Why do we use H-1Bs to teach our kids?

Date: Monday, August 29, 2005 11:13 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

by Rob Sanchez
August 29, 2005 No. 1324

The schools in Nevada should win some kind of prize for anti-American behavior for their blatant discrimination against American teachers. On the one hand, they are importing inexperienced teachers from the Philipines on H-1B visas to teach Las Vegas kids, while at the same time they are rejecting experienced U.S. teachers. If that wasn't enough, the Clark County School District claims they have a shortage of teachers!

If all of this sounds too absurd to be true read the following material and you will be convinced.

For more background on what is happening in Nevada be sure to read the recent 8/3/05 newsletter titled "Teachers arrive from Philippines".

This passage from the Las Vegas Review-Journal sizes up the situation quite well:

Because no one within the Clark County School District seems
actually empowered to determine whether someone would make a
good teacher
(hint: principals are traditionally pretty good at this),
we see an increasingly dysfunctional bureaucracy depending
on an arcane system of "credentialism" which would rather
import Filipina newcomers to temporarily swell the ranks
(one wonders how they'll do in explaining the Bill of Rights),
than hire a California "teacher of the year."

Articles used for this newsletter

http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/050826_vfl.htm
http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2005/08/27/opinion/1_guzzardi_050827.txt
Why do we bring in foreigners to teach our kids?

http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_082905.htm
A Reader Expert On Job Destruction Writes About The Growing Use of H-1B Visas In Education

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Aug-28-Sun-2005/opinion/3083515.html
'Teacher shortage' a bureaucratic fraud

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Vdare link is formatted better:
http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/050826_vfl.htm

http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2005/08/27/opinion/1_guzzardi_050827.txt

Why do we bring in foreigners to teach our kids?

A recent item in the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal should raise eyebrows among my teaching colleagues and parents with school-age children.

In his warm and fuzzy story titled "Teachers Arrive From Philippines," Antonio Planas reported that 51 Filipino teachers recruited in February to work for the Clark County School District have completed their 7,000-mile journey. They are headed directly to the classroom.

Clark County is, according to the story, short about 400 teachers districtwide.

But tough, unasked questions remain.

Will the new instructors be able to make the transition from teaching in rural communities halfway around the world -- one described her village as "rice and coconut farmers" -- to teaching in the neon lights of urban Las Vegas?

That would be no small feat. Look, for example, at the personal history of Elvira Ocamia as retold by Planas.

Ocamia, who has never been outside the Philippines, is 56-years-old, married for 36 years and is the mother of eight children. She will be living either in an apartment or with other Las Vegas Filipinos, but without her husband or children.

Can Ocamia can get off a plane and be emotionally prepared to deal with disruptive students in a demanding classroom?

Another teacher, Elmer Potes, admitted that he speaks broken English with a heavy accent. Will his high-school math students, already sufficiently challenged, be able to understand him?

Ken Record, a longtime Clark County resident who follows education issues, said "The way math is taught today, verbal skills are very important."

Most of the recently arrived teachers admit that all they know about Las Vegas is what they have seen on television and on the Internet.

The Filipino teachers are legally in the U.S. on non-immigrant H-1B visas. And that fact begs a bigger question: Did Clark County exhaust every opportunity to hire an American before traveling to the other side of the globe?

Rob Sanchez, who tracks non-immigrant visa issues and is the Webmaster for the invaluable http://www.zazona.com, says school districts fail to look at unemployed local professionals. Many laid off software engineers, for example, have gone back to school to get education degrees.

Wrote Sanchez in his Aug. 3 newsletter: "School districts all over the United States are actively recruiting foreign teachers for our schools. In this case, Filipino math and science teachers on H-1B visas have just arrived in Nevada."

I have talked to many engineers and programmers who have been unable to get teaching jobs in math and science, despite the fact that they went back to school to get education degrees. Despite the growing number of desperate unemployed high-tech workers, states like Nevada still claim there is a shortage of these types of teachers. This is just another cruel insult to the growing number of highly educated professionals that can't find meaningful work.

And when Sanchez says that recruitment of foreign teachers is going on nationwide, he isn't kidding.

In 2003, Arizona educators traveled to New Delhi for teachers even though the local Scottsdale Unified School District cut 175 jobs during the same period.

In June 2004, the New York Department of Education, crying "shortage," added 200 additional teachers from Jamaica to its staff. The state offered two additional bonuses: Free legal advice so that they could convert their visas into permanent residency status and free temporary housing.

In September 2001, Cleveland hired 50 math and special education teachers from India. This year 500 pink slips are being sent out in what the Cleveland Plain-Dealer describes as "The first wave in what will be deep staff cuts in the school district."

At the beginning of my column, I warned that teachers should be leery of the trend to hire H-1Bs. Conservative estimates put the number of teachers with non-immigrant visas at about 15,000 -- and growing.

If you wonder why the attraction to H-1Bs is so strong, read the 2004 National Education Association report "Trends in Foreign Teacher Recruitment." From the NEA report: "Some foreign teachers receive lower pay than comparable teachers in their schools."

And: "Some school districts pay their nonimmigrant employees as new teachers, regardless of their experience and qualifications."

And to the parents, I urge you not to settle for anything less than the best for your child. In today's job environment, your kid needs the best possible academic foundation.

With nearly 14 million unemployed or under-employed Americans, the chances are great that someone in your community with professional experience and impressive academic credentials would jump at the chance to teach.

School administrators should forget about traveling around the world to sign up teachers simply because they will work for less.

