Education: Looking Abroad For A Few Good Teachers

Like most Kindergarten classrooms, Carol Espiritu's is decorated with cheerfully colored posters illustrating the months and seasons, stacks of picture books and imaginative drawings. Espiritu's tiny students, like all the kids at the Dr. Bernard Harris Sr. Elementary School in Baltimore, Md., are neatly dressed in the official school uniform--white shirts and blue pants for the boys, white blouses and blue skirts for the girls. In fact, the only thing out of the ordinary in Room 122 this fall is Espiritu. She is one of three new teachers at the school recruited from the Philippines to help fill Baltimore's yawning teacher shortage. "I had to get out of my comfort zone," says Espiritu, who taught for 14 years at an exclusive private school in Manila. "I had to try something new."

The Baltimore school system needed to try something new too. Each year administrators scramble to fill some 800 teacher vacancies. Statewide, Maryland requires 6,000 new teachers annually, but its colleges and universities produce just 2,500, and only the most altruistic of them choose to work in urban schools, where the challenges range from trying to raise low test scores to tending to students who are homeless or whose parents are on drugs. The No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to meet certain standards or risk losing federal funding, has intensified the need for good teachers in poor schools.

To find them, Baltimore and other school districts--in California, Florida and New York--have begun looking abroad for teachers to do the jobs they can't get enough locals to take on. After watching a presentation, at an education conference, on Filipino teachers working in other U.S. school districts, George Duque, human-resources manager for the Baltimore public schools, decided to give that approach a try. "We've always had difficulty getting teachers in math, science and special education," he says. "We would go on recruiting trips, and we could count on one hand the number of available teachers. And they were at a premium, so they could pick and choose. We thought that this might be a better source."

Duque was further encouraged by the success others had experienced with foreign teachers. New York City has recruited teachers from such countries as Austria, Canada and Spain for years. Three years ago, it began recruiting in the Philippines. Administrators in the city say only 10% of those recruits have left and 530 Filipino teachers are currently working in the city's schools. So last fall Duque took an 18-hour flight to Manila, courtesy of Avenida International Consultants (AIC), an agency that specializes in connecting U.S. schools with Filipino teachers. AIC put him up in a five-star hotel for five days and introduced him to a stream of experienced teachers eager to work in the U.S.