The New Import: Teachers

The new teacher struggles to keep the algebra lesson on track. An eighth-grader is fiddling with a broken pencil sharpener. Another sneaks out of the Compton classroom. “Please be good,” the teacher begs in accented English.

“Mr. Banas, where are you from?” one student asks.

The teacher smiles.

Relson Banas points to a spot on a classroom map, and a collective gasp goes up. “You mean you came all the way across the Pacific,” asks another student, “to teach us?”

Who would pay dearly to cross the ocean to teach middle-school math in one of Southern California’s lowest-performing school districts? Who would leave behind a 2-year-old daughter to share a house with four other adults in South-Central Los Angeles?

Banas did. And many of the Philippines’ best teachers are about to follow his lead.

Banas, who arrived in the United States in January, is the first ripple in a wave of experienced, English-speaking foreign teachers about to land on American shores. With school districts needing to hire 200,000 teachers a year to stem a national shortage, private recruiters plan to place at least 15,000 foreign teachers in American classrooms over the next five years.

“It won’t be long before people will be saying, ‘Relson, you brought along the whole island,’ ” Banas says.

The recruiting agencies are also eyeing India and China. But the Philippines--with an English-speaking school system founded by colonizing Americans--is emerging as the chief source of recruits. The recruiting companies, once devoted to bringing nurses to the U.S., are now switching to teachers.

Central to their success is putting the financial burden on the job seekers, not the schools. Foreign teachers pay the job agencies about $7,500, which covers the costs of passage and recruitment--and provides recruiters with a profit of up to $1,000 a head. With the teachers themselves picking up the tab, their recruitment is a free lunch for U.S. school districts.

These pipelines are so new that they have gone unnoticed by many U.S. educators. Nevertheless, recruiters have found customers in the Boston and Houston school districts. Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City have made inquiries. But the strongest market so far has been mid-size school districts in Southern California, which are struggling to meet a federal mandate for “highly qualified” licensed teachers. Philippine recruits, some of whom have advanced degrees, begin the credentialing process even before they leave the islands.

In the last academic year, San Bernardino hired 41 Philippine teachers, Inglewood 50 and Compton 58, including Banas.

The story behind this new bandwagon begins with a couple in the San Fernando Valley and 150 pioneers determined to reciprocate a little-known act of American generosity from a century ago.

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Three years ago, Randy Henry, an engineer at Xerox, and his wife, Susan, a native of the Philippines, read a newspaper report on the teacher shortage in Compton.

Susan Henry, daughter of a teacher, had grown up hearing stories of the Thomasites, 540 American teachers who arrived in the Philippines in 1901 aboard the U.S. Army transport ship Thomas and built an English-speaking educational system in what was then an American colony.

Since 1994, her company, Universal Agency, had been bringing Philippine nurses to staff American hospitals and nursing homes. She wondered if she could do the same with teachers, so well-prepared in the Thomasite tradition.

Foreign teachers are not new to American classrooms. Exchange programs are common, but those teachers must go home within three years. Some large U.S. school districts have tried recruiting foreigners but found the process too costly. The Henrys, working out of their home in Northridge, decided that a private firm could bring teachers both permanently and at no cost to the schools.

Randy Henry quit Xerox and put his retirement money into Universal Agency. To find teachers, the couple traveled to Susan Henry’s hometown of Cebu, the Philippines’ second-largest city.

The response was overwhelming. At a seminar for Cebu teachers, the Henrys had planned for 200 to show up; 1,500 did. The lure was clear: Many U.S. teachers get starting pay of $30,000 or more, while their most experienced counterparts in the Philippines are lucky to earn $5,000 a year.

The Henrys culled the applicants by demanding five years’ experience and requiring a passing grade on an exam based on the California Basic Education Skills Tests, which California teachers must pass to earn their full credential. Worried that applicants might have too rosy a view of U.S. education, Randy Henry screened “The Substitute 2,” a movie about a violent high school in the urban core.

