McGill Professor proposes affirmative action to attract male teachers

By Carolyn Abraham, Globe and Mail, October 18, 2010
Having trained elementary teachers at McGill for 25 years, and seeing “the vast majority” of former male graduates eventually leave teaching, Prof. Bradley (Associate Professor of Education at McGill) believes it's time to move beyond billboards.

“We need to get fairly draconian,” he says, and use affirmative action to ensure that 20 per cent of teachers at every school are male.
When most of the teachers, elementary school principals, and support staff are women and “the token male on staff tends to teach phys ed,” he says, the entire system has an intrinsic bias against boys.
“Females are making the decisions, they're choosing the books, and setting up the class.” Which is why he believes that the early grades focus too heavily on sitting still, and stress co-operation over competition.
While there is no evidence that male teachers will improve the scores of boys in the classrooms, there is indisputable evidence that schools are staffed primarily by female teachers. It is clearly not only possible but even likely that students can pass from elementary through secondary school without having experienced a male teacher at the front of the classroom.
Professor Bradley's proposal of affirmative action "to ensure that 20% of teachers at every school are male," while laudable, may be hollow in the implementation. It may not be possible to attract that many males to the teaching profession where the 'odds' of normalcy appear very low. That means that male teachers report working in a constant state of anxiety about their 'potential' for perceptions among their peers of inappropriate behaviour to the students.
Some will argue that the classroom is the only place where the interaction of students and teachers matters. However, the culture, the tone and the everyday practices and policies of the school establish an expectation among both students and teachers, and if there is no "legitimate" room for male teachers then a billboard on every corner attempting to recruit males into the profession will not work, and might even be counter-productive.
There is a "stigma" to being a male teacher, and it stems from the fear that males who like to work with children must be so different as to be either gay or perverted. It is this stigma that needs to be addressed.
It is a form of unstated, yet obvious, prejudice against a single group of potential educators.