Shownotes Transcript
If you have kids or pets, you know stains and odors in your carpet and upholstery are inevitable. But the experts at Chemdry can help. Chemdry removes odors and stubborn stains by sending millions of carbonating bubbles deep within your carpet. Chemdry lifts dirt, urine, and stains to the surface to then be extracted away, giving you a cleaner and healthier home. Call
1-800-CHEM-DRY or visit chemdry.com to connect with your local Chem-Dry and learn about special offers in your area. That's 1-800-CHEM-DRY or visit chemdry.com today. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from BU's Mayrotra Institute that explores questions like why are executives paid so much? Do they deserve it? Listen wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts.
When a lot of people find out, oh, you're a kindergarten teacher, they are shocked. They would never assume a guy would be teaching kindergarten. You can't really blame them for being shocked, right? In the United States, 97% of all kindergarten teachers are women. A mere 3% are men.
Anywhere else, that kind of gender lopsidedness in the workplace would trigger civil rights complaints or discrimination investigations. But in education, it's just seen as normal. Which is why, when Olante Douglas graduated from the University of Georgia last December, he did indeed do a surprising thing when he decided to become a kindergarten teacher.
So my students, my little munchkins, it's about 18 of them and they're five and six right in the kindergarten age or first experience with school. Mr. Douglas teaches in Gwinnett County, Georgia. So a lot of things I do, it's their first time ever experiencing it. So it's their first time a leprechaun is coming to their school and trashing it.
We spoke to Mr. Douglas on St. Patrick's Day. One of his colleagues had dressed up as a leprechaun making mischief all over the school. Well, one thing about me is that I love joy. I try to make my students joyful and happy. So that's the energy a lot in kindergarten. The kids are always curious and happy and just joyful. When I was growing up as a young student, I was the complete opposite of who I am today.
I was a very quiet kid. I came to school, talked to my two friends, did my work and went back home and then did my stuff at home. So I was never that joyful, out-of-my-shell person ever. Olante Douglas grew up in Jamaica. School there was very different from where he teaches now. He didn't have a school bus. Class sizes were much bigger.
But there is one way in which his school experience as a young Jamaican boy is highly similar to boys in America now. I did not get a male teacher until I started high school. When Olante says high school, he's talking about secondary school, which in Jamaica begins in seventh grade. So he was about 12 years old before he had his first male teacher, who coincidentally was also named Mr. Douglas.
He taught gym and was the only male teacher Olante ever had until he moved to Georgia at age 16. That's when I started questioning, like, why aren't males in education? And then, you know, when you start to see a male, it's mostly in the leadership position. So that's where my perception was.
Teaching wasn't part of Olante's life plan. He was a cybersecurity major at the University of Georgia. During the COVID pandemic, he worked at a local grocery store. And he got burnt out. Then, the state of Georgia relaxed the requirements for becoming a substitute teacher. And Olante gave it a try. He loved it.
He switched majors to elementary education, earned his degree, and went to work as a kindergarten teacher, one of only nine men out of a staff of 100 in his school. I sent an email to a teacher within the district because I just received her new student, and
And the first thing when her response was, hey, Mrs. Douglas. And I was sitting there like, I have the photo on my Outlook email. Like, you know, it's a guy. So I think moments like those, I'm assuming she was on autopilot, just sending an email out really quickly, for sure. But when you look at that, you're seeing, wow.
You're automatically assuming. Gwinnett County Public Schools is Georgia's largest school district. A 2021 report from the Governor's Office of Student Achievement finds that 80% of the district's K-12 teachers are women. Olante says, though, he's had two mentor teachers who are men. He was like, as a guy, this is what you have to do.
No one has ever said that to me because my personality doesn't allow that.
But I've heard that advice from him too. Olante co-teaches his kindergarten class. His co-teacher is a woman. And he says that partnership works in more ways than just teaching reading and writing. Sometimes when they want to tell on themselves, they'll go to her because they know it would be a little calmer, sweeter voice. And then I also establish some stuff you should go to her. Like if their pants need to be zipped up or buttoned, I'm like, you should go to my co-teacher.
