社区黑料

An Indiana program designed to recruit talented students to become teachers , according to the state鈥檚 Commission for Higher Education. Observers fear that the $10 million grant scheme will do little to curb the profession鈥檚 largely white and female bent.

In its inaugural year, the Next Generation Hoosier Educator Scholarships dispensed $1.5 million in grants聽for high-performing students to attend public universities in exchange for agreeing to teach in Indiana public schools for five years after graduation. The four-year, $30,000-per-student awards almost cover the cost of in-state tuition at Indiana鈥檚 public universities.

Although the program directed outreach toward men and people of color, those demographics made up just 15.5 percent (31 of 200 total) and 5.5 percent (11 of 200) of recipients. Those numbers even trail the nationwide averages for male and nonwhite teachers.

Recent reports have shown that America鈥檚 teachers are compared to their students, where many minority communities are clustered. Additionally, that minority students perform better academically and are suspended at lower rates when exposed to at least one educator of their own ethnicity. The proportion of Hispanic students, growing at startling rates, is roughly three times as large as the share of Hispanic teachers.

But experts say that male instructors are also exceptionally underrepresented in classrooms. Women occupy , according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics鈥檚 Current Population Survey. They hold 78.5 percent of elementary teaching jobs and an astonishing 97.5 percent of preschool and kindergarten positions. Only in high school do men begin to approach parity, accounting for 39.5 percent of all teaching jobs at that level.

That disparity has grown more extreme in recent decades, according to education researcher Richard Ingersoll. In for the Consortium for Policy Research in Education that measured changes to the teaching workforce over a 30-year span, he found that teachers became 15 percent more female between 1980 and 2012. While women made up two-thirds of all teachers at the dawn of the Reagan era, they accounted for more than three-quarters of the profession three decades later.

鈥淕iven the importance of teachers as role models, and even as surrogate parents for some students, certainly some will see this trend as a problem and a policy concern,鈥� Ingersoll wrote.

The increasing predominance of women in the field, including a growing share of principal positions, contributes to a negative cycle in which men are dissuaded from earning teaching degrees because of a 鈥減ink collar鈥� professional stigma. In turn, since female-saturated professions often offer lower wages, the absence of men may well lead聽to a devaluing of educators and their work.

鈥淲omen went into it without other options, and it was a low-status profession that was associated with women, and the fact that it鈥檚 now dominated by women inhibits the status from increasing,鈥� Columbia Teachers College President Susan Fuhrman .

With recognition of the problem spreading, initiatives have been created to address the dearth of male teachers 鈥� and particularly male teachers of color, who are . Though the Next Generation Hoosier Educator Scholarships program fell short in its initial bid to diversify the state鈥檚 teaching ranks, it could take an example from the state鈥檚 more established . The Call Me MISTER program, launched as a collaboration between three historically black colleges in South Carolina, persuading black male high school students to consider careers as teachers. And individual districts are about devising mentorships and other strategies to attract and retain male instructors.

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