Articles

The state Department of Education announced the Georgia Teacher of the Year today.

Interesting to see that six of the 10 finalists, including the winner, are male teachers. (Nationwide, 84 percent of k-12 teachers are women.)

Here is the DOE release:

In her 20 years as CEO of Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Teachers, Bettye H. Perkins has seen hundreds of ninth-graders return to their schools as teachers after completing the nonprofit’s mentorship and training program.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) district is on a special assignment. The district wants to have at least 22 percent of its new teachers this year to be male. Currently out of about 9,000 CMS teachers, 20 percent are male.

The national average is about 24 percent of teachers are men. CMS superintendent Ann Clark believes increasing male teachers will make a difference in learning and help fill the teacher pipeline.

As more parents and primary caregivers work outside the home than ever before, demand for early childhood caregivers is on the rise. More women are forging new careers elsewhere, leaving the field scrambling to keep up, and care professionals are looking at men as a solution.

Source: The Role of Gender in Education

The fifth grade students in Brad Ericksen's class know what their teacher will be doing after school today. They can tell by his outfit — a navy blue shirt and khaki pants.

He'll be working at Walmart.

Edward Waters College is offering a scholarship program called, Call Me Mister. The college needs more applicants. It is available for African-American men who want to become teachers.

December 1, 2014

Boys will rarely if ever encounter a male teacher until they reach high school, a fact lamented by many both because teacher's serve as important role models and because the lack of gender diversity tends to turn the profession into a prestige ghetto.

I would imagine that the lack of male teachers has long standing, structural causes. Teaching is not, after all, the only historically female profession that remains so. But if that is the case it’s a shame, since elementary classrooms have a lot to offer in career opportunity for men.

Even when the tasks themselves are relatively simple, the act of helping a gloriously mixed group of kids is hard.

Glenn Peters knew he would be in the minority when he started training to teach preschool as part of New York City's rollout of universal pre-K, the largest such initiative in the country. But he didn't realize just how rare men are in the profession until he attended a resume-building workshop for aspiring pre-K teachers.

Along with the hundreds of thousands of students heading back to school across the region this week and next, there are hundreds of new teachers, some of them leading a classroom for the first time.

And some of those teachers are just as nervous as the students.

Our guest author today is Travis J. Bristol, former high school English teacher in New York City public schools and teacher educator with the Boston Teacher Residency program, who is currently a research and policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) at Stanford University.

Changing demographics trend toward diversity

Despite the cry from people of color for more teachers who look like them, both whites and blacks benefit from a more diverse teaching force, according to a study by Center of American Progress.

Sixteen kindergarteners sat cross-legged on a rag rug, singing songs about the days of the week and the months of the year.

The classroom at Carnegie Elementary School in the Carlynton School District was furnished with the usual toys preferred by 5-year-olds -- trucks, blocks, a kitchen play-set, a miniature makeup table. There was a collection of books nearby, and a set of puzzles in cardboard boxes.

In addition to lists of class rules and words the students had learned to read, Penguins, Steelers and Pirates posters decorated the walls.

One in four primary schools in England are without a male teacher, figures have revealed.

But one Birmingham school is bucking the trend, with a trio of male teachers working in the classroom.

There were just 26,208 men working as teachers in primary schools as of March 31 this year, compared with 185,023 women, statistics from the General Teaching Council (GTC) show.

And despite growing numbers of men applying to join the profession, 4,000 schools are without single male teacher at all.