There's another difference. Boys' behavior can often be perceived as more disruptive than girls. As a one-time boy himself, Olante sees their behaviors as simply different. When they play, they're more aggressive. Like, they're always play fighting. They're throwing their rubber ducks all across the classroom. Our school policies, no play fighting, but...
Sometimes it's not what it seems. Like we have a kid who likes to spin their stuffies in the classroom. That doesn't bother me. For some teachers, they have vocalized that it bothers them. So I think sometimes I'm more relaxed in terms of the discipline part. Olante says he was lucky to have wonderful teachers himself, and they were mostly women. And he supports and celebrates all his female colleagues.
Still, he's mindful of the fact that as a man, there's something unique he can provide his students, especially the boys. At another school when I was teaching summer school, a parent was super grateful, saying, I just appreciate you being a positive male role model. Like, that was her quote. Some kids have a very hard home life, and a person within that school could make a difference. Just knowing that somebody's in the building might be going through the same battles, and I could reach out.
Those reasons keep me going, making a difference and just being a safe space for students. Olante Douglas, kindergarten teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and one of the ever-shrinking number of men in American classrooms. I do think that the decline in the share of male teachers is a problem.
In 1988, men made up 30% of America's K-12 teachers. That's dropped to 23%, according to Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
It's a problem for the culture of those schools, it's a problem for boys not seeing themselves and their teachers. We know from the literature on other occupations that if any environment or culture gets too gender skewed, it tends to skew to the default of that gender, right? One of the reasons we want more women in science and engineering and politics is because if we don't, they'll tend to have "male cultures." Well, the same is true the other way around too. And I think that's one of the reasons why just having more flesh and blood men
in our classrooms would be hugely important. But just getting the percentages back up to those 1988 levels would require somehow adding 230,000 men to America's teaching ranks. So what will it take to bring them back? Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Mr. Mahacho. Y'all ready to have a good day today? Yeah.
I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is an On Point special series, Falling Behind the Miseducation of America's Boys. The ways that school doesn't work for lots of boys comes with a higher penalty. He calls it six cruel hours of our lives, you know, an acronym for school. The data will show that we're failing them desperately. Hey, yo! It's a beautiful day in LA!
If you have a teacher who tells you, like, you're really badly behaved and sends you all these messages that you're not going to do well, it turns out there's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. One, two.
As a first grade teacher, relationships with the boys became a window into what I argue now is a need for the reimagining of Black boyhood. Gypsies cut your skin because they think that you condone violence. Because they see other Black children on the news condoning violence, killing, like,
It brings you down. One thing I do with my class is I always ask them if they can remember the time when they were first told that boys don't cry. And 100% of them can do it. Like as men, we're like in jail with our emotions. Like we can't let them out. It just sucks. The quote actually comes from Frederick Douglass. It's easier to build strong boys than rebuild broken men. Today's boys are tomorrow's men. Episode four, where have all the men gone?
Hi, my name is Thomas Dee. I'm the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University. When you were growing up, how often did you have male teachers? It was really quite rare. I'm guessing through eighth grade, I maybe had one male teacher. At the time, I remember just noticing how odd it was to see a male in that role. Well, clearly it was, and it becomes ever more different over time.
Can we break that down a little bit more, Professor D., because it seems like the decline is rather uneven across the grades. Yeah, you know, the declines appear to be, I believe, substantially larger at the secondary level, but also like they vary considerably by subject.
Career and technical education has become an increasingly important part of the modern high school curriculum. And interestingly, we've seen the biggest declines in male representation of teachers in those CTE classrooms. I'm seeing the numbers here in front of me.
A decline from 75% down to 45%. Okay, we could look at this 30% drop in male teachers with, you know, sort of like, oh, this is a crisis. But in that same time period, there's been considerable effort in making STEM fields and technical fields much more attractive to women.
And that may be now rebounding back into the classroom. I think that's right. And I think we should be careful about, I mean, there's no shortage of using crisis-themed rhetoric in education policy. That being said, I think there are important opportunities here to do better for our boys. And what's going on with the decline of men in the classroom is clearly part of that.
Math, a decline in the percentage of male teachers from 50% down to 37%. Art and music from 54% to 40%. Science, 60% to 40%. In high school or middle and high school, 7th through 12th grade, 48% of teachers were once men. And that's dropped to 36%.
