TRB SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
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Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy had a great idea. He would create an agency, the Peace Corps, to send idealistic young Americans abroad to spread their wealthy nation’s know-how among the impoverished peoples of the world. Lately, public schools in the United States have taken JFK’s idea and turned it around. Why not invite the impoverished peoples of the world to come here to enlighten us?
America is still the planet’s wealthiest country, but it is no longer, by international standards, a particularly well-educated one. The foreigners come as migrant workers, but, instead of picking lettuce or grapes, they teach science and math. Retiring baby-boomers have created an acute shortage of science and math teachers in public schools. If you’re a school principal, recruiting foreigners from desperately poor countries to come to the United States on temporary visas is a handy way to avoid paying a premium to people skilled in these subject areas who already live within U.S. borders.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the bracero (“strong arm”) program, which brought migrant farm workers from Mexico to California and the Southwest for limited periods of time starting in the 1940s. Edward R. Murrow exposed these foreign laborers’ inhumane working conditions in the 1960 CBS News documentary Harvest of Shame. Within five years, the program was shut down and Cesar Chavez was organizing native-born and immigrant Chicanos into the United Farm Workers. The temporary visas that public schools secure for foreign science and math teachers are a bit like the bracero program, except immigrant and native-born teachers in the United States already have two national unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). These are widely believed to exert a stranglehold on U.S. education. But I don’t see how that can be if public school districts are importing foreign labor right under their noses. The unions represent the newcomers as best they can under preexisting labor contracts and try to obtain green cards for the ones who’d like to stay.
The presence of bracero teachers is a notable humiliation for the United States, because it suggests that our own citizens are no longer willing to pass on to the next generation the tools necessary to maintain a leadership role in the world. But it has not, for some reason, attracted much attention. A high-ranking AFL-CIO official told me it was news to him. I first learned of the migrants a few months ago when I read in The Washington Post’s Metro section that the Labor Department had levied $5.9 million in fines and back pay from suburban Maryland’s Prince George’s County for ripping off foreign schoolteachers working on temporary visas. Pretty steep penalty, I thought, until I saw that the number of foreign teachers involved exceeded 1,000. Foreign migrants accounted for more than 10 percent of the county’s entire teaching staff! Baltimore, I learned, employed a comparable proportion.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the migrant-teacher flow has slowed amid widespread school layoffs. But, for most of the aughts, about 8,000 migrant schoolteachers arrived each year, most headed for Texas, Georgia, New York, Maryland, and California. That’s two to three times as many teachers as Teach For America was fielding annually. Initially, the recruits came on J-1 cultural-exchange visas from the State Department, but, when these became scarce after 9/11, the favored vehicle became the Labor Department’s H-1B visas. (Since 2006, bracero teachers have been largely exempt from the annual H-1B ceiling of 65,000 recipients.)
A plurality of the bracero teachers comes from the Philippines, the sketchy available data suggests. Labor markets don’t come much cheaper. A 2009 AFT report notes that 40 percent of the Philippines’ population earns less than $1 per day. “I am earning twenty-five times more than what I was earning in the Philippines,” a bracero high school teacher says in The Learning, a documentary about the travails of Filipino migrants teaching in Baltimore schools that aired on PBS in September.
One quality the Philippines is not known for is the excellence of its primary and secondary education system. In math and science, the Philippines consistently ranks at or near the bottom among Asian nations (and well below even the United States). That means, among other things, that the Philippines can ill afford to send its best teachers here.
The Learning, which was made by a Filipino-American named Ramona Diaz, is a heart-wrenching film focusing on the anguish four Filipino women suffer in leaving their families behind and the extreme culture shock they face on entering classrooms filled with unruly inner-city Americans. But it’s no Harvest of Shame. By that I mean that—apart from one teacher remarking early on that she paid $7,000 up front to a U.S.-based recruiting firm that is never identified—the documentary sheds no light on whether these migrant teachers are exploited. Nor does the film examine the extent to which the guest workers’ presence undermines the bargaining power of American schoolteachers. The Learning’s indifference to such questions reflects how mainstream liberalism has, since Harvest of Shame, drifted away from matters of economic justice (the very phrase sounds antique) toward celebrating multicultural diversity for its own sake.
Exploitation of bracero teachers is, of course, routine. In Prince George’s County, new recruitment was suspended after the county compelled the teachers to pay the cost of their H-1B visas and other fees associated with their entry to the United States. In Louisiana, a group of Filipino migrant teachers and the AFT last year sued a Baton Rouge school district alleging that the recruiter deceived them about the ultimate size of her ($16,000!) fee. VIF International Education, the highest-volume recruiter in the United States, once required many of its bracero teachers to lease cars from a company owned by VIF’s owner, according to a 2003 report by the NEA. The practice was later discontinued. “We are not an employment agency,” a VIF spokesman assured the NEA. “We are a cultural-exchange organization.”
