Falling Behind: Where have all the men gone?

After decades of decline, male teachers now make up less than a quarter of the public-school teaching force. What’s driving men away, and what would it take to bring them back? On Point’s weeklong series exploring boys and education continues.

Thomas Dee, professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

Robert J. Hendricks III, founder and CEO of He is Me Institute, a non-profit that supports Black male teachers throughout their careers in the public school system.

Olanté Douglas, a kindergarten teacher in the Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia.

William Hayes, CEO of Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia.

Part I

OLANTÉ DOUGLAS: 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.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: You can't really blame them for being shocked. 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 Olanté Douglas graduated from the University of Georgia last December, he did indeed do a surprising thing when he decided to become a kindergarten teacher.

DOUGLAS: So my students, my little munchkins, it's about 18 of them and they're five and six, right into kindergarten age or first experience with school.

CHAKRABARTI: Mr. Douglas teaches in Gwinnett County, Georgia.

DOUGLAS: So a lot of things they do, it's their first time ever experiencing it. So it's their first time a leprechaun is coming to like their school and trashing it.

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

DOUGLAS: 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 (LAUGHS). 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Olanté 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.

DOUGLAS: I did not get a male teacher until I started high school.

CHAKRABARTI: When Olanté says high school, he's talking about secondary school, which in Jamaica begins in 7th 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 Olanté ever had until he moved to Georgia at age 16.

DOUGLAS: That's when I started questioning, like, why aren't males in education? And then, when you start to see a male, it's mostly in the leadership position. So that's where my perception was.

CHAKRABARTI: Teaching wasn't part of Olanté 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 Olanté 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.

DOUGLAS: I sent an email to a teacher within the district because I just received her new student, and the first thing with her response was, Hey, Mrs. Douglas. And I was sitting there, like I have the photo on my Outlook email, it's a guy. (LAUGHS) 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 saying, wow, you're automatically assuming.

CHAKRABARTI: 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. Olanté says though, he's had two mentor teachers who are men.

DOUGLAS: He was like, as a guy, this is what you have to do. Never be in a room alone with someone. If it comes too close, ask them to go to the clinic. Sometimes as a guy, you'll be perceived as naturally angry. So try to be very calm. No one has ever said that to me, because my personality doesn't allow that. (LAUGHS) But I've heard that advice from him too.

CHAKRABARTI: Olanté 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.

DOUGLAS: Sometimes when they wanna 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.

CHAKRABARTI: There's another difference. Boys' behavior can often be perceived as more disruptive than girls. As a one-time boy himself, Olanté sees their behaviors as simply different.

DOUGLAS: 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 policy is 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 am more relaxed in terms of the discipline part.

CHAKRABARTI: Olanté 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.

DOUGLAS: At another school when I was teaching summer school, a parent was super grateful at saying, I just appreciate you being a positive male role model.

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.

CHAKRABARTI: Olanté Douglas, kindergarten teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and one of the ever-shrinking number of men in American classrooms.

RICHARD REEVES: I do think that the decline in the share of male teachers is a problem.

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

REEVES: It's a problem for the culture of those schools. There's a problem for boys not seeing themselves and their teachers.

REEVES: We know from the literature and other occupations that if any environment or culture gets too gender skewed, it tends to skew to the default of that gender. 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 quote 'male cultures.'

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.

CHAKRABARTI: But just getting the percentages back up to those 1988 levels would require somehow adding 230,000 men to America's teaching ranks.

Episode four. Where have all the men gone?

THOMAS DEE: Hi, my name is Thomas Dee. I'm the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University.

CHAKRABARTI: When you were growing up, how often did you have male teachers?

DEE: It was really quite rare. I'm guessing that through 8th 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Clearly it was, and it becomes ever more different over time. Can we break that down a little bit more, Professor Dee, because it seems like the decline is rather uneven a across the grades.

DEE: Yeah. 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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, this is a crisis.

But in that same time period, there have been considerable effort in making stem fields and technical fields much more attractive to women. That may be now rebounding back into the classroom.

DEE: I think that's right. And I think we should be careful about, there's no shortage of using crisis theme rhetoric and 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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, seventh through 12th grade, 48% of teachers were once men, and that's dropped to 36%.

Why do you think this matters? Because even when we had 28% of English teachers being men, that means 72% of English teachers 40 years ago were women. We weren't so wildly focused on the lack of men in the classroom.

So why is it, why does it matter even more now?

DEE: 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.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Brian Pridgen is one of only two male teachers in his North Carolina Elementary School.

BRIAN PRIDGEN: At my school, the school climate committee is about to host a girls appreciation day.

There is no boys' appreciation day there. They're 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

DEE: 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.

And also, when we ask the boys about how, 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.

CHAKRABARTI: I wanna 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?

DEE: I would frame it as like maybe 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 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 just a couple of years, just two or three with a male teacher could substantially close that gender gap in reading achievement for boys.

CHAKRABARTI: The obvious question is why?