Right.
One is, I think, at the secondary level is when kids' social identity gets formed. But more generally, we've seen that the gender of a teacher appears to have real impact on student performance and student engagement. So the fact that over the last 40 years, at the secondary level, the share of teachers who are male has declined from roughly one in two to one in three merits our attention.
Falling behind, the miseducation of America's boys continues in a moment. This is On Point. Support for On Point comes from Indeed. You just realized that your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy, just use Indeed. There's no need to wait. You can speed up your hiring with Indeed.
and On Point listeners will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash On Point. Just go to Indeed.com slash On Point right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash On Point. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need.
Support for On Point comes from Select Quote. There are so many things in life we just never get around to. Taking up that hobby, cleaning out the garage. You know, little things that don't really make a huge difference in our lives. Yet there's one thing that most of us have probably been neglecting that can have a huge impact on our family's future.
It's life insurance. And with SelectQuote, getting covered with the right policy for you is easier and more affordable than you may think. Get the right life insurance for you, for less, at SelectQuote.com slash on. Go to SelectQuote.com slash on today to get started. That's SelectQuote.com slash on. America's boys are falling behind in school.
"Boys too often end up being treated like malfunctioning girls." The gap emerges before boys hit third grade. So more than ever, experts are saying with urgency that something must be done. "The quote actually comes from Frederick Douglass: 'It's easier to build strong boys than rebuild broken men.' Today's boys are tomorrow's men."
I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. Look out for our special series. It's called Falling Behind, The Miseducation of America's Boys. You'll find it right here in this podcast feed. So be sure to follow On Point wherever you get your podcasts. Brian Pridgen is one of only two male teachers in his North Carolina elementary school. At my school, the school climate committee is about to host a girls' appreciation day event.
There is no Boys Appreciation Day. There are not these special events for boys. There's so much girl empowerment, which is amazing and it should be happening, but we have to have that for boys too. It can't be at the expense of boys. And on top of that, if we only have females in the room...
that are trying to solve problems of what's going on with little boys, and they don't have an experience to pull from of what that's like to be a little boy. There is not that male representation that could be helping to solve some of these problems. Brian Pridgen listens to On Point in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Professor Thomas Dee, you had said that there's evidence that the gender of the teacher at the front of the classroom matters when it comes to even academic achievement. Take us a little bit more into what data supports that. What I've done in my research is leverage some unique features
of federal data sets where I can observe a given boy with two different teachers at the same moment in time. And what we see is that when the boy is with the male teacher, their test scores are appreciably higher than with the female teacher.
But there are also some other indicators beyond test score achievement that have to do with engagement. So, for example, when you have a female and a male teacher looking at the exact same boy, the female teacher is substantially more likely to say that boy is disruptive in the classroom. Mm-hmm.
And also, when we ask the boys, without regard to gender, how do you feel about this subject? How do you feel about that subject? The exact same boy is more likely to say they look forward to a subject when it's the subject that's currently being taught by a male teacher. I want to break this down piece by piece. So first of all, let's go back to those test scores.
Remind me, how much of a jump did you say the boys were having with a male teacher? I would frame it as like several months of learning are gained by a boy when they're assigned to a male teacher versus a female teacher. And this matters because, I mean, if we look at the aggregate data, boys in particular fall behind girls on reading scores. So the kinds of impacts I've seen in my research suggests that
that just a couple of years, just two or three with a male teacher could substantially close that gender gap in reading achievement for boys. The obvious question is why? Yeah, and here's where we have to acknowledge we're not entirely sure because there are multiple mechanisms in play. So what might be going on here?
Well, you know, the benefit a boy receives from a male teacher may actually not have anything to do with male teachers doing something differently in the classroom. It could simply involve their gendered presence. One prominent illustration of this would be role model effects. If simply seeing a male teacher at the lectern
reshapes the way a boy understands social expectations and a sense of belongingness in academic settings, that could easily explain the effects I've seen in my research. It's interesting, Professor D, because one of our listeners talked about exactly that. This is Ryan Klein, and he teaches second grade in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he's one of only two male teachers in his elementary school.
