needed to instill in them that I wasn’t their father, I wasn’t their social worker.”
Those experiences partly explain the ever-widening gender gap among teachers, which accelerated in the early 1960s as more women sought jobs outside the home, said Steve Tozer, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Many educators believe the trend has had a profound impact on the way young boys and girls learn. That’s particularly true in urban communities where more and more children are growing up without a steady male influence, they say.
“You’re talking about something that has had a devastating impact on the academic success of young black men in their formative years,” said Phillip Jackson, president of the Black Star Project, a Chicago-based organization that promotes children’s education. “Unfortunately, the males that become important in the lives of so many African-American and Latino boys are the gang leaders, the drug dealers, the hustlers — and if that’s all they see, that’s what they’ll become.”
While male professors still far out-number women at colleges and universities, their numbers are dwindling at lower grade levels, both across the Chicago area and around the country.
In Illinois, fewer than 1 in 4 teachers between kindergarten and high school are men, a percentage that has declined over a 10-year period from 24.6 percent in 1999 to 22.9 percent in 2008, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.
The ratio of male teachers is 1 in 5 at Chicago Public Schools, the state’s largest district, and at Plainfield High School District 202 in western Will County, among the state’s fastest growing. Those ratios are robust compared with the 12 percent of male teachers at Joliet Public School District 86, and the 11 percent at Downers Grove Grade School District 58 and at Schaumburg Community Consolidated 54. Some districts have no male teachers.
Mary Fergus, a State Board of Education spokeswoman, said the board is concerned about the imbalance but has no plans to recruit more men.
Phyllis Watson, superintendent for Joliet District 86, said her district has a program to recruit minority teaching candidates but does not make a distinction between men and women. Similar minority-targeted programs are used in Downers Grove, Schaumburg and scores of other districts.
“We want our classrooms to reflect the world as a whole, and we put such a priority on hiring people of color. Why do we ignore gender?” said Bryan Nelson, director of MenTeach, a Minneapolis-based advocacy group for male teachers. “The message we’re sending to boys is that, not only is teaching a women’s realm, but perhaps education is as well.”
Yet after decades of decline, Nelson and others are optimistic about a turn-around. Over the last year, Nelson said, thousands of men laid off from their careers in business, advertising, journalism and other white-collar professions are taking a fresh look at teaching, attracted by its seemingly stable work environment and the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the next generation.
That optimism is shared in academic circles as well, although officials warn it’s too soon to say whether men really are seeking teacher certification in larger numbers than before. At National-Louis University in Chicago and other area schools that offer such programs, women still make up a strong majority. Officials said that disparity has not gone unnoticed, but that their top concern is producing qualified teachers regardless of demographics.
“The optimal thing would be to have a diverse teaching staff at all levels,” said Harry Ross, chair of secondary education at National-Louis. “But the key is to work ourselves away from the stereotypes that say women are better at certain things, or men are better at other things.”
Eric Schmitt, a 5th-grade teacher at Creekside Elementary School in Plainfield, became a teacher two years ago after a career as an accountant. He said pride and ego are perhaps the two biggest reasons more men don’t pursue teaching at the lower grade levels. Experts agree, saying that low starting pay and stigma are major factors, along with outdated stereotypes about men’s and women’s roles, and few mentorship opportunities.
“It’s not glamorous, it’s not a status position,” said Schmitt, 44. “Guys at a young age are chasing after big dreams, big money. But at some point, later in life, they look for a job that’s more meaningful.”
Increasingly, administrators are reluctant to hire a man to teach young children for fear of abuse allegations or outcry from parents. When the men are young, single and fresh out of college, the reluctance is even greater, said Valora Washington, president of the CAYL Institute in Massachusetts, which last fall released a study on the shortage of male teachers.
“I’ve heard from many men that they’ve just felt unwelcomed by their school administration,” Washington said. “Working with children is often not the problem, it’s working with the adults.”
Keilan Bonner, 29, an advanced placement math teacher at King College Prep High School on Chicago’s South Side, said he connects to the boys in his class on a different level than a female teacher might.
“We talk about a lot of stuff they might not be comfortable sharing with others,” Bonner said. “They know I’m somebody they can talk to outside of class and I think they appreciate that.”
Mike Schuelke, a 4th-grade teacher at Freedom Elementary School in Plainfield, said he was the first male teacher many of his students had ever had. And, he said, that seemed to bring him a certain respect. “It may not last long, but you can see it there in the beginning,” said Schuelke, 31.
Warren, 27, said he also noticed that extra measure of respect in the beginning. But after two years teaching 8th-grade math at Calumet Middle School, a charter school in Chicago’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood, and two years at other area schools, Warren left to pursue other interests. He’s now enrolled in a doctoral program at UIC and hopes to one day teach at a college.
“There’s a lot I really enjoyed about teaching,” Warren said. “But it wears on you and there’s a lot that can discourage you. I felt like I needed a change.”
jhood@tribune.com
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
Tags: Male Teachers
August 25th, 2009 at 12:16 am
This is a surprise? With colleges getting to be more and more female and the college women getting higher GPAs, who do you think is going to get the teaching jobs? There is an inherent fantasy in this article and others on teaching as a career. The fantasy is that there are lots and lots of available teaching jobs and all you have to do is have the will to do it (and the basic qualifications) and you can land a teaching job. It is getting highly competitive. In some cases hundreds of applicants are applying for one job. This is mitigated to some extent by the same basic pool applying for multiple jobs, but the net is that it is very competitive, and far more competitive than it was even a few years ago. Applying for a teaching position requires all sorts of things. You have to submit all of your college transcripts. Who has the higher GPAs? The women. You have to submit letters of recommendation. Where do those come from? If it is from school experience, like from student teaching, it is likely to come from a mentor teacher who is most likely a woman. Again, advantage female. And you have to have a clean record with the law. No DWIs. No drug busts. That will also more likely remove male candidates from the applicant pool. In the face of all that, you would need some sort of affirmative action to start to alter the trend. As the article says, that you don’t get that with regard to gender. You get it for racial minorities, but not for gender. So it is not in the least surprising that you see what is happening. Even though public school teachers are already heavily female, they are getting even more heavily female. And given the trends in college overall, and the overall effect of the recession on trying to gain employment out of college, one can only expect the trends to keep swinging further and further female, unless some sort of explicit affirmative action enters the picture. As for your point that the lack of male teachers does not seem to be at the core of the boy troubles, you are likely, in a sense, right. The question is, what are the elements of a solution to those troubles? Male teachers teaching boys would seem to be a reasonable element. One thing we know for sure is that female teachers do not, shall we say, appreciate the boisterness of boys. It does not seem to be as completely unacceptable to male teachers.