With Men Abandoning Teaching, What’s the Cost to Boys? 

While teaching middle school and high school English for the last 14 years, I’ve often found myself not only as one of the few minority teachers on staff—but also one of the few men. It makes sense why. 

Nationwide, only 23 percent of teachers in K-12 public schools are male, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center. The numbers look even worse when you break things out by race: Male teachers of color account for only six percent of teachers, despite the fact that more than a quarter of all students are boys of color. 

Things weren’t always this bleak. According to data from a 2024 study by Richard Reeves, an author and researcher focused on improving outcomes for boys, male teachers were a third of the teaching population in 1988. 

The reasons for this decline aren’t clear cut, but some educators suggest that a lack of male teachers in the classroom sends a signal to boys that teaching is a female profession, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. Meanwhile, former male teachers I spoke to say they left teaching for reasons all teachers tend to leave, regardless of gender: low pay, under-resourced schools, and burnout.

Reversing this trend will take a concerted effort: Getting back to 1988 levels alone requires hiring over 230,000 new male teachers. But researchers like Seth Gershenson, a professor of public administration and policy at American University says the effort is worth it. Gershenson noted that male teachers bring a lot of intangibles to the table—particularly in their ability to form deep, meaningful bonds with male students. 

“Male teachers can sometimes earn their male students’ trust in a different way, or at a higher rate,” Gershenson said. “And therefore they can naturally form stronger relationships. Part of being a good, effective teacher is forming strong, trusting relationships with your students.”  

Boys—who often find themselves entire grade levels behind girls in core subjects like reading—could use stronger connections to learning. They are less likely to graduate high school on time and enroll in college compared to girls, and are disproportionately more likely to face school discipline—especially boys of color. 

A 2016 study by Gershenson found that teachers of black male students who weren’t of the same sex or race tended to have lower expectations of them to succeed, while a 2020 study found that male freshman college students assigned to male peer advisors were more likely to graduate on time.

There’s growing evidence that more male teachers in the classroom can influence student engagement, expectations, and even academic outcomes. 

The Role Model Effect in Action

I’ve seen firsthand what researchers like Reeves dub the “role model effect” in his 2024 study, in which boys are more likely to perform better in school if they have a “male teacher they relate to and admire.”  

I spent the first part of my career teaching middle school ELA—a subject and grade level where men make up just 28 percent of teachers. For many students, I was not only their first male ELA teacher but also their first teacher of color. 

Often, the boys who struggled the most in school were placed in my classroom because administrators, counselors, and other teachers believed they needed a male figure to serve as a positive role model, and that they would perform and behave better for me. 

Many of my students arrived with poor grades and a list of demerits and suspensions they’d previously received. Despite this, I found that what they often needed was attention, approval, and affirmation. Many students had previously been in classrooms where they were reprimanded more than praised, and ironically, it was only due to discipline that they ever encountered men: males make up 46 percent of administrators in school, making it more likely that boys will interact with them through their role as disciplinarians. 

To reverse this effect, my goal was to recognize my students’ everyday successes as much as possible, so that when they did make a bad choice their “cups” had already been full of positive attention. This is how we built a strong rapport, which I found was key to supporting and motivating my students to succeed academically—an approach that research supports. 

In “The Why Chromosome” an influential 2006 report by Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford, an analysis of a nationally representative sample of 8th graders concluded that a teacher’s gender can have “large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material.” 

But because there are fewer male teachers, boys are experiencing fewer positive interactions with men. In fact—as I saw firsthand in my classroom—it is increasingly likely that many boys will go through years of education without one compliment from a male teacher. 

Male Teachers Are Leaving—With Few Replacements In Sight 

Gershenson, who has spent years studying the demographic changes of the teaching profession and its effect on students, said diagnosing the reasons why men leave teaching is a “billion dollar question” that we don’t have a clear answer to. “There are a lot of hypotheses and speculation out there,” he said.

A former colleague of mine, Ben, who requested to only use his first name, is one of many male teachers I know who have quit. Six years ago, he and I were among a handful of male new teachers entering the district. The majority of these men were physical education teachers (men make up 59 percent of PE teachers nationwide), which made Ben and myself, humanities teachers, feel like we were part of an even smaller subset.

Through the pandemic, Ben struggled to match the challenges that came his way, and he ultimately left the job for the reasons that many teachers leave: “The work-life balance was unsustainable for the long haul,” he said. “Putting in 60-hour weeks through teaching and coaching did not leave me with much time to build friendships or relationships.”

While pay didn’t seem to be a major factor for Ben, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that wages do play a role in the calculation for many men. Although teachers often receive benefits outside of their salary—summers off, and a pension, for example—Reeves told the outlet that teacher salaries can be less appealing for some men, particularly when they’re the primary breadwinners of their families.

The larger cultural question of whether teaching is ultimately “women’s work” because, as students, boys so rarely see male educators, is a major hurdle. Seeing men thrive as teachers is crucial to motivating younger men to join the teaching profession, Gershenson said, and sends the message that it’s a valuable, important profession.

“It’s helpful to have a network or support system that sort of reassures you that, yes, this is a path for you,” he said. “Yes, you can do meaningful work. Yes, you are needed.” 

Efforts to Turn the Tide

Homegrown pipeline efforts can be especially effective. NYC Men Teach is a program out of City University of New York which aims to add 1,000 male teachers to the New York City workforce. Their recruitment efforts span across 16 community and city run colleges. Shemeka Brathwaite, an associate program director, said the program particularly aims to increase the number of male teachers of color, given that nearly 50 percent of New York City’s public school kids are students of color.

“These college students are often from the very communities they serve,” she said, noting that the program’s goal is to provide a pathway to teaching for kids “who were once students in the districts they are now trying to support.” 

Gershenson said another effective path—which programs like Alternative Route in New Jersey explore—is recruiting men “at different age groups or different points in their lives,” such as older men considering a career change into a line of work that is more rewarding and meaningful. 

Daniel Saenz, a former Army lieutenant, told The New York Times that he decided to change careers to make a difference in the lives of children, and doing so keeps him in the job despite the lower pay and underrepresentation. “I have students come in knowing no letters, no sounds, no numbers, and now they’re writing complete sentences,” Sanez said. “This is something they’re going to take with them the rest of their life. That right there is the greatest impact.” 

While these are welcome developments, they require funding, policy changes, and big-scale overhauls—challenges that can be insurmountable in many districts. Still, there are other low-cost, lower-lift strategies, Gershenson said, that schools worried about the performance of their boys can employ—such as making better use of the male teachers they already have. 

“A lot of the benefits we’re talking about when it comes to male teachers don’t have to happen every single day,” he said. “Even a one-off interaction with a male teacher might be really helpful. And so we could probably make better use of the male teachers that we currently do have by increasing the number of students who get to interact with them.” 

For example, a fifth grade male teacher in your school could trade classrooms once a month or do guest lectures or guest projects in another classroom, he said. “That would create an opportunity where, although there might only be one male teacher in the fifth grade, by doing that a couple times a year, every single student in the fifth grade will benefit from that interaction with a male teacher and a male role model.” 

While solving the larger pipeline issues won’t happen overnight, Gershenson said he believes it is important schools remain “thoughtful and strategic” about how they attempt to provide boys the connection with male educators that research suggests they need. 

“In the younger grades especially, teachers—outside of parents and guardians—are really the adults that kids see the most, and spend the most time with,” he said. “So it can be a pretty impactful, and informative experience to interact with a teacher who looks like you.”