Boys Are Struggling. Male Kindergarten Teachers Are Here to Help.

by Claire Cain Miller, June 22, 2024

Boys are falling behind in school. They are less likely than girls to be ready for kindergarten. They read at lower levels. They graduate from high school at lower rates. This gender gap in education has significantly widened just in the last generation.

One group is uniquely positioned to help put boys on the right track in their first year of formal schooling: men who teach kindergarten. Yet only around 3 percent of kindergarten teachers are men.

Many studies show that older boys benefit from having male teachers. There hasn’t been as much research on the youngest students and their teachers — in large part because there are so few male teachers in early education to begin with.

Still, it stands to reason that men who teach kindergarten can make a difference for boys, said Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford professor who has for decades researched the effect of teacher demographics on students.

We interviewed a dozen men with the job about being a rarity in their field. The teachers spoke about drawing on their own experiences as boys in school to address the challenges boys face today.

“They come in and you can already see — behaviorally, academically — they’re behind the girls,” said Kevin Clifford, 58, a kindergarten teacher in Yonkers. “Kindergarten is the basics, it’s the building blocks, so I want to be there for that.”

Kindergarten enrollment has declined since the pandemic, and enrollment is lower among low-income families. But nearly nine in 10 children in the United States attend kindergarten, which experts say is a crucial starting point for academic success.

Most children thrive with the female teachers who are the core of the profession, in kindergarten and beyond. But diversity in the profession may be increasingly important, especially for boys at earlier ages, researchers said.

Kindergarten is becoming more academic, gender gaps are opening earlier and more of the professionals in children’s lives are women, said Richard V. Reeves, author of “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.”

“I really worry that the very idea of educational success is becoming increasingly female-coded,” he said. If boys are “seeing education as not for them,” he said, “that’s the risk.”

First role models

One way male teachers make a difference is by relating to boys, like presenting material in a way that is more relevant to them or not succumbing to stereotypes, such as those about boys’ misbehavior or achievement in reading.

Mr. Clifford said that when he was disruptive in class as a young student, “it wasn’t that I didn’t understand.”

“My behavior was bad because I was bored,” he explained. “So I can personally relate to what the boys go through.”

There is also a role-model effect. Sometimes a teacher is the first man with a major presence in boys’ lives, as one in five children grow up without a father at home.

Dwayne Taylor, 47, a kindergarten teacher in Frontenac, Kan., was drawn to the job in part because he was raised by a single mother, without male role models. “I wanted to be that for future students,” he said.

Research shows that children also benefit from teachers who are of the same race. One study found that having a Black teacher in elementary school increased college attendance for Black students, and another found that Latino students’ performance improved when schools had Latino teachers.

“I think it’s more important than the studies show,” said Pedro Romanelli, 55, a kindergarten teacher in Dallas.

Even students who aren’t in his class run to him in the halls or grab his hand, he said: “They’re always boys, and they’re always Latino. When they see someone who looks like them, they may see a path there.”

Keith Heyward Jr., 31, who teaches in Charleston, S.C., reads his class a book called “The King of Kindergarten,” about a Black boy on his first day of school. When a student in his class this year said, “That looks like me,” Mr. Heyward said, his eyes teared up.

He grew up playing classroom, pretending to be a teacher. Yet his own school experience was dispiriting; he was “not really feeling appreciated or seen,” he said. “I have a big personality, I talk a lot. Now I see why I got in trouble.”

“I try to be a voice for children who look like me, act like me, sound like me,” he said. “I often tell my parents, when I have those children who do express themselves like that, ‘Do not let your boys be diminished. Do not. The next thing you know, your child’s lost their voice.’”

Keith Heyward Jr., Charleston, S.C.

Emotional Education

Longtime teachers say kindergarten is strikingly different today.

A positive development, particularly for boys, has been more focus on understanding emotions, for both children and teachers.

Social-emotional learning has given them vocabulary to express their feelings, said Greg Smedley-Warren, 45, a kindergarten teacher in Nashville.