I really try to demonstrate things that I think are especially important for boys and men to keep in mind. Things like patience and gentleness and calmness and kindness and empathy and things that students might not always see in popular culture. In regards to male role models, I hope that's helpful for them.
There's also a related phenomenon called stereotype threat. The argument here is that, you know, we worry that others see us through the lens of whatever stereotypes may exist, and that this can actually become a kind of cognitive millstone around students' necks. So the reason this might matter in this context is that if you're a boy in a classroom, you're
You may worry that a female teacher doesn't see the assets you bring and may see you as a potential disruption, etc. And the anxiety that creates can effectively become self-fulfilling. So there's that entire class of effects, role model effects and stereotype threat that have nothing to do with what male and female teachers may actually do differently. Well, to be frank, this leads us into some pretty uncomfortable territory.
Because you're saying that simply a gendered presence can make a difference in student achievement in the classroom. And that seems to me to fly in the face of, I don't know, 50 years of effort.
in saying that good teachers are good teachers no matter who they are. And specifically because of education, this has largely been a female-dominated space to begin with and an underappreciated profession as well. So I imagine if I'm a female teacher hearing this right now, this is...
It's kind of uncomfortable, Professor D. Well, you know, a little bit of discomfort, I think, can be productive. But I want to benchmark this by saying one of the major lessons of the last several decades of big data in education is that teachers really matter. Just one year with a high-quality teacher can reshape the life trajectory of students, economically and otherwise.
And we've also learned that there is considerable variation in overall teacher quality. Now, the work we're discussing now is kind of a subset of that. Within all of that variation and generic teacher quality, we're seeing elements of that that interact with the kind of gender congruence of students and teachers. And again, part of that might just be
Nothing to do with well-intentioned teachers who are treating students fairly and simply things going on on the student side in terms of role model effects and stereotype threat. But there may also be
Broadly, on average, differences in the way male and female teachers conduct their classrooms. Both could be true simultaneously. You have measured this potential remarkable change in a young boy's academic achievement after spending a year in the classroom with a male teacher. If a girl has a male teacher, there's demographic incongruence there. Is there a measurable negative effect on the girls? Yes.
There is. So we see that girls do somewhat better with female teachers. Boys learn more when assigned to a male teacher and measures of engagement improve for both. But I think we need to be really careful here because sometimes when people hear these results, they extrapolate them to think, well, obviously we should be segregating students in all kinds of ways and teachers as well. And that's an absurd assumption.
inference, I think, to draw from this evidence. I think we should think seriously about strategies for recruiting more male teachers, but I think we should also be building a research agenda that helps us understand exactly why do these dynamics exist in the classroom and what are the kind of responsive strategies that would allow all teachers to be more effective for all students.
Well, one reason why men might be turning away from the teaching profession is something we already mentioned, that the field is dominated by women. So we asked a group of female teachers what they think about this concern that education has become too feminized.
the feminization of education maybe affects how society views them in a way. Just like when men first started wanting to become nurses, there was that giggle of like, oh, a male nurse, you know, or whatever. I think it can be awkward on either side of the table here. If you go into a meeting and
you're a male teacher and you're surrounded by 16 women. It could be awfully uncomfortable. I don't think it is. I mean, if the feminized culture is really present and highly impactful, I guess it would have shown itself. But there's something to this
There is no vertical movement in the teaching end of it. And I can say that that's a killer for a lot of men. I think that's pretty natural for anyone when they're like the outlier of the group. They're going to suppress their natural inclinations that they would alter their behavior to assimilate. I think it's a little bogus, like welcome to the club of not being the majority. I can understand maybe younger men who are coming right out of college would be intimidated.
But the suppressing your maleness, I've never seen a man do that in my life. So that was Amber Blevins. She taught in Bloomington, Illinois, for more than 20 years. Amy Price is a high school science teacher in South Carolina. Susan Levesque was a high school teacher for more than 30 years in Plattsburgh, New York. Chelsea Clark is a high school English teacher in Fort Myers, Florida. And Kaitlin Toropova, she's a middle school science teacher in San Francisco, California.
Well, joining us now is Robert J. Hendricks III. He's the founder of the He Is Me Institute. It's a nonprofit that supports black male teachers throughout their careers in the public school system. Robert Hendricks, welcome to On Point. Thank you for having me. So obviously, we want to know what's been driving this steady year-after-year decline in the number of male teachers in classrooms overall.
