Migrant Teachers: How American Schools Import Labor

by Lora Bartlett

Overview

Migrant Teachers investigates an overlooked trend in U.S. schools today: the growing reliance on teachers trained overseas. This timely study maps the shifting landscape of American education, as federal mandates require K-12 schools to employ qualified teachers or risk funding cuts. Lora Bartlett asserts that a narrowly technocratic view of teachers as subject specialists has spurred some public school districts to look abroad. When these districts use overseas-trained teachers as transient, migrant labor, the teachers have little opportunity to connect well with their students, thereby reducing the effectiveness of their teaching.

Approximately 90,000 teachers from the Philippines, India, and other countries came to the United States between 2002 and 2008. These educators were primarily recruited by inner-city school districts that have traditionally struggled to attract teachers. From the point of view of school administrators, these are excellent employees. They are well educated, experienced, and able to teach in areas like math, science, and special education where teachers are in short supply.

Despite the additional recruitment of qualified teachers, American schools are failing to reap the possible benefits of the global labor market. Bartlett shows how the framing of these recruited teachers as stopgap, low-status workers cultivates a high-turnover, low-investment workforce that undermines the conditions needed for good teaching and learning. Bartlett calls on schools to provide better support to both overseas-trained teachers and their American counterparts. Migrant Teachers asks us to consider carefully how we define teachers' work, distribute the teacher workforce, and organize schools for effective teaching and learning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674055360
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	01/06/2014
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 11.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lora Bartlett is Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction and Overview 1

Part 1 The Count, Context, and Conditions

1 The Scope and Pattern of Overseas Trained Teachers in U.S. Schools 15

2 The Perfect Policy Storm: Colonization, Education, and Immigration 32

Part 2 The Teachers and the Schools

3 Transnational Teacher Motivations and Pathways 45

4 Navigating Migration 66

5 A Tale of Two Schools: The Transient School and the Transplant School 82

Part 3 Implications

6 Teachers' Work 103

7 Transnational Teacher Migration 117

Afterword 127

Appendix: Investigating Teacher Migration 137

Notes 163

References 173

Acknowledgments 179

Index 181

Editorial Reviews

A powerful exploration of a significant and neglected issue in American education. Migrant Teachers is a very original book.

John Skrentny

This important study persuasively describes the motivations for teacher migration and the insecurity of their tenure in America, and reveals, for the first time, how dependent some urban schools have become on overseas-trained teachers.

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Migrant Teachers highlights a largely invisible phenomenon in American schools—the hiring of teachers from other countries, and the concentration of those teachers in high poverty schools and districts. Lora Bartlett places teacher labor markets in global context, opening a new line of research on teachers' work and careers, and compelling us to consider what it means to be a teacher at this time and place.

Judith Warren Little

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