Instead, to ensure a quality education for our children, they must find good teachers locally and pay them well.

Joe Guzzardi, an instructor at the Lodi Adult School, has been writing a weekly column since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at joaquin@lodinet.com.

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http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_082905.htm

August 29, 2005

NOTE: PLEASE say if you DON'T want your name and/or email address published when sending VDARE email.

A Reader, Former Resident, Says "God Have Mercy On California!"

Todays Letter: A Reader Expert On Job Destruction Writes About The Growing Use of H-1B Visas In Education
Re: Joe Guzzardis Column: "Look Out Teachers; The H-1B Visa Gang Wants Your Job"

I thank Joe Guzzardi and VDARE.com for publishing an excellent article on the use of foreign teachers in our schools.

In the year 2003, Arizona educators traveled to New Delhi to hire Indian teachers who could be brought to the U.S. on H-1B visas. This happened while schools in Scottsdale, Arizona were firing teachers to save money.

What was going on in Arizona was not unusual or atypical. Schools districts have been replacing American born teachers with cheaper and more docile transplants from overseas. These foreign teachers are literally indentured servants of the state, who cannot complain when they are paid starting teacher salaries as they are sent to the worst and most undesirable schools.

When I discovered what was going on in Arizona I sent several emails to every officer in the local teachers union (Arizona Education Association). I never received a single reply. So I called and left several phone messages to Penny Kotterman (e-mail penny.kotterman@arizonaaea.org) the president of the union.

She and the other officers of the union refused to communicate with me.

I assume they stonewalled me because they are either too stupid to understand the issues or have been bought off by the cheap labor lobby.

Either way it's obvious that the unions who are supposed to support teachers have sold them out to be bartered as global commodities.

This education hiring scandal isn't rare. School districts that openly flaunt their preference for cheap foreign teachers include California, Texas, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Mississippi, and Alabama, just to name a few.

Legislators and educators claim that they look for foreign teachers because Americans either don't want the jobs or they don't have the skills to teach our kids.

Their claims are nothing but bunk! Schools are doing this to cut costs because the quality of the teachers they get from foreign countries is rarely as good as what they can find here.

I email regular updates with issues such as H-1B and offshoring with a publication called the "Job Destruction Newsletter". Go to my website (www.zazona.com) to find out how to sign up to be on the free mailing list.

[Rob Sanchezs VDARE.COM writings: "Reflections on the Minuteman Project", "H1B Visas: Putting the Bite on American Jobs" and "Whos Afraid of 9/11? Illegal Aliens Still Get Sensitive U.S. Jobs"]

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http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Aug-28-Sun-2005/opinion/3083515.html

Aug. 28, 2005
Copyright ) Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: 'Teacher shortage' a bureaucratic fraud

Despite flying in teachers from the Philippines, the Clark County School District says it's still short 287 teachers to start the school year, and will fill those gaps with long-term substitutes.

But anyone who wonders what the Clark County School District's "teacher shortage" is really all about need only read reporter Antonio Planas' Thursday account of California classroom veteran Theresa Porter's attempt to find work in our local Las Vegas schools.

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Ms. Porter holds a master's degree in English literature and has 14 years of experience teaching in Japan and California. She is licensed by the state of California to teach students whose primary language is not English -- an area where the Clark County district says it has "high needs."

Not only that, Theresa Porter was named "teacher of the year" in the 2004-2005 school year, beating out 140 other faculty members at the high school where she taught in Stockton, Calif. But at her interview with the Clark County School District, Ms. Porter was turned down because, all those years ago when she was starting out as a teacher, she did her student teaching at the wrong place.

Ms. Porter fulfilled her California student-teaching requirement at San Joaquin Delta College and Fresno Pacific University. But Nevada does not recognize those programs.

This is like having Bill Gates or Steve Jobs show up offering to teach a course in entrepreneurship at the local business college, and telling them, "Sorry, you never did complete all your required semesters of gym class in high school, did you?" This is like refusing to give Audie Murphy his medals or allowing him to train other young recruits how to conduct themselves in combat -- because you find out he lied about his age to get into the Army.

Nevada state law requires all incoming teachers to fulfill eight credits of student teaching before they can set foot in a classroom here, and that requirement is not unreasonable, responds Keith Rheault, Nevada's superintendent of public instruction.

Before the district could hire Ms. Porter, she would have to obtain a provisional license, giving her three years to go back and do her required student teaching, Mr. Rheault explained.

But as it turns out, there's no need. After briefly considering a position as a long-term substitute at Rancho High School -- making $110 per day without benefits -- Ms. Porter said Tuesday she has accepted a job in Bakersfield, Calif., teaching high school English to students whose primary language is not English ... for $60,300 a year, plus benefits.

"It's a far different welcome on this side of the hill," Ms. Porter says, further protesting, "I'm not just any teacher -- I'm excellent. The state is blocking a lot of qualified people from teaching."

Because no one within the Clark County School District seems actually empowered to determine whether someone would make a good teacher (hint: principals are traditionally pretty good at this), we see an increasingly dysfunctional bureaucracy depending on an arcane system of "credentialism" which would rather import Filipina newcomers to temporarily swell the ranks (one wonders how they'll do in explaining the Bill of Rights), than hire a California "teacher of the year."

This bureaucracy would refuse to hire Albert Einstein to teach high school physics.

This bureaucracy values the kinds of dull minds who are content to dutifully put in scores of make-work hours pretending that education colleges actually teach anything of value, over those who have actually excelled in real classrooms, or in the subject areas they will be expected to teach.

You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

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