International Teacher Recruitment

The growing number of overseas-educated teachers in U.S. schools has put many talented educators in classrooms, but the trend also has led to a host of concerns about exploitation, questionable hiring practices and harmful effects in the countries that are losing their most qualified teachers.

The AFT recently issued a report, "Importing Educators: Causes and Consequences of International Teacher Recruitment," which estimates that 19,000 teachers were working in the United States on temporary visas in 2007. The report includes case studies of international recruiters who help school districts hire noncitizens.

Recruiters often use fees from workers to pay for U.S. school officials' overseas trips, where they stay in luxury hotels and handpick teachers at job fairs. Not surprisingly, some school district officials have become increasingly reliant on overseas hiring. For instance, more than 10 percent of public school teachers in Baltimore come from the Philippines.

Recruiting agencies also have intimidated teachers, forced them into housing contracts, misrepresented their pay, charged them exorbitant fees and threatened to pull their visas. These practices continue because the international teacher recruitment industry is almost entirely unregulated.

"It is an outrage that these abuses are occurring in the United States," says AFT president Randi Weingarten. "The AFT is adamant that all teachers working in our school system must be fairly treated, no matter what country they are from."

In a dramatic recent example, disturbing news has emerged from Louisiana regarding abuses of overseas-trained teachers. According to a state-level complaint filed by the AFT and the Louisiana Federation of Teachers on Sept. 30, a company that recruited Filipino teachers to work in Louisiana schools cheated those teachers out of thousands of dollars and held them in virtual servitude. On Oct. 20, the AFT also filed a federal complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor on behalf of these teachers. These alleged abuses are consistent with the patterns of exploitative recruitment practices found in the AFT’s report.

The AFT is calling for federal, state and local governments to take steps to monitor the hiring and treatment of overseas-trained teachers. In addition, the union recommends:

• developing, adopting and enforcing ethical standards for the international recruitment of teachers;
• improving access to the government data necessary to track and study international hiring trends in education; and
• fostering international cooperation to protect migrant workers and mitigate any negative impact of teacher migration in their home countries.

The AFT passed a resolution in July 2009 committing the union to organize and represent highly skilled migrant workers and reiterating their basic human rights.

The union is now collecting stories from other teachers who have experience with international recruitment practices. Use this form to send us your story.