Men are fleeing the teaching profession like rats from a sinking ship!

The number of male public school teachers now stands at a 40-year low!  Only 21 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers are men.  This number has been slowly declining for the past 20 years.

Even more scarce are male elementary school teachers.  In 1981, there was an all-time high of 18 percent and now we are at an an all-time low of 9 percent.  In 1986, high school teachers were 50% male while today they make up 35 percent.

Just 2% of U.S. kindergarten teachers are men.  As a Kindergarten teacher who travels the country lecturing at Kindergarten seminars I can tell you that 2% is very accurate.

What is going on here?  Why are the number of men in the teaching profession steadily declining?

I think there are many factors that play into this trend.

ECONOMICS
Lower salaries relative to other white-collar professions undermine efforts to recruit males to teaching because many men don’t believe teaching pays enough to support families.  The world of education does a very poor job of highlighting the positive aspects of teaching such as only working 182 days a year, great benefits, early dismissal.  I fear that any campaign that highlighted these aspects would make teachers come across as lazy or over paid.  I imagine a man finishing teaching and hitting the golf course at 3:00 and saying “my lawyer friends don’t get to do this”.  I know this would not fly but this is how to recruit men to the field.

STEREOTYPES
No public relations campaigns can undo the myth of "men's work" and "women's work," including notions that women are better at nurturing young children.  For this reason, more male teachers are drawn to secondary schools.

NOT RESPECTED IN SOCIETY
About 60 percent of all teachers in Japan are male, with females holding the majority of positions in elementary schools.  In Japan, teachers  are looked on with great respect just as doctors and lawyers are in the U.S.  When I tell people I am a teacher I usually recieve the standard “awww” as in “awww, it’s so nice that you have sacrificed a chance at riches to help serve society.”

Although the standards to become a teacher are relatively higher than most professions (you need a college degree and teaching credential which is usually just a few classes short of a Masters Degree in Education) teachers are not looked upon as intellectuals.

A FEMININE ENVIRONMENT
Also unattractive to men are the percieved female "style" working environments, that include forming of committees and staff meeting in which there is a lot of back and forth.  As a male teacher I can tell you that I do agree that most schools, especially those run by women, have a different feel than organization run by men.  Allow me to give you an example, at our school we now have a “gift policy” concerning the maximum amount a class can give a teacher.  This was instituted because some teachers who were not recieving as much as others felt “hurt”.  Can you imagine a policy like this existing in a male work environment?

POSSIBLE RISK
Some feel that the threat of charges of sexual inappropriateness keep men away from the teaching profession but I think that is not something men really think about until they are already in the profession.  It may play into what level a man chooses to teach (many of my friends say they would never teach high school for this reason) but I do not think it keeps men away from the profession as a whole.

HOW CAN WE TURN THIS AROUND?
Teaching is an art, not a science.  We need to recruit more artistic types and not expect those wooed by money to enter the teaching profession.  Highlight the creativity involved in teaching.  Highlight all the fun you can have and the other benefits of teaching that I mentioned before.  Even if you were to raise teaching salaries by a whopping 30% it would still fall way short of luring most male college graduates so we need to highlight all the other attractive attributes of teaching.