As loathe as I am to do anything at all to promote the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) I think this is an important article- "AFT Report Finds Abuse in Overseas Teacher Recruitment."
While teaching in a Baltimore City school last year I worked with a Filipino who left a young husband and two kids behind to work in the U.S. teaching. She and her husband were in serious debt from their education. Her parents agreed to raise their children while the husband worked in Taiwan. The grandparents also gave their house as collateral for the loan that was necessary to pay the recruitment company. Arriving in Baltimore, my co-teacher along with many other Filipinos were housed in a brand new, very expensive high rise development. They were not permitted to break the lease made for them for a full year. My co-teacher struggled to teach across multiple cultural barriers- just like me- but there is no doubting her commitment and absolute love for teaching and for the students. The article also rightly notes that many foreign teachers have been highly succesful in the classroom.
We met one of these teaching recruits while traveling in the Phillipines. She was a teacher in the Bronx, but on vacation with her two children in the Phillipines and visiting her mother. Her experience in NYC had been challenging and she had little positive to say... she had done it only to give her children a better future. And that seemed to be working out. She had grown up in a poor. rural, and mountainous area of the northern Phillipines and when we met her she was enroute with her mother and children for a beach vacation on Boracay, a stunning resort island.
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