DALLAS - Zach Galvin makes a good living teaching English, drama and public
speaking in Natick, Mass. But high living costs make it hard to make ends meet
in the Boston suburb.
"I'm earning a salary in a town that I'll never be able to afford to live
in," he said.
Galvin, 32, said he makes more than $50,000 a year, but can't afford a down payment on a house.
"They say, 'You're doing great work but you're a fool to be doing that job,' " he said. "It's tongue-in-cheek, but there's some truth to it."
Gathered at their annual meeting this week, members of the National Education Association talked about why so few men go into teaching; recent statistics show that only one in four public school teachers is male.
"It's not macho, it's not cool," said Ned Good, a middle school teacher in Burr Oak, Mich.
Good, the only male out of 12 teachers in his tiny school district, echoed the comments of many teachers who said that while teacher salaries are rising nationwide, teaching still carries little prestige.
"Your job as a male is to provide for your family; it's not to be a nice guy and do what you can to help others," he said.
Delegates to the NEA, the nation's largest teachers union, this week approved a measure to help recruit more men into their ranks, with an emphasis on recruiting more minorities and getting more men into elementary schools.
According to the Education Department, the percentage of male teachers in public schools has actually gone down in the past 40 years. In 1961, 31 percent of teachers were male. By 1996, it dropped to fewer than 26 percent.
As a whole, the nation's public school teaching force has also become a bit less diverse: In 1972, about 88 percent of teachers were White; that rose to nearly 91 percent by 1996.
Teacher salaries just barely kept pace with living costs in the 1990s, rising
31 percent to about $43,000, the NEA found last spring.
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