SCABBING OUR SCHOOLS

The Washington Post Magazine, on Sunday, August, 3rd, ran a cover story, Outsourcing Our Schools, showing a glamorous photo of the smiling face of a Filipino teacher in Prince George’s County. The blurb accompanying the portrait read, “Desperate for qualified teachers, Prince George’s County has imported hundreds from the Philippines. It’s good for the country’s students, but what about the teachers’ own children,” What follows is a letter to the editor I sent to The Washington Post.

As a dedicated veteran teacher of forty years in the New York City school system I was very upset by the cover story of the August 3rd Washington Post Magazine glorifying modern day scabbing of the suburban schools. It's a sad commentary on our education system that we are outsourcing the education of our students to foreign workers willing to work for lower salaries than American teachers. The propaganda article glamorizes the hard work and dedication of non-citizen Filipinos who are dazzled by salaries that are high by labor standards in Manila. We are made to sympathize and empathize with the teacher whose smiling portrait graces the cover as she valiantly struggles to support a husband and three children back in the Philippines.

Why are not American teachers being employed in these schools systems? There are hundreds of thousands of hard-working, dedicated professionals across the country who would be able and willing to successfully teach in Prince George's County. If the pay and working conditions in the schools were improved, American college graduates would be lining up for these jobs. School systems need only employ qualified pro-teacher principals and administrators who are willing to help teachers deal with difficult students, rather than harass them, work against them and attempt to drive them out of the system before they gain tenure.

There are plenty of professional educators in this country who have families to support and who would make superb teachers. The goal of school systems should not involve importing cheap foreign labor into our classrooms in an effort to depress wages and bust unions.

The Post Magazine cover proudly proclaims, "It's good for the county's students." Who would you want in front of the classroom instilling knowledge and the values of citizenship to your children: a highly qualified American educator or a foreigner with little knowledge of our nation's deep heritage, culture, history and civic values. The history of the Philippines has unfortunately never been associated with the growth of democracy and civil liberties.

Postscript: I would like to note that NYC emulated this feat in the early 1990’s by bringing in cheap labor from Manila, as well as from Trinidad, Austria and Eastern Europe. UFT President Sandra Feldman boasted about helping these replacement workers find housing in NYC. I always wondered why she never questioned why the Board of Education could not raise salaries and improve working conditions, so as to attract educators from the metropolitan area. After all, in our better paying suburbs they have no need to import cheap labor from abroad. In her infinite wisdom our own leader was helping to scab our schools. However, the influx from abroad was a total failure as the novices were unable to control their classes and could not afford the high cost of living in NYC. (I always wondered if the Filipino contingent was nicknamed “the Manila folders.”)