Lenny Macklin made it to 10th grade before having a teacher who looked like him ”” an African-American male. Gregory Georges graduated from high school without ever being taught by a black man.
Only about 2% of teachers nationwide are African-American men. But experts say that needs to change if educators expect to reduce minority achievement gaps and dropout rates.
Macklin, now an 18-year-old college student, said he understands the circle that keeps many of his peers out of the classroom professionally.
“A lot of males, they don’t like being in school because they can’t relate to their teacher,” said Macklin, of Pittsburgh. “So why would you want to work there?”
In southern Georgia, during the late 80s/early 90s, I tried unsuccessfully for 9 years to get black men as tutors for adult literacy students. Finally, one of men I had approached several times told me, “Black men do not teach elementary grades.” No argument that adult males, whatever their skin color, are not “elementary school children” would move him from the opinion that it would be demeaning to a black man to teach that level of student. I don’t know how universal that attitude might be, but it could have some bearing on the paucity of black male teachers below the high school level. Frances Scott
44% of students are minorities? I know that’s true in our inner city district, but it’s hard to believe it’s generally true, unless “minority” is an over-broad category. I wonder whether they make the mistake of forgetting that some people are both “white” (or “non-black”) and “minority” simultaneously. Under some rubrics I’ve seen both Hispanics and even Asians can fall into that group.
That said, it’s true (and odd) how few male teachers there are in public schools, although black male teachers seem proportionate to the overall population of male teachers, at least based on the article’s stats.
The private schools that I’ve seen seem to have a better balance of male and female teachers, despite the lower pay. I’d be curious to know whether that’s a general phenomenon.
From what I’ve seen my own children and their classmates, boys do seem to have fewer conflicts with male teachers in general, although there are plenty of exceptions to that.
I’ve wondered about that public/private disparity myself. I only ever had two male teachers in public school (one of them a PE coach), but about half my teachers in private school were men. Granted, I switched at the start of high school so that may account for it, but the middle school at my school, and the private middle school my sister later attended, were also about 50/50 while my public middle school had I think three or four men out of a faculty & staff of several dozen (1500+ students). They really stood out like sore thumbs.