And Robert Hendricks, when you talk to or you do outreach and trying to convince men that teaching would be a great career for them, what are some of the responses you get when folks say, I don't think it's for me? It's either related to pay or...
And I don't necessarily mean dollar amount salary. I mean relative pay, value, opportunity costs for being a teacher as opposed to doing something else. The other is this idea around identity, culture, mismatch. I don't fit that role. And the third bucket is what I call the pipeline. Either that's mentorship or having entry points into the profession. Just along the way, there's so many ways
places and reasons why they decide it's not for me. And we can break that down in a bunch of different ways. Well, let's talk about the pay one, because that's really interesting. It's just that men see other careers, perhaps because there's quite a bit of a pay gap in other careers, that they have more upside. Right. So what you're naming is exactly the very foundation of the problem. When we look at the discrepancies with pay with gender and with teaching being such a feminized profession,
it is not valued in the same way. So when a woman becomes a teacher as opposed to something else, her pay cut is not as great as a man's. He will lose about $30,000 a year from switching from a more masculine career, the way we socialize these careers, as opposed to becoming a teacher. Wow, that's a significant amount. The phenomenon you're describing there relates to what economists call cost disease, right?
To get someone to work in the classroom, you need to entice them at the margin from some alternative job. And generally, what they can earn in alternative jobs rises with technological change.
And we could see this in the data where the relative pay for teachers has declined as technology has increased productivity. And I think that may explain part of why men in particular are much less likely to be found in the classroom than they were 40 years ago. Well, Mr. Hendricks, so you also mentioned that some of the men you talked to are saying that it doesn't feel like the space for them. Tell me more about that.
When we look at teachers, when we hear about teachers, when we think about what the profession is, we talk about the nurturing sides of it. We talk about how it is a child rearing profession, which is all true. So there's two things going on here. One, boys are not socialized to have those attributes. The second issue is that we're not looking at teaching as holistically as we should. It is a highly intellectual job.
It is a job that builds legacy, advances communities, and those are the types of characteristics that males lean more towards, but we don't talk about that with teaching. Yeah, we don't talk about it in terms of leadership. Right, absolutely. So when we do see men in teaching, we also ask them to code switch much more often. Schools are designed in ways that lean towards the way we socialize girls. We sit and we are quiet and we're compliant, and
And a lot of boys don't do that. So to then ask them to come back and take on that job, it's like, I don't want to do that. I didn't have fun doing that. So why would I want to come back? Okay. Professor D would love to hear your thoughts about this because basically, again, this is one of those potentially uncomfortable areas, but important ones of this conversation that this
This isn't necessarily to criticize all the women teachers out there, but I do want to press you a little bit on the point that Robert Hendricks was making because he was talking about how teaching is perceived. Men maybe actually feel blocked out of education as a career because it's, you know, quote, too highly feminized.
Once a man is in the classroom, they're less likely to stay. Even if they remain within education, they're going to pursue other leadership opportunities at different rates than their female peers. In general, I think men are more likely to become principals and move on to become superintendents of school districts. But I think that exacerbates the problem. Robert, I see you giving a
A knowing nod, yes. Go ahead. There's research behind men going for those bigger jobs oftentimes they're not even qualified for. But then also, they're asked to be in leadership roles before they're ready.
Myself included. It's not uncommon for a male teacher to be seen as an authoritative figure in the school, especially when we talk about how they respond to support discipline boys in ways that the woman may not feel comfortable, may not feel successful in doing so. So it's like, oh, you're really good at this. You should be the assistant principal. You should be the dean of students. You should move to the district office where you oversee everything.
people who are doing this type of work. Now, Mr. Hendricks, when you dangle something like including myself in front of me, you know I got a bite. What are you talking about? Yeah, I was working as a teacher for two years before I moved to administration. Two years? Yeah. I became a dean of students because I was able to get
boys, mostly black boys to, you know, come to school, to do their work, to be perceived as more respectful. So it was like, okay, so you can do this with the whole school community fairly quickly, fairly early. You were encouraged to do that? Yes. Did you feel ready for it? I thought I was. In retrospect, no, absolutely not.
