When the U.S. started learning the wider impacts of outsourcing manufacturing jobs, especially during the 1980s, it was too late to turn back the tide. Thousands of companies built plants in other countries to access cheaper labor, while at the same time tapping into more expansive talent pools.
Among the costs were a loss of oversight in quality and social responsibility, as well as millions of homegrown jobs.
A recent study by the American Federation of Teachers shows a reverse trend in education, one we’ll call “insourcing.”
According to the report, tens of thousands of foreign teachers are snapping up assignments American teachers don’t seem to want. It appears U.S. teachers, notably those fresh out of college, aren’t attracted to hard-to-staff positions in rural or inner-city schools.
An example in the study was Baltimore Public Schools, which hired 108 teachers from the Philippines in 2005. Four years later, Baltimore now has more than “600 Filipino teachers working in city classrooms, where they make up more than 10 percent of the teaching force,” according to The New York Times.
Large school districts are having a hard time recruiting American teachers to take over classrooms in hard-to-fill disciplines such as math, science and special education.
This void is being backfilled by international recruiting, with some 19,000 foreign teachers reportedly working in the U.S. on temporary visas in 2007. The states that applied for the most temporary visas for foreign teachers were California, New York, Maryland, Texas and Georgia.
It seems rather disturbing, albeit understandable, on multiple levels that American teachers don’t wish to commit to teaching in urban schools.
On a utilitarian level, one would hope that new teachers might want the challenge of improving our social structures by educating children in one’s own country. The pay is low, however, and most districts are underfunded, communities seem less grateful and safety issues are plentiful.
We’re not saying there aren’t a lot of newly graduated teachers who forego working in impoverished settings because we know there are. What we are alluding to is that, during our current economic crisis when jobs are increasingly scarce, it seems ironically tragic more don’t take the challenge.
Cal State Long Beach churns out hundreds of teachers each year and undoubtedly many of them take these low-paying, unappreciated positions, whether here or in developing countries.
Most don’t, however. They opt for the easy road to wealth and security by working outside of the public school systems. That’s fine, too. To each their own.
But for those sitting on the fence, we would encourage them to consider the social responsibility avenue of working in communities that truly need them; communities they might have grown up in; communities where teaching really does give children a chance to realize dreams.
In the meantime, large school districts will continue recruiting from outside our borders, where tens of thousands wait in the lurch to do the work no American teachers want to tackle.