Gentlemen, Preschool Is Calling : NPR Ed : NPR

Gentlemen, Preschool Is Calling : NPR Ed : NPR: Glenn Peters knew he would be in the minority when he started training to teach preschool as part of New York City's rollout of universal pre-K, the largest such initiative in the country. But he didn't realize just how rare men are in the profession until he attended a resume-building workshop for aspiring pre-K teachers.

"They couldn't find the bathroom code for the men's bathroom, so I actually had to go to the women's room while someone stood guard outside the bathroom," Peters says. "I knew at that moment that I was a bit of a unicorn." Today is the first day of school in New York, and experts suspect that only a sliver of the city's roughly 1,000 new preschool teachers — hired to meet the demands of this expansion — are men. Nationally, barely 2 percent of early education teachers are men, according to 2012 labor statistics.
While numbers aren't yet available for these latest hires in New York, education researchers in the city expect the gender breakdown to be similar.