WASHINGTON — While two Atlanta-area school districts are re-examining their use of foreign teachers following reports of unethical practices by one of the state's largest recruiting firms, a national advocacy group this week unveiled a list of standards to protect the rights of international teachers.
The Alliance for Ethical International Recruitment Practices said the standards — called The Teachers’ Code — would improve classroom instruction by putting teachers in a more secure, supportive environment.
“Fairly treated and well-supported teachers are effective teachers,” said Lora Bartlett, a professor at University of California Santa Cruz who has spent the past decade studying the use of foreign instructors in American schools.
The group formally launched the code this week at an event in Washington, but how successful it will be is unknown.
The code is voluntary and its recommendations would require Georgia school districts to dramatically change their practices. But organizers are hopeful that support from school districts with long histories of recruiting teachers from abroad, like the Baltimore City Public Schools, will pressure others to follow suit.
In Georgia, some teachers with Jonesboro-based Global Teachers Research and Resources told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution they went periods without full pay and were required by their recruiting firm to pay some or all of their immigration expenses, among other complaints. Global owner Paddy Sharma denied most of the accusations, although she admitted giving teachers subsistence wages while waiting to place them in a school. She blamed late paychecks on districts that were slow to pay her.
The code requires recruiters to be fully forthcoming about visa terms and fees and for school districts to directly employ the teachers, rather than using the recruiting firms as a go-between.
Last month, Atlanta Public Schools announced they were canceling their contract with recruiting firms and would instead directly employ all of their teachers. APS has not said whether they will hire international teachers for the coming school year or do without.
DeKalb County Schools responded to reporting in the AJC by putting their long-standing recruitment contracts out for public bid with provisions they say will bring new accountability to the process. However, outgoing Superintendent Michael Thurmond said the district would not directly employ teachers and he showed no interest in reversing an unpopular decision among teachers to not allow paid sick days for the district’s international faculty.
In the past five years, Georgia school districts have spent at least $52.5 million paying recruiting firms to import teachers, largely from India and other developing nations. The firms often place them in classrooms in high-poverty urban and rural areas. In some of the schools, international teachers make up the majority of science or math faculty, but because they remain the employees of the recruiting firms, they are moved regularly from school to school.
Georgia school district’s appetite for foreign teachers, combined with their distaste for directly hiring them, led North Carolina-based recruiting firm VIF International Education to withdraw from the state in recent years.
Company CEO David Young, who helped develop the code, said Georgia school districts have shown that they have no interest in the cultural exchange an international teacher provides. They are just looking to fill classrooms to meet a shortage, he said.
The AJC found some districts hire foreign teachers because it is a cheap solution to filling those vacancies.
In addition, Young said Georgia administrators want the recruiting firms to employ the teachers so the recruiter acts as a legal buffer between the teacher and school district.
Alliance director Mukul Bakhshi said this system presents a problem of “power balance and information asymmetry” for foreign teachers. The teachers, eager for higher-paying jobs in the United States, are sometimes charged high recruiting fees and often do not know the full terms of their employment. Rather than finding a job waiting for them when they arrive, foreign teachers can end up scrambling to find a teaching position in order to pay back debts owed to the recruiting firm that enticed them to come.
That’s what happened to Rogie Legaspi, a Filipino science teacher who was brought to Texas in 1992 by a recruiting firm and immediately told to hit the road, driving across the vast state in search of a job.
“They would put 18 of us in a seven-person van,” he said. Those same 18 teachers were housed in a two-bedroom apartment and paid 10 percent of their wages back to the recruiting firm for the next two years, he said.
After teaching in Texas for several years, Legaspi returned home to teach in the Philippines. His second trip to America in 2008 to teach in the Baltimore City Schools was a much different experience. Fees were expressed up front and he was employed directly by the school system, not a recruiting firm.
“That was important,” he said.
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