U.S. school districts are recruiting thousands of teachers from abroad

Parent Cafe
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<p>Despite there being large numbers of college grads unemployed in this country, some school districts are recruiting teachers from abroad, including teachers without adequate English skills!</p>

<p>"“Overseas-trained teachers are being recruited from nearly all corners of the globe and are being placed primarily in hard-to-staff inner-city or very rural schools teaching the hard-to-fill disciplines of math, science and special education,” said the report, by the American Federation of Teachers.</p>

<p>The report cited the Baltimore Public Schools as a case study. Baltimore hired 108 teachers from the Philippines in 2005, but four years later has more than 600 Filipino teachers working in city classrooms, where they make up more than 10 percent of the teaching force.</p>

<p>Michael Sarbanes, a spokesman for the Baltimore Public Schools, confirmed those numbers but said the report exaggerated the district’s overall reliance on foreign teachers.</p>

<p>“For Baltimore, the question is how do we get highly qualified teachers into our classrooms,” Mr. Sarbanes said. “International teacher recruitment has produced some exceptional results for us.”</p>

<p>But, he said, the number of foreign teachers the city recruits each year is now dropping because it is finding enough teachers for most hard-to-staff subjects from other sources, including Teach for America.</p>

<p>Still, the city could not find American teachers for about 60 special-education jobs this year, he said, and so recruited Filipinos to fill those positions.</p>

<p>Foreign instructors usually must show English proficiency to be hired, but sometimes districts inadequately assess them, and in such cases should offer help in improving fluency, the report said.
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/education/15teach.html?_r=1[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/education/15teach.html?_r=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>What are these teachers paid?</p>

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<p>This also happened with Nurses in the past.</p>

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<p>There is a glut of teachers in SW PA, because a lot of young people raised here don’t like to leave the area, so I have not seen this here. I do understand it can be hard to find math and science teachers, but special ed teachers are plentiful around here. The district keeps telling me there is a shortage of qualified Latin teachers, and that is why they don’t offer Latin.</p>

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<p>here in E PA there is a glut as well. our school district gets hundreds of applications for elementary teachers. Even high school science and math will generated close to a hundred applications. We have mostly certified teachers working as teacher assistants.</p>

<p>it irks me to hear these new graduates talk about how they want to teach, they were born to teach and have a “calling” to teach but only in the suburban schools! they would rather make $11/hr as a teacher assistant than go to an area that really needs teachers.</p>

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<p>Well many international tecahers teacehrs are hired for math/science progarm.</p>

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<p>We have a Russian educated Math teacher at our high school. His AP Calc pass rate is 90%, 70 % getting a 4 or better. The other AP Calc teachers pass rate is 30%, none get 4 or 5’s.
Parents line up to change their kids schedule to get this Math teacher at least once in the HS level.</p>

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<p>I heard on an NPR program a month ago that a teacher recruited from the Philippines would have to pay $10k for job placement and necessary paperwork, prepayment of a few months for as apartment, etc. How different is that from being an indentured servant?</p>

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<p>Foreign recruiting of teachers is hardly confined to the Philippines. It might be a regional thing but the DISD (Dallas, Texas) has been organizing trips in Mexico for a long time. Salaries are extremely attractive since many teachers in Northern Mexico earn less than $500 a month. Moving to Dallas might mean a salary increase of 300 to 600%. </p>

<p>However, the recruited people are going through an extensive selection process, and only the competent and well-educated survives. In many cases, the recruited teachers have a better mastery of Spanish … and English than many of the old guard of pochos that is allowed to remain employed despite failing test upon test. </p>

<p>The fact that our school districts are forced to seek competent teachers for math or science classes speaks volumes about our misguided reliance on incredibly dismal “schools” of education. </p>

<p>By the way, we will need a lot more of foreign “imports” to fill the huge gaps in demand that are about to become very visible in a couple of years as massive numbers of teachers are set to retire.</p>

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<p>There may be a glut in one area and shortages 100 miles away. Many teachers are not primary bread winners. They lack the mobility to move around.</p>