DEE: 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? 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.

So for example, 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.

CHAKRABARTI: It's interesting, Professor Dee, because one of our listeners talked about exactly that.

This is Ryan Klein, and he teaches 2nd-grade in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he's one of only two male teachers in his elementary school.

RYAN KLEIN: 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.

DEE: There's also a related phenomenon called stereotype threat. The argument here is that 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 may worry that a female teacher doesn't see the assets you bring and may see you as a potential disruption, et cetera, 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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 am, I imagine if I'm a female teacher hearing this right now, this is, it's uncomfortable, Professor Dee.

DEE: 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 a subset of that. Within all of that variation and generic teacher quality, we're seeing elements of 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 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let me, can I just jump in here on that one?

DEE: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Because 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. That does force the question about if a girl has a male teacher, there's demographic incongruence there, is there a negative, a measurable negative effect on the girls?

DEE: 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 obviously we should be segregating students in all kinds of ways, and teachers as well.

And that's an absurd 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?

CHAKRABARTI: You are jumping ahead to an area of conversation, which I definitely want to have, right? Because children are going to grow up with teachers of both genders, and that's the reality that we want to help improve for all. 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.

(MONTAGE)

AMBER BLEVINS: 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, Oh, a male nurse, or whatever.

AMY PRICE: 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 just, it could be awfully uncomfortable.

SUSAN LEVAQUE: I don't think it is. And if the feminized culture is really present and highly impactful, I guess it would've shown itself. But there's something to this. There is no vertical movement in the teaching end of it, and I can say that's a killer for a lot of men.

CHELSEA CLARKE: I think that's pretty natural for anyone. When they're like the outlier of the group, they're gonna suppress their natural inclinations, that they would alter their behavior to assimilate.

CAITLYN TOROPOVA: I think it's a little bogus, 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.

CHAKRABARTI: So that was Amber Blevins. She taught in Bloomington, Illinois for more than 20 years. Amy Price, a high school science teacher in South Carolina. Susan Levaque was a high school teacher for more than 30 years in Plattsburgh, New York. Chelsea Clarke, a high school English teacher in Fort Myers, Florida. And Caitlyn Toropova, a middle school science teacher in San Francisco, California.

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.

ROBERT HENDRICKS: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So obviously we wanna 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 in 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.

HENDRICKS: It's either related to pay, and I don't necessarily mean dollar amount salary. 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 places and reasons why they decide it's not for me. And we can break that down. In a bunch of different ways.

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

HENDRICKS: 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.

Yeah. 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow, that's a significant amount.

DEE: The phenomenon you're describing there relates to what economists call cost disease, because 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 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

HENDRICKS: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We don't talk about it in terms of leadership.

HENDRICKS: Right? Absolutely. So when we do see men in teaching, we also ask them to code switch much more often. But schools are designed in ways that lean towards the way we socialize girls. We sit and we are quiet and we're compliant and a lot of boys don't do that. (LAUGHS) So to then ask them to come back and take on that job. It is, I don't want to do that. I didn't have fun doing that, so why would I wanna come back?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Professor Dee, 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 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, quote, too highly feminized.

DEE: Yeah, no, I think it's interesting to unpack what's been going on with the decline of men in the classroom, because another part of it is once a man is in the classroom, they're less likely to stay. Because even if they remain within education, they're gonna pursue other leadership opportunities at different rates than their female peers. The 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Robert, I see you giving a knowing nod. Yes, go ahead.

HENDRICKS: 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. And 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, and may not feel successful in doing so.

So it's, 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 people who are doing this type of work.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Mr. Hendricks, when you dangle something like including myself in front of me, I got a bite. What are you talking about?

HENDRICKS: (LAUGHS) Yeah. I was working as a teacher for two years before I moved to administration.

CHAKRABARTI: Two years?

HENDRICKS: Yeah. Yep. I became a dean of students because I was able to get boys, mostly Black boys, to 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.

CHAKRABARTI: You were encouraged to do that?

HENDRICKS: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Did you feel ready for it?

HENDRICKS: I thought I was, in retrospect, no, absolutely not.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. Professor Dee, the majority of education, the vast majority of education in this country, K-12, happens in co-educational spaces, right?

Co-ed schools, teachers of both genders, so 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. How do we get there?

DEE: Yeah. 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 gender presence of the teacher? Or is it some kind of unconscious bias in the way 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.

Part III

Hello, sir. How are you? Good to see you.

CHAKRABARTI: 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:

WILLIAM HAYES: Across the middle school and high school, in equal numbers, about 48% of our teaching staff are Black males.

CHAKRABARTI: William Hayes is CEO of Boys' Latin, and that percentage he cited is many times higher than the national average.

HAYES: 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 his 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.

JAYDEN CASEY: My name Jayden Casey. I'm an 8th grader and I'm 14. You can't walk outside without being scared that you're not gonna make it home that same day.

CHAKRABARTI: Michael Sanford is Jayden's principal.

