I recently ran across a June 2009 report by the American Federation of Teachers spotlighting a troubling increase in the hiring of exploitable foreign teachers, primarily from the Philippines, to work in the most dysfunctional public schools in Baltimore.
According to the AFT report, “Importing Educators,” in 2005 Baltimore City Public Schools recruited 108 teachers from the Philippines to help meet staffing shortages in schools labeled “persistently dangerous” by the state of Maryland.
By 2009, more than 600 Filipino teachers, or ten percent of the city’s entire teaching force, are working in Baltimore.
The recruitment process is designed to make it easy to avoid recruiting U.S. citizens for these jobs. Rather than attending job fairs throughout the Mid-Atlantic, trying to persuade American teachers and recent education school graduates to accept positions in troubled inner-city schools, Baltimore officials can “meet all their hiring needs in one trip.” The recruitment agency paid for multiple junkets by Baltimore Schools HR officials to Manila, a locale known for its sex tourism, staying in luxury hotels.
Such arrangements violate many international standards for ethical recruiting and create powerful incentives for school officials to rely foreign body shops for filling positions. Each foreign teacher recruit must pay between five and eight thousand dollar “placement fees” to a body shop contracting with the Maryland school district. In the past year, two of the Filipino teachers working in Baltimore have committed suicide, raising alarm bells about the conditions under which they work and are housed.
The problem is spreading rapidly to other counties in Maryland which have adopted similar hiring practices. By summer 2009 more than 1,200 Filipino teachers alone were estimated to be working in taxpayer-funded teaching jobs state-wide.
One Baltimore official was quoted as saying that recruiting domestically is “almost a waste of time.”