Armed with teachers’ resumes, the Henrys began receiving a few bites from school districts. San Bernardino called first. Susan Henry explained that Universal--drawing on prospective teachers’ fees--could provide air fare to the Philippines for district recruiters.

San Bernardino had planned to hire 20 teachers. It ended up with twice that many, including the former dean of education at a Cebu university. A month later, the school district in Boston hired nine teachers from Cebu. In the spring, Inglewood hired 50.

“It’s an absolute gold mine,” says Douglas Agatep, the Inglewood schools’ chief human resource officer. Officially, the Philippine government is “flattered” by the recruiting, but it worries about the possible effect on education there.

“It is definitely a brain drain,” says Erlinda Alburo, head of the Cebu Studies Center at the University of San Carlos, where some of the recruited teachers taught. “They take the best teachers we have.”

Compton, a struggling district that only recently emerged from an eight-year state takeover, was desperate for qualified teachers--particularly in math and science. In the spring of 2001, Compton officials, working with the Henrys, took a recruiting trip to the Philippines. At one interview site, a line of 300 applicants stretched around the block.

By May 2001, the district had made offers to 58 teachers. They all accepted.

Relson Banas was one of them.

The 31-year-old had grown up in a rural community outside Iloilo, the son of a successful rice farmer. He moved to the city to attend college, earning a master’s degree in education, and taught math at a Catholic school.

Single and living with his mother, Banas had adopted a relative’s baby daughter. He did not have the $7,500 fee required by the recruiting program.

He took the offer anyway, scrounging half the fee from friends and relatives. He would pay them back, and the other half to the Henrys, once he was on the payroll in Compton. “This was the chance to practice my vocation in the land of milk and honey,” Banas says.

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The first teachers arrived in Los Angeles just before Christmas 2001, four months late--and very anxious. An INS agent at the airport, glancing at visas that showed “Compton Unified School District,” asked: “Did you bring a bulletproof vest?”

All Banas knew of his new city was that Venus and Serena Williams grew up there. “I thought Compton was a place where everyone played tennis,” he said.

Just getting to the United States had been an ordeal.

Banas and the other teachers, who had been scheduled to leave in August of last year, were delayed when the Immigration and Naturalization Service demanded that they obtain preliminary California teaching credentials before getting visas.

The state had no experience granting preliminary credentials to teachers while they were still overseas. California fingerprints all prospective teachers electronically, but there were no facilities to do so in the Philippines. Then the teachers’ ink-on-paper fingerprints were caught in a post-Sept. 11 backlog, as the number of visa background checks soared.

In the Philippines, the recruits--most of whom had already quit their jobs--grew desperate. Banas took a part-time job teaching ballroom dancing to make ends meet.

In Southern California, the schools that had hired them were desperate too. They were forced to rely on substitutes until Jan. 7, when the first teachers arrived.

The Henrys personally greeted all of them at LAX.

“At last!” cried Banas, as he spotted the Henrys.

“What took you so long?” Randy Henry joked.

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At 7 o’clock each weeknight, Banas takes a seat on a living room couch, alongside the four other teachers with whom he shares the $1,500-a-month rented home. Together they watch the game show “Jeopardy.” It is a half-hour break from lesson plans and a chance to test their assimilation.

They didn’t know the identity of California’s governor until “Gray Davis” came up as an answer on the show. But they ace the questions related to literature, science and movies.

“Jeopardy” is a rare ritual of familiarity in an extraordinarily difficult adjustment. The teachers say the Henrys have done their best to help them, organizing outings on holidays and advising them on American standards of promptness. Philippine churches in Carson have assisted some of the teachers, lining up van services to take them just about anywhere.

“I’m honored to be of service,” says their driver, Francisco Arzadon, also known as “Brother Ike.” He is paid $100 a month by each of six teachers to provide 24-hour transportation service.

But the teachers see Los Angeles as too large, too sprawling, and especially--for people from the tropics--too cold.

“It’s just freezing here,” says Banas.