Wow. Okay. Well, Professor D, the majority of education, the vast majority of education in this country, K through 12, happens in co-educational spaces, right? Co-ed schools, teachers of both genders. Ideally, we want to get to a point, maybe we won't, but we want to get to a point where it shouldn't matter what the gender of your teacher is. And we don't see the kind of gender effects that you've been measuring in your research. Right.
How do we get there? Yeah, well, I think it has to begin with a better understanding of why these gender dynamics occur. Can we build more robust evidence on the extent to which it's simply the student responding to the gendered presence of the teacher? Or is it some kind of unconscious bias in the way that male and female teachers manage classrooms? And we need to recognize it may be both.
But understanding the relevance of those mediating mechanisms can guide us towards responsive forms of teacher training and teacher professional development that could help both male and female teachers realize the potential in both their male and female students. Well, Thomas Dee is a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. And Professor Dee, thank you so much for joining us. It was such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Falling behind continues in a moment. This is On Point.
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's tax season, and we're all a bit tired of numbers. But here's one you need to hear. $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. $100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
Mr. Sanford, you got those kids over there? You ready? In episode three, we visited Boys Latin School in Philadelphia. It's a middle school serving primarily Black boys. And we're going back there briefly today because... Across the middle school and high school in equal numbers, about 48% of our teaching staff are Black males.
William Hayes is CEO of Boys Latin, and that percentage he cited is many, many times higher than the national average. And I think one of the things that students allude to is they are able to have conversations with people who experience the same things. And I think we're very transparent and honest with kids about this happened in the world. And this is how it's impacting me as an older Black man. How is it impacting you? And so just giving space for them to know that they're not alone.
My name is Jayden Casey. I'm in eighth grade and I'm 14. You can't walk outside without being scared. You're not going to make it home that same day. Michael Sanford is Jayden's principal. For me, growing up, you know, my dad was incarcerated. So I really didn't build a relationship with my dad until I was 14. Thinking about our boys here, sixth through eighth, you may not have that presence in your home, but you know you come to school every day and
them having that access to black men who care about them, who's not afraid to let them cry or hold them accountable, put their arms around them, hug them. Those things are so important for a young black boy in their formative years. And it shapes how they not only view themselves, how they treat other people, how they treat women, right? How their relationship to the world, their experiences is all rooted in really their experience when they come to school. So where they spend the majority of their time, it just changes the game.
The same is true for all boys, regardless of race, as we heard earlier in this episode. So given that, how does William Hayes so successfully recruit so many men to his school?
Every way possible leveraging both my personal network and the leaders personal network or whoever you encounter in the past, who you've worked with. We also have a certification program that we partner with Drexel University and so we pay for a black male to come be a resident to get their certification at the school and to hopefully take a position. We also don't obligate them to come work at Boy's Latin. We hope that the product convinces them to stay after their residency year and we also target alum to go through that program as well.
In fact, Hayes says some of the school's fundraising is specifically for that teacher certification program he mentioned. Principal Michael Sanford says it's worth every penny. As a man, as a black man, you know, this experience for me has been so far probably one of the most rewarding just in life, period. Because, he says, he gets to watch the change in boys like Jaden. The school made me feel good about myself, everything about it, like,
They make you better than who you was before. Like, you come to school, they'll try to make you get out of the streets and bring you to a young scholar and a young man that you is to be great and feel excellent. Robert Hendricks, you are the founder of the HeIsMe Institute. You dedicated your professional life to solving this exact problem.
of the lack of male teachers and specifically black male teachers in the classroom. So kind of walk me through what it is that you do to help recruit and retain male teachers. So we start as early as preschool because we recognize those early experiences really change how a student perceives school. With nearly 50% of suspensions and expulsions go to black boys.
So then to expect them to be a teacher is kind of absurd. Yeah. So as early as preschool, we put a black male educator in front of them. And the educator is a black male high school student. Uh-huh. And they are learning social emotional development. So it's something that's very real for them from a person that looks like them from their neighborhood. They're all from the local area.
And then after they finish high school, they go on to college. And the ones that join teacher internships, which we encourage them to do so, we then offer support throughout their summer experiences, mostly over the summer, about six to eight weeks. And it's not like instructional coaching. They get that from the summer program. What we help them with is navigating those early teaching experiences. For example, he's 19 years old. It's his first time teaching teaching.