Nonsense. When 10 percent of a school district’s teachers are foreign migrants, that isn’t cultural exchange. It’s sweatshop labor—and a depressing indicator of how low a priority public education has become.
Timothy Noah is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the October 20, 2011, issue of the magazine.
16 comments
How much worse could the immigrant teachers be than the illiterate cretins that make up a considerable percentage of the teachers' union membership?
- bulbman1066
October 3, 2011 at 1:42am
I'm not a libertarian. But sometimes libertarianism has the right answer. The answer is to get government, federal, state and local out of the education business. Oh the poor! The poor who care about their children will find a way to educate them. They will apply for scholarships and agree to make their children do their homework in exchange for getting them. As the poor in India are increasingly doing they will band together and hire private teachers. A hundred flowers will bloom. Government needs to protect life, liberty and property, and the national defense. It needs to help protect the air and water and the natural world. What is doesn't need to do is attempt to produce what can be what more effectively provided by private individuals acting in free cooperation, i.e. most good and services.
- bulbman1066
October 3, 2011 at 2:22am
"I'm not a libertarian" sayeth bulbman. No, you're an asshole. Not sure that's confined to a particular notch on the political spectrum, but rest assured, no one cares what your particular political leanings are. You come here, you spew your hateful bile, and then you move on to the next topic. You go out of your way to prove yourself a bigot, an anti-semite, a hater of all things attached in any way to the Obama administration, of all things democrat, and you're sole contribution ios the regurgitation of limbaugh talking points about free market tripe. You want free market solutions, how about this one? I'll pay you $10 to shut the f up.
- Tristan
October 3, 2011 at 8:04am
Props to Tris. Private education will guarantee that we spend more on education, treat teachers much worse, and educate much less than 100% of our children. It will sharpen whatever inequalities exist, since rich people will pay for better teachers and middle class and poor people won't be able to compete. It's like saying to America: privatize all universities! The money will magically appear for scholarships that allow everyone else to get educated like the rich do. Not only is it wrong-headed, it is fantastically fantastical. Come down to earth. Education is not a business: it's a public service.
- chaitless
October 3, 2011 at 8:17am
One of the more profound bumper stickers on our nation's highways: You think education is expensive? Try ignorance.
- Tristan
October 3, 2011 at 8:28am
bulbman: If we leave education entirely to the private market, there will be those who cannot afford whatever price the market sets. Should those people go without education? If not, how can those people get an education without some kind of government intervention? And traditional market theory says that if you want to improve the quality of your employees, you have to either raise salaries or improve working conditions (or both). Do you think free market principles apply to all employment except teachers?
- dsimon
October 3, 2011 at 9:04am
I reside in a small Georgia town, and the school district recruited many Filipino teachers in years past, mostly for elementary school. It was a real shock to many parents and students, not to mention the American teachers who they replaced. My son is in high school now, so I don't know if the district continues to recruit them, but my impression is that they no longer do, although that hasn't led to hiring more American teachers. Instead, the district increased class sizes and shortened the school day/year. Of course, unions don't have any power in Georgia, a right to work state like most in the South. But that doesn't stop Georgians from blaming unions for all that is wrong in America.
- rayward
October 3, 2011 at 10:01am
"I'm not a libertarian. But sometimes libertarianism has the right answer. The answer is to get government, federal, state and local out of the education business" Absolute idiocy. If anything we have to get government far more involved in the education business. I taught in the worlds top rated school district and my wife was one of it poorer students, yet she has since gone to the United States and graduated at the top of her nursing class studying in a language she did not know well until she met me because she had such a strong base in learning skills. We need national standards so that anytime any parent moves from one city to another or one state to another their childs education can continue apace instead of either repeating what they have learned or not learning a skill that was already covered. But bulbmann's kids can maybe mow my own children's lawns. As to the bracero program, Timothy Noah should also take a look at the US nursing homes in America, you will be lucky to find many native Americans working there. Most of my wife's classes were Filipino.
- blackton
October 3, 2011 at 10:13am
I think what bulb meant to say is: "I'm not a libertarian, but I agree with them when their positions are sufficiently heartless and brainless." None of my teachers were "illiterate cretins" but for some reason, I believe bulb when he says that his experience was different. Not that I think his teachers his teachers were cretins, but it wouldn't surprise me if they seemed like idiots to him. I can't blame them if at some point they just gave up.