For recreation, he walks to Magic Johnson Park or wanders the aisles of a local thrift store. On weekends, the teachers often head to a shopping mall, where the crowds remind them of the streets back home.

Many of the teachers have become close, because few members of their families have accompanied them--at least during this first year. The separation is hard.

“Daddy, come home,” Banas’ 2-year-old daughter, Aliah, pleads over the telephone one recent night. For a few minutes, the normally effusive Banas can’t say anything.

“I am grateful for my roommates and my fellow teachers,” he finally says. “It’s a slice of home for us. It’s a refuge.”

The American classroom--for all its wonders--is not.

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“Get to work, get to work,” Banas begs his afternoon class at Whaley Middle School. In the Philippines, his easy manner and corny math jokes were enough to handle students, some so well-behaved that he wondered if they understood the material. Here, merely holding the students’ attention is the challenge.

On this day, his offer of M&Ms; to those who stay quiet doesn’t work. So he has students dance on the floor’s linoleum tiles, channeling their energy into a lesson on graphing. He gently chides those who don’t behave or find comedy in his accent.

“Mr. Banas,” says one miscreant, with a feigned Philippine lisp, “we want to play.”

Banas presses on. Like the other Philippine teachers, he is in awe of the number and quality of textbooks and materials available to them. Teachers in the primary grades, whose classes back home sometimes swelled to 60, cannot get over the small class sizes mandated by California.

But controlling American children is daunting. The teachers have little experience dealing with rowdy behavior. In the Philippines, they say, there is more respect; students stand when they enter the room. On a van ride home, one Compton teacher asked Brother Ike: “Are all American children this rude?”

Southern California principals are mostly impressed, saying their new instructors are better steeped in their subject matter than many of their American counterparts.

“They are among our best teachers,” says Principal Kelcey Richardson of Compton’s Dominguez High School, which has six of the new arrivals.

But principals also say the Philippine teachers are too quick to refer poorly disciplined students to administrators instead of handling disruptions themselves.

The teachers have been well-received in Inglewood and San Bernardino. But in Compton, union members, school board trustees and parents have questioned whether the Pacific Islanders are a good match culturally for poor African American and Latino youngsters. “They seem to have some problems connecting with our kids,” says school board member Marjorie Shipp.

Some students have found otherwise. When Yz Barrientos, one of Banas’ housemates, asked her students to make a list of courageous people, one put the teacher herself on the list--just below Martin Luther King Jr.--for “coming over and teaching me.”

Justyn Brisbon, who served as eighth-grade vice president this spring at Whaley, says Banas was his best instructor. “He won’t move on ... until the entire class gets what he’s saying,” says Brisbon. “He’s good, and he knows what he’s talking about.”

Banas is now teaching math in summer school in preparation for his first full year in an American classroom. Once he passes the third and final section of the California teachers exam, he will be eligible to teach in Compton for at least four more years.

During that time, he says, he will apply for permanent residency in hopes of extending his teaching career here.

Banas is also greeting other Philippine teachers who are getting visas and coming over. The last of Compton’s and San Bernardino’s teachers arrived this summer. Inglewood is only now receiving the final 29 of its 50 teachers. These districts say they may return to the Philippines to hire even more.

When they do, the Henrys will be ready for them. The couple hope that their new Cebu office, which will offer U.S.-bound teachers classes in speech, classroom management and Spanish, will give them a leg up on a growing number of competitors, one of which just guided 60 teachers to Houston.

Banas recently bought a Kia Sportage, making him one of the first of the recruits to purchase his own car. He teaches a ballroom dance class Saturdays. In search of a bigger place closer to school, Banas and three other teachers have found a new home in Paramount.

The Philippine teachers gather on Friday once a month to compare notes. Some have signed up for Spanish classes. Banas is talking about pursuing a doctorate in education.

This summer, though, he is determined to find someone to teach him to play tennis. “I figure now that I’m in Compton,” he says with a grin, “I should play the local game.”

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Sol Vanzi in Cebu contributed to this report.