The kids love them. That's like my cousin, my brother, my uncle. And then his white woman instructional coach says, "You're too friendly with students." Is that true? It could be. Or is there some kind of cultural misunderstanding? And we help them navigate those things because we see that those are the types of situations in which early career teachers, black men, leave the classroom. I see. So if we help them navigate those while they're in college,
By the time they get to the classroom, they know what to do already. So this is really interesting to me. You try to get high school young men into a kindergarten classroom or a preschool classroom. Preschool through eighth grade. Preschool to eighth grade. And so then you get sort of a double positive impact there, right? For both the high schooler and the young black boy as well. Exactly. Okay.
But earlier in the show, you'd said there is this sort of belief that to being a teacher is not a space for men and particularly black men. How do you convince the high schoolers to do this? We don't. That's the trick. No, we we actually don't use language about come teach for this summer. We talk about being a mentor. We talk about being able to work with boys over the summer. It's not until they get the end of summer evaluation when we say, would you be a teacher?
And then that's when we see the interest start to creep in. But when we first started this program, we used to recruit using teacher language and it was hard. Okay. So this is a really very powerful lesson, I think. It should work for men across the racial spectrum, right? There's nothing unique that you're saying to a young black high school student to say that's a different language and that should work with any other young man. Right. Correct.
Another factor that was mentioned earlier that could be contributing to the decline in male teachers in the classroom is there comes a time where perhaps opportunities outside the classroom, pay-wise, career-wise, are more attractive to a man. Have you worked with teachers that have reached that point? Or more broadly, what can we do to help retain male teachers once they're in the classroom? Well, my first answer to that actually goes across teachers, regardless of demographic. Yeah.
We need to figure out how people can stay teachers and become leaders. But we need to figure out how we could build in more leadership opportunities for teachers.
The next thing we need to think about is pay. The real issue is how do we create more pay equity across professions when we're talking about a quote unquote feminized profession being valued the same as a masculine profession in quotes.
So those are the two big things. And then we think about all the things related to policy. I'm thinking specifically about first generation college students who already have a large financial burden. Teaching just doesn't look like the right path. So how do we do loan forgiveness and additional Pell grants or some kind of grants for students who are going to college and taking on all this debt? And if I majored in math, I can be a statistician or I can be a math teacher.
And I have to pay back $100,000. Either way. Yeah. So speaking of college, there are pretty strict requirements in what all states for certain levels of education, certification, licensure, etc. Are they actually what is needed to be a great teacher?
I want to be careful with that. I think it should be hard to become a teacher. It's a hard job and I wouldn't want anybody in front of my child for sure. So we do need ways to test and measure and train people in the profession. We're just not doing it the right way. So what is the right way? The best way is to do it.
I've never seen a teacher in their first week knock it out the park like they've been there for 10 years. It just doesn't happen. It doesn't matter where you went to school or how great you were. You have to do it. And there's nothing like teaching. And that's why those early pipeline programs matter. So when they do get to their first official year as a teacher of record, it's not their first time actually teaching.
We need to get them teaching opportunities earlier when they have a mentor, when they have a coach, when they are still figuring it out, when they have a person in the room just in case when they do stumble, when things are challenging, there's a person there that can coach them through it as opposed to throwing them in on day one.
all by themselves, they're going to struggle for the first three years. And for black males, at least, they're five times more likely to leave by year three. Yeah. Let's say we're talking to a young man and like we want to get him to, if we think he could be a great teacher, we want him to give it a try. I mean, you have been there. You have been in the classroom. What would you tell him about, hey, this is why I'm glad that I did this, that I chose to be a teacher?
Oh, that's a very powerful question. I would talk about the impact on students, looking at them come to school, thinking about the way that they light up. And what I hear mostly from students, and this is something I would throw back to them, is it's hard. Like as a student in my class, it's hard. And they feel good at the end of it. And you can do that same thing. I remember I was teaching the seniors and they had this group project.
And they were supposed to be presenting on this group project. And these three boys are brilliant. You could tell that they spent 10 minutes on this thing. So at the end of class, I was like, I'm not great in this.