- GeoffG
October 3, 2011 at 11:42am
I didn't say that my teachers were illiterate cretins. None of them were. The majority of teachers today aren't cretins, but all too many are. When it is the policy of the unions to make it difficult to impossible to fire poorly performing teachers how could it be otherwise? So far as the teachers' unions are concerned teaching is an industrial job, not a profession. I have a good friend who is a public school teacher. His politics are to the left of TNR. He volunteered to teach in a rough neighborhood. When he was assaulted he got no backing from the administration. At another school a rape occurred. The principal was concerned mainly to cover up the incident. The problem isn't so much the teachers as it is the administrators, the bloated sometimes corrupt structure of bureaucrats who run the system. By the way, President Obama doesn't agree with the above commenters in defending the status quo in public education. He and his Education Secretary have endorsed charter schools and increased teacher accountability, much to the dismay of the teachers' union bosses. Comrades, this is a debate that you are losing on the national level. More and more moderates and liberals are coming out in favor of increased parental choice and greater teacher and administrator accountability. Even the teachers' unions in some places are beginning to see the light. For them it is a case of adapt or die.
- bulbman1066
October 3, 2011 at 2:11pm
Come come, personal criticisms are not helpful. I spent a good part of my life in public education; local government sponsorship is absolutely essential. In a union shop you can "fire" underperforming teachers; it just takes some time and a bit of deftness. Excellent teachers are hard to find, just like in any other profession (like lawyers, of which I am one). The trick is to manage the school so that just good teachers can obtain excellent results. Not easy, but technology can help. It is expensive, but like the man said, ignorance is more so.
- choward
October 3, 2011 at 2:53pm
"The majority of teachers today aren't cretins, but all too many are." The same can be said of CEO's. Their ignorance of macro-economics is appalling. And they are constantly consulted for their opinions on what they don't know.
- drofnats1
October 3, 2011 at 2:59pm
There is a cult of the genius CEO that is way out of bounds. Presumably that syndrome has faded a bit since 2009. Still, there is the question of why some CEOs get big bonuses despite poor performance. The only answer I can think of is to avoid investing in such companies, and to advise your friends to do the same. If wasting money on bad executives causes their products to be expensive and of low quality then don't do business with them. If a company is poorly run for an extended period it goes belly up. (At least that was the case until Obama came along and decided that companies that support him should get help from the taxpayer if they get into trouble.) If a private company does a poor job Darwin eliminates it. If a government enterprise such as a public school does a bad job the government pours in good money after bad in order to "help it get better". If by "ignorance of macroeconomcs" you mean that they don't believe in Keynesian economics then the same can be said of at least half, probably more, of the Nobel Prize winners in economics. If a company is poorly run for an extended period it goes belly up. At least that was the case until Obama came along and decided that companies that support him should get help from the taxpayer if they get into trouble. If a private company does a poor job Darwin eliminates it. If a government enterprise such as a public school does a bad job the government pours in good money after bad in order to "help it get better". If by "ignorance of macroeconomcs" you mean that they don't believe in Keynesian economics then the same can be said of at least half, probably more, of the Nobel Prize winners in economics.
- bulbman1066
October 3, 2011 at 6:01pm
Ditto on CEO's. Why on earth corporate experience should be per se a qualification for political leadership and governance is a mystery. A country isn't a company and citizens aren't employees that can be let go to clean up the balance sheet in bad times. I'm not saying at all that people who have managed a business have nothing to offer in politics -- they do. But so do people who have served in the military, founded an organization, earned professional qualifications in medicine, law etc, gained academic or teaching experience, practised a sport, learned technical or craft skills, or spent time bringing up children.
- ironyroad
October 3, 2011 at 9:19pm
We need all sorts of people in politics. But at present we have too few people with experience in business. President Obama is a smart man, but if he had some experience in the business world he might better understand what is needed to get the economy going. As it is, his bookish Ivy League liberalism doesn't serve him well in dealing with the real world. Mitt Romney and Herman Cain both have a record of success in business, and if the Republicans nominate them for president and vice-president President Obama's chances in 2012 will be slim to none.
- bulbman1066
October 3, 2011 at 11:16pm
In my experience, many Filipinos living abroad are fairly well educated. So, at least based on my experience, I don't expect the quality of education to be necessarily inferior just because the teachers were educated in the Philippians. However, as a citizen of the USA, born and raised in the USA, and, as person with a PhD in experimental physics with strong experience in mathematical physics, a broad background in chemistry, a fair amount of experience in geology and well educated in the liberal arts as well, I have never even received one interview for a high school teaching job. Admittedly, teaching high school science was not necessarily my primary aim in life, but it is not like I didn't seriously consider it or try to apply for positions in the K-12 circuit. Other teachers (born and raised in the US) that I met who were teaching math and science also said it was hard to find work. It is a consistent picture that hasn't changed for at least 20 years (based on my personal observations). In this respect, I am inclined to concur with the author that there really is something wrong. Issues like these are rarely the fault of a single group. Rather, they reflect a collective failure at many levels. Like it or not, administrators must deal with budgets. Still, it is odd that I was never even granted the time of day. Most dedicated and serious teachers did not chose their profession because they expected a high salary and a luxury life.
- wkdawson
October 4, 2011 at 1:49am