You would expect high tech giants such as Microsoft, Cisco
Systems, and the U.S. division of India’s tech support powerhouse,
Infosys, to be among the biggest users of H-1B skilled-labor visas.
The same holds true for universities such as Johns Hopkins, the
University of Michigan and Purdue — the world’s training ground
for skilled workers and research-and-development.
But some of the largest users of H-1B visas aren’t tech firms or
major research universities. Rather, these unlikely users are the
nation’s public school systems. Thirteen hundred seventy-four H-1B
visas were issued to public schools during the 2006-07 school year,
according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
This includes some of the nation’s biggest school districts,
including Baltimore’s — the 38th largest user of the program, with
196 visas issued to teachers in that same period — and the New
York City Department of Education, with 171 visas issued to its
foreign-born teachers.
Smaller districts are also seeking high-skill labor visas for
their own foreign-born staffers. Fifteen visas were issued to
teachers in the 4,800-student school district in dusty Espanola,
New Mexico, near Santa Fe, while 11 more are employed on the North
Carolina coast by Bertie County Schools.
Emigrant teachers can even be found in crime-riddled New
Orleans. Eighteen H-1B visas were issued to teachers working in the
Recovery School District, the state-run school system.
THE SINGLE-BIGGEST user of H-1B visas among school districts is
located right in the suburbs outside the Beltway, in the Prince
George’s County school system in Maryland.
Two hundred thirty-seven visas were issued to teachers in the
district in 2006-07, a number that put it ahead of banking giant
J.P. Morgan Chase, slumping cell-phone-maker Motorola, and
healthcare outsourcing outfit Marlabs. The district’s experience
mirrors that of other school districts.
Just 57 percent of the freshmen who made up PGC’s Class of 2005,
actually made it to graduation, making it one of the
worst-performing school systems in the nation. To turn that
performance around — and meet the federal No Child Left Behind
Act’s provision that every one of its teachers is
“highly-qualified” and knowledgeable in their respective subjects
— the district must improve the quality of its teaching corps.
At the same time, it must fill positions of teachers who have
either retired, left for more-affluent school districts, or skipped
out on teaching altogether. Some 1,064 teachers — 11 percent of
its teaching corps — left its employ during the 2004-05 school
year alone, according to the Maryland Department of Education.
So Prince George’s has posted “help wanted” signs in exotic
locales. Since 2004, the school system has hired some 400 teachers
from the Philippines.
These teachers, having grown up in a nation with strong ties to
the United States, have strong English language skills and advanced
degrees. Many have spent more than a decade in classroom
instruction, with classroom sizes of 40 or more students. Even
better: They don’t quit. Just 11 of the Filipinos have left the
district over the past four years.
“They are determined to make this work,” said Robert Gaskin,
Prince George’s human resources director, to the Washington
Post Magazine. “You ask them, ‘What are you doing this
weekend?’ They’ll say, ‘I’m preparing lessons.’”
THESE HARD-WORKING teachers likely don’t cross the minds of
immigration opponents at the Federation for American Immigration
Reform, professional guilds such as the American Engineering
Association, or the editorial board of National
Review.
They successfully filibustered recent efforts by President
George W. Bush and Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy to (among
other things) expand the number of H-1B visas available for
high-skilled labor beyond the 105,000 statutory limit. Their
critiques vary but they have in common the spectre of evil
corporations trying to benefit the bottom line at the expense of
American labor.
Yet restrictionists fail to realize that the underlying reason
behind Corporate America’s global talent search is America’s woeful
public schools. And those schools are also struggling to recruit
and retain highly-skilled workers, for the good of future American
workers.
The development of value-added assessment, a statistical
technique through which the effects of instruction on student
performance are measured, have yielded new information to
educational researchers. Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that a
teacher with strong subject matter competency and strong
instructional skills may have as much influence on the academic
performance of a student as his socioeconomic background. These
findings have resulted in mandates to improve teacher quality set
down in No Child and other school accountability laws.
Exacerbating the need for teachers are class-size reduction
initiatives, which haven’t helped much and are about to make
matters a whole lot worse. The upcoming retirement of the Baby
Boomers from the teaching ranks — 100,000 in California alone —
will force more school districts to look far and wide for
replacements.
The traditional system of teacher compensation, under which
teachers earn income based on seniority and number of graduate
degrees acquired, makes the profession less attractive to math and
science collegians.
So the most-critical shortages will continue to be in the
courses that students badly need in order to advance in the global
economy, unless something drastic is done.
BUT SCHOOL DISTRICTS can’t count on help from the nation’s schools
of education. Just 13 percent of 77 education schools surveyed by
the National Council on Teacher Quality had high quality math
instruction programs.
Arthur Levine, the former president of Columbia University’s
Teachers College, concluded in a 2006 study that 54 percent of the
nation’s teachers are taught at colleges with low admission
requirements.
This lack of high-quality instruction helps the nation’s annual
teacher attrition rate of 8 percent. It’s even higher among
instructors with less than three years of experience, despite the
fact that most teachers can easily attain tenure — and
near-permanent job security — within two-to-three years of
service.
Alternative teaching programs such as Teach For America — which
supplies aspiring teachers to school districts in 27 cities — may
help with the shortages. But school systems must look at other ways
of getting teachers into the classroom. That means competing with
other industrialized nations for highly-talented instructors,
especially those from Third World countries in which teaching
remains one of the few ways the poor can move into the middle
class.
Some 10,000 emigre teachers were employed by the nation’s school
districts in 2003, according to the National Education Association.
That number has since swelled. School districts have followed the
path blazed by districts such as Prince George’s County and the
Clark County school district in Las Vegas, which lured 51 Filipino
English and math teachers to its schools in 2005.
More could be brought in, especially as foreign teachers have
gotten hip to the relatively high wages compared to those in their
homelands, but efforts to improve U.S. schools will eventually run
up against the statutory limits of H-1B visas. Maybe that could
help teach our politicians a lesson about the need to reform the
current Byzantine and bothersome immigration system.