And that's the same face they made. And they're like, what? I'm like, I will see you next Wednesday after school and you're going to do it again. And they did. And I said, I'm not grading this either. And they had to do it about three or four times before they got a grade. But they felt so much better about the outfit. They would have been okay with getting a D and moving on to the next thing.
But it's that level of high expectation. And when they get through it, they feel so much better about it. And that's what I would throw back to a student. What difference does it make to the boys? They behave differently in how their behaviors are perceived differently. When I was a teacher, I remember hearing a bunch of noise coming out of the bathroom. Yeah. And I walked in there and these boys are in there wrestling. Yeah.
And I'm just like, go to class. You know, just go to class. And another administrator had walked by at the time. It was a woman. And she's like waiting for me to do this whole big thing. And I'm like, they just went to class. You know, like what is the problem at this point? There didn't need to be any big discipline. Yeah. Yeah. And then that reminds me of another story about when I got called to the principal's office as a teacher.
Because I didn't give enough disciplinary infractions. They knew I worked with boys, a lot of the ones who were seen as behavior problems, but I didn't give enough.
And I redirected behavior. You know, they did all the things when they were with me in a positive way. But I didn't have to rely on this behavior system that was very by the book and strict. They do this, you do that. They do this, you do that. I have conversations with them. I make them stay after school with me. I make them, you know, and it's not always a bad thing. One of the kids, I wouldn't call it a punishment, but I was like,
you know what, you're missing your meeting upstairs. He's like, what meeting? I was like, student government. Like, you have to go. He's like, you think I'm on student government? I was like, everybody follows you. You might as well be on student government. And he went. And he became one of the class reps. You know, so there's other ways that I responded to student behavior, specifically to boys. And I'm not the only one in that. There's a lot of male teachers who see our boys and see what the value is that they can pull out of what they see.
Clearly, there is such a vast underrepresentation of black male teachers in this country. But I have to say, I'm not sure that we were able to find a ton of programs in general that are trying to get more men back into the classroom. So I'm wondering, why do you think that is? I think it's because of the way the profession is viewed.
It's undervalued, underpaid, and especially white men. We're not going to drive them to do a job like that. So there is something about their masculinity that actually does matter. That's what Professor D was talking about. Is there a way to support that when they become teachers? Yes, asking them not to change that. Right now we do ask them to soften your tone,
change your positionality. Don't be too scary. Don't be too threatening. Don't be too violent with that authoritative look. But on the flip side, if you're too nurturing, it gets a little suspicious for a lot of folks. So it's a really hard balance to try to find. So we see males either conform or
to that more nurturing tone at risk of looking suspicious, or we see them push back and say who they were socialized to be and being seen as not really a fit. So how do we let males come in who they are and how they are as teachers and recognizing that men, like any other group of people, are not monolithic? I think that's a huge way that we can solve this problem is thinking about teachers differently.
Most people, if you were to close your eyes and I say, think about a teacher, you're probably not thinking about a man. Yeah. And he's probably not black. Yeah. And they're probably not in elementary school if they are a man. So that mere fact means we need to think differently about teachers and teachers.
It should matter to everybody because these are the people that are going to be in front of your children. You do want a diverse set of people educating your children. We heard from Professor D earlier about the absurdity that someone might take away and say, like, we need to segregate everybody, but all these different ways. Like, actually, we don't. They need to learn. Our students need to learn how to learn from, engage with all types of people, right?
So it does matter who's in your classroom. We do want them to bring all these different perspectives. And it changes how students view authority. Yeah. Who is in a intellectual authority role. It shouldn't just be one type of person or two types of people. It should be a bunch of different type of people. So we need to really reframe how we think about what a teacher is and what a teacher does.
Well, Robert J. Hendricks III, founder and CEO of the He Is Me Institute, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation. Next time on Falling Behind... If we're not grasping boys' elemental human natures, their need to talk about their feelings, their need to be yelled, and the kinds of structures we're going to build for them, they're going to be off and they're going to produce casualties.
Doing better for boys' mental health. It's our final episode of Falling Behind, the miseducation of America's boys. I'm Magna Chakrabarty. This is On Point. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Valley with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.