Administrative law judges voted to join the UFT.
Latest on the cellphone ban in city schools: The City Council overrides the Mayor’s veto.
Another Department of Education probe: Did a Queens high school prohibit deans from calling 911?
A similar question in Staten Island.
Proposed changes to No Child Left Behind were the focus of a Congressional hearing yesterday. More from the AFT here, here and here.
The gender imbalance in teacher ranks is growing.
A teacher responds to Mike Gravel on education policy.
2 Comments:
1 xkaydet65
· Sep 12, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Re. the so called gender imbalance. I believe most of this can be explained in two words; Vietnam Draft. The overwhelming number of men who sought the draft deferments allotted to teachers and stayed on for a career have retired or are about to. Vietnam brought about the great influx of males into the profession, especially at grade levels below high school.
Now those ratios are returning to pre Nam norms. The only pull for males into the profession is their failure to find success, money or career possibilities in their college field of study. Teaching then can be a place to mark time. make a few bucks and wait for a better opporunity.
One additional hindrance is that much of the current thrust of classroom methodologies is focused on elementary school models, cooperative groups, teacher as facilitatot and not leader. These do not have the appeal to males that would make many seek to remain the the profession.
But in a nutshell, the reasons men are not becoming teachers are mostly unchanged from 50 years ago. The Vietnam experience did not cause permanent changes in the way people look at teaching.
2 scienceforockstars
· Sep 20, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Although the hypothesis is interesting, I’d love to see some pre-/post-Vietnam data to back up this account.
More importantly, I think the idea that “the only pull for males into the profession is their failure to find success … in their college field of study.”
Really? Speaking for myself, I have looked to teaching as a integral part of my college major (neuroscience) for some time; I eventually saw my research interests move more into development psych and then, from there, into being a participant rather than an observer in the process of development. While I don’t doubt that for a decent number of men (and women) teaching was a “safety” or “fall-back” career, my personal experience and that of the men in my particular middle school speak to a group of Y chromosomes who always looked to teaching as a good, honest, solid career choice.
The money factor is interesting, though. As a young teacher, I’m not exactly excited about attempting to start a family on my salary. However, if teaching has taught me anything, it is this: if you want something done well *and* economically, there’s always a way. Do I think I’m an outlier among the XY population of teachers and professionals in general? No.
As to whether or not Vietnam or any other single factor affected the rates of men entering the education professions, I can’t say. However, as social forces go I’d venture a guess that the loosening of gender stereotypes (and thus restrictions on what men “can” and “cannot” or “should not” do) has allowed for a stronger, more committed base of men in education. We may not see huge growth in numbers, but I believe (or simply hope) that our model of men committed to education for its inherent worth will help to equalize the gender imbalance in education in the next wave of educators..