will the Left embrace "Affirmative Action" to get more men in K-5 classrooms?

From Sara Cunningham in the C-J...

Most students in the Louisville area will go through elementary school without having a male teacher. And while that's a national trend — female teachers vastly outnumber males across the nation — Kentucky ranks 41 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in percentage of male public school teachers, according to a National Education Association report.

Most Louisville-area elementary schools have no more than two male teachers, according to a Courier-Journal review of this year's teachers. Twenty-one schools in Jefferson, Oldham, Bullitt and Clark and Floyd counties in Southern Indiana have only one male teacher, while nine schools in those districts have none.

That's a problem, many experts say, because students benefit from having a more diverse pool of instructors — especially boys, who lag behind girls in reading and tend to have different learning styles than girls....

“There isn't any hard-and-fast evidence that boys learn better with a male teacher or that they achieve at better rates, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that says it's beneficial,” Johnson said, “There's the bonding factor and the role model factor. … These male teachers serve dual roles as educators and also role models.”...

“We have gaps in scores between boys and girls, and national numbers show more boys than girls dropping out of school. Wouldn't it make sense to at least try to see if getting more men in the classroom would help?”...

While educators may disagree about the impact that more male teachers would have on academic achievement, they agree that girls outperform boys in reading at every grade level tested....

One problem is that schools aren't usually run in terms of how boys learn, said Michael Gurian, author of the book “The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life.”...

Changing that must begin with the universities and colleges, Nelson said, adding that providing stipends or scholarships will help.

“Engineering programs do it for women. Why shouldn't we be doing more in this case?” he said....

But no district or college in the area really markets its programs for men interested in teaching, said Margaret Pentecost, assistant dean of education student services at the University of Louisville.

“I think we all have an interest in it, but I haven't really seen any outreach really beyond traditional recruiting,” she said....