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<p>Are you aware that most large immigrants communities in the USA have their own schools where tchildren learn additional material primarily in math and sciences because parents realized how badly these subjects are covered in K-12 system? This is something that could have been considered in decision making of bringing some foreign teachers into American schools.</p>

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<p>My observation is that the foreign teachers are generally better qualified and they are able to put more hours into their work. Our charter school hires spanish speaking teachers. They come here generally without families and therefore can put in more time, are much better prepared for classes and expect more from students. Some parens hate it, I love it! I want my kids to work hard in school.
I do not buy the “can’t speak English” argument. Yes, they are not native speakers, have heavy accents but they did not come here to teach Honors English.
My very good friend was educated in Eastern Europe. She teaches AP Calc. Last year out of the class of 15 on AP Calc BC 13 got 5, 1 got 4, 1 got 2. The year before entire AP Calc AB class taught by her got a 5. At the beginning of the school year some parents were complaining that she is tough to understand, now everybody loves her!</p>

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<p>^^-^^</p>

<p>Those education “sweatshops” have a very different objective. While our public system is forced to focus on the lowest common denominator --and “hopes” it becomes smaller to forced attrition and perhaps higher competency-- the foreign “schools” are focusing on developing excellence in a small pool of extremely driven students. Or at least driven by parents who understand the benefits of academic preparation as a tool for social climbing.</p>

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<p>Having experienced a lot of mediocre teachers who have degrees in education, I could see unemployed Americans with strong math or science backgrounds being more than adequate replacements. I am sure there are lots of people out there with a natural aptitude for teaching, who could jump right in with little more than a few weeks preparation. School districts should be ready to bend the rules when they are short-staffed. I bet the positive results would be surprising.</p>

<p>I also would not underestimate the potential difficulty for typical students to be negatively impacted by science or math taught by someone with a very heavy accent. I experienced it myself (the teacher was from India, and the class was in college). I could see this being especially true for kids who already have math anxiety (and there are a whole lot of those).</p>

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<p>I moved to the middle of nowhere about two years ago and wondered why there were so many English people here, until I learned of a program about 30 years ago to bring in much-needed nurses from abroad. Sure enough, they’re all either nurses, former nurses, or spouses of nurses.</p>

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Not in my school district. We have several incompetent teachers on staff who were brought in from Mexico and Latin America to teach bilingual elementary. They speak broken English (word order, verb tenses, spelling, etc incorrect), have no background or training in education and think that at 3:30 the job is over and they can go home. They don’t know how to formulate a cohesive lesson, or assess whether the students have learned what they need to know. And it is absolutely awful to hear a teacher who is supposed to be “transitioning” students from Spanish to English, modeling such poor English. Sorry, Xiggi. Maybe they are getting great high school teachers from abroad, but it’s not working well in my elementary school. :frowning: (We do have many GREAT bilingual teachers who are fluent in both languages. But the ones the school district is bringing in from Mexico have not been “screened by a rigorous standard” at all!)</p>

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<p>^Along those lines, I was listening to a radio show broadcast out of L.A. the other day about public schools there, and the elementary school teacher they interviewed had a very heavy Spanish accent, pronouncing “this” as “deece.”</p>

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<p>Accents don’t bug me; poor sentence structure, incorrect verb tenses, inaccurate spellings, incorrect word order, very limited English vocabulary… that’s the larger problem.</p>

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<p>"the foreign “schools” are focusing on developing excellence in a small pool of extremely driven students. Or at least driven by parents who understand the benefits of academic preparation as a tool for social climbing. "</p>

<p>Do you realize that they teach kids in these schools just like they would have been taught in their country of origin? If these schools have an image of “sweatshops” in comparison to K-12 system, that only means that k-12 system failing in its goals of providing real education and become more of a social outlet with K-8 basically wasting time on baby sitting kids and giving them busy work to calm them down instead of developing analytical skills in crucial time of brain development.</p>

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<p>I have a terrible ear for accents, despite growing up in an area where I was exposed to them on a daily basis, and having taken 5 years of a foreign language. I even have trouble understanding Americans from the deep South. Children in grades K-5 generally have only one teacher teaching all subjects during the entire day where I live. I cannot imagine educating elementary school children with a teacher who has a heavy non-American/English accent and expecting them to succeed here.</p>