MICHAEL SANFORD: For me growing up, my dad was incarcerated, so I really didn't build a relationship with my dad when I was 14. Thinking about our boys here, 6th through 8th. You may not have that presence in your home, 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 'em, 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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?

HAYES: Every way possible. Leveraging both my personal network and the leader's personal network, or who have you encountered in the past?

Who have you 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 Boys 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

SANFORD: As a man, as a Black man, this experience for me has been so far, probably one of the most rewarding just in life period.

CHAKRABARTI: Because he says, he gets to watch the change in boys like Jayden.

JAYDEN CASEY: The school makes 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. I feel excellent.

(OUTSIDE NOISE) It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

CHAKRABARTI: Robert Hendricks, you are the founder of the He Is Me Institute. You're dedicated your professional life to solving this exact problem, of the lack of male teachers and specifically Black male teachers in the classroom. So kinda walk me through what it is that you do to help recruit and retain male teachers.

HENDRICKS: 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 absurd. 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. 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 the summer experience.

It's 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. His first-time teaching. The kids love him. 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.

CHAKRABARTI: I see.

HENDRICKS: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is really interesting to me. You try to get high school young men into what, a kindergarten classroom or preschool classroom?

HENDRICKS: Preschool through 8th grade.

CHAKRABARTI: Preschool into 8th grade. And so then you get a double positive impact there. For both the high schooler and the young Black boy as well.

HENDRICKS: Exactly. Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Earlier in the show you'd said that there's this sort of belief that being a teacher is not a space for men and particularly Black men, how do you convince the high schoolers to do this?

HENDRICKS: We don't. (LAUGHS) That's the trick. No, we actually don't use language about come teach for the 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so this is a really very powerful lesson, I think. It should work for men across the racial spectrum, right? Because I don't think there's, is there, there's nothing unique that you're saying to a young Black, high school student to say, that's different language, that should work with any other young man, right?

HENDRICKS: Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: Another factor that was mentioned earlier that could be contributing to the decline in male teachers in the classroom is that 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?

HENDRICKS: My first answer to that actually goes across teachers. Regardless of demographic, 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Either way.

HENDRICKS: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: So speaking of college, there are pretty strict requirements in what all states for certain levels of education, certification, licensure, et cetera. Are they actually what is needed to be a great teacher?

HENDRICKS: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: So what is the right way?

HENDRICKS: 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 in that thing. 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 the 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 'em 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Let's say we're talking to a young man and like we wanna get him, too. If we think he could be a great teacher, and we want him to give it a try.

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?

HENDRICKS: 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, 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, all brilliant, you could tell that they spent 10 minutes on this thing. So at the end of class, I was like, I'm not grading 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 gonna do it again. And they did.

And I said, I'm not grading this either.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

HENDRICKS: And they had to do it about three or four times before they got a grade. But they felt so much better about the output. They would've 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.

CHAKRABARTI: What difference does it make to the boys?

HENDRICKS: They behave differently, in how their behaviors are perceived differently. When I was a teacher, I remember hearing a bunch of noise coming outta the bathroom. And I walked in there and these boys are there wrestling. And I'm just like, go to class, 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. What is the problem at this point?

CHAKRABARTI: There didn't need to be any big discipline.

HENDRICKS: Yeah. Yeah.

And then another, 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. 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 'em stay after school with me. I make 'em, and it's not always a bad thing. One of the kids, I wouldn't call it a punishment, but I'm just like. You know what? You're missing your meeting upstairs. He's, what meeting? I was like, student government. You have to go.

He's, you think I'm on student government? I was like, everybody follows you. You might as well be on student government.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

HENDRICKS: And he went and he became one of the class reps. 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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?

HENDRICKS: I think it's because of the way the profession is viewed, is undervalued, underpaid. And especially white men, we're not gonna drive them to do a job like that.

CHAKRABARTI: So there is something about their masculinity that actually does matter. In a sense, that's what Professor Dee was talking about.

Is there a way to support that when they become teachers?

HENDRICKS: Yes. Asking them not to change that. 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh yeah.

HENDRICKS: So it's a really hard balance to try to find. So we see males either conform to that more nurturing tone at risk of looking suspicious, or we see them push back and stay 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Yeah.

HENDRICKS: I think that's a huge way that we can solve this problem, is thinking about teachers differently. If most people, if you were to close your eyes and I say, think about a teacher, you're probably not thinking about a man.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

HENDRICKS: And he's probably not Black.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

HENDRICKS: And they're probably not an elementary school if they are a man.

So that mere fact means we need to think differently about teachers, and it should matter to everybody, because these are the people that are gonna be in front of your children. And you do want a diverse set of people educating your children. We heard from Professor Dee earlier about the absurdity that someone might take away and say, we need to segregate everybody about 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. So it does matter who's in the classroom. We do want them to bring all these different perspectives, and it changes how students view authority.

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 like really reframe how we think about what a teacher is and what a teacher does.