Teachers have also learned to understand misbehavior as communicating a need for help, he said: “When someone’s acting out, you step back and you’re like, ‘What is it they need? What are they missing?’ rather than, ‘You’re being bad. Get out of my classroom.’”

Yet kindergarten has also become more academic and test-focused. Teachers in many states said there was much less time for play, physical education or recess — on some days, children didn’t play outside at all — and more time sitting at desks.

This is challenging for all young children, teachers said, but particularly for some boys, who tend to mature later than girls and are more active overall.

“We teach it, we test it, we move on,” Mr. Warren said. “I wish we could slow down and bring more play into our classrooms.”

He has no desks or chairs in his classroom — children “can sit, stand, wiggle” wherever they want. There’s a classroom trampoline, and each day ends with a dance party.

In Howard Braden’s classroom in Ocala, Fla., the children learn phonics by forming their bodies in the shapes of letters before returning to their desks to write them.

“Their bodies aren’t really made to just stay in that chair all day long,” Mr. Braden, 53, said. “They need that movement.”

Expanding gender roles

Nearly all the men said part of their role as male teachers was to show students, especially boys, a different model of masculinity to prepare them for a world in which gender roles are less defined.

“We learn how to cook. We show respect for the custodial staff,” Mr. Taylor said. “There are no boy jobs and girl jobs. If there is a mess, we clean it up.”

Many of the men said that when they were growing up, their fathers were the disciplinarians and their mothers were the nurturers. While teaching kindergarten, they have had to take on a different role.

Daniel Saenz, 38, served as an Army lieutenant before teaching kindergarten in Midlothian, Texas. Of his disciplinary style, he said, “Simply giving them a look or raising my voice to a certain tone, they quickly understand that this authority figure is not messing around.”

But he has also learned to soften his approach. His teaching mentors, he said, “taught me what it is to really be a teacher, and that was to show empathy, to give a hug to students, remind them there is someone there for you.”

Empathy is something nearly all the teachers said was crucial to the job. For Jeffrey Towle, 36, who teaches in Long Beach, Calif., developing that skill has been a learning experience.

“I had a kid come today and say, ‘I love you, Mr. Towle,’” he said. “To have that is so rewarding. It changes the way you see yourself.”

“That ability to talk to them on that nurturing level was not my strong suit,” he said. “I have definitely grown in that way.”

Overcoming a stigma

There are many reasons that more men don’t teach kindergarten. A big one is stigma, the teachers said.

“It’s looked down upon for a man to want to spend his whole day with children,” said Riley Lyons, 44, who teaches in Atlanta.

Another obstacle, they said, is the pay. The median salary for the job, which requires a college degree and a teaching license, is $64,000, lower than comparable jobs requiring a degree.

Some of the male teachers said it was a particular barrier for men, because they felt there was a societal expectation that their salary support a family.

David Feldman, 47, a kindergarten teacher in St. Petersburg, Fla., said the pay was the main warning he would give to men considering the job. The trade-off, he said, is watching the growth kindergartners make by the end of the year, “when they are so proud of themselves.”

Sometimes, parents are wary of male teachers. Some kindergarten teachers said they took care not to let children sit on their laps or to help a student with a button unless a female teacher was present or they were standing in a hallway, so there would be no assumptions that they were behaving inappropriately.

Many states have teacher shortages, and researchers say men would benefit from pursuing careers in fast-growing caregiving occupations like teaching. Yet there has been no major national push for recruiting more men into early education.

“K through 3 is so formative in a young person’s life that it should be more of the focus” in recruiting male teachers, said Colin Sharkey, the executive director of the Association of American Educators. “It’s like unlocking a new market of potential educators.”

The male kindergarten teachers said that from their perspective, the fulfillment of the job generally outweighed the negatives.

“I love that they’re just so sweet still and so curious, constantly asking questions, wanting to know more,” Mr. Lyons said.

Mr. Saenz said he left his post-Army job in supply-chain logistics because he realized he wanted to help people instead.

“I have students come in knowing no letters, no sounds, no numbers, and now they’re writing complete sentences,” he said. “This is something they’re going to take with them the rest of their life. That right there is the greatest impact.”

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