No Teachers are being outsourced!!! GHS hires three teachers from India

[devilgrrl]

GHS hires three teachers from India

By: Abby Fox, Staff Writer
Principal says he may be first in state to recruit from India

August 1, 2003

Greenwood High School Principal George Noflin says he's had to look farther than ever to find good teachers. Just recently, he hired three teachers from India, and he expects their arrival any day now. To his knowledge, Noflin is the first principal in Mississippi to seek and hire teachers from India. He found them after Carey Spears, the former personnel director and a former principal of Greenwood High, introduced him to the idea, he said. After 85 interviews which Noflin and Spears conducted in India earlier in the summer, Noflin chose three. Garima Malhotra will teach compensatory math and compensatory reading. She has taught special education for three years and has done extensive research in special education. N. C. Spriram Mallani will teach upper-level math courses such as advanced algebra, probability and pre-calculus. He has taught math for 14 years and has published several articles.Preetika Randive will teach geometry. She has taught mathematics for 11 years. All of the teachers have master's degrees in their field.Spears and Noflin discovered the teachers through USA Employment, an organization based in Houston, Texas that connects teachers from all over the world with jobs in the United States. USA Employment pre-screens applicants before the interested American employer comes to interview them. It also pays the cost of transportation and housing for the employer. "I didn't deal with the technical aspects of it," Noflin said. "It didn't cost the school one red cent." Noflin could have interviewed teachers from almost anywhere in the world, but he wanted to choose from a country with a mass of highly educated teachers, he said. "In New Delhi, India, there's about 16 million people there in one city. It's a teacher headquarters."His overseas hiring success is a great relief, Noflin said, because it's becoming more and more difficult to hire educated and experienced teachers every year.

"This was the toughest recruiting year we've ever had," he said. "Folks are getting out of education. A lot of people retired. Some people left to go back to school. There are a lot of different reasons. Private industry has taken some good quality teachers, and the pay scale hasn't helped."It depleted our math department. Areas like math and science are very difficult to fill," he said. "You have schools in the state vying for the same 10 or 15 graduates. They gobble them up quickly," he said.Greenwood Public Schools Superintendent Les Daniels agreed that the hiring situation had become more dire than ever. He said that the decision to recruit teachers from abroad was made for one reason only - to answer the teacher shortage."We've had math positions open all summer, and there were no takers," he said."We go where we need to go to find certified teachers," he said. "They just happened to be from India. They're certified and qualified. We were looking for certified, qualified teachers." But some of those hiring worries are now in the past, Noflin said, because he can look forward to the aptitude and experience of the Indian teachers."I would put my child in their class.

more> http://www.usaemployment.org/rmc_march02_4.htm

[_Jumper_]

1. So what?

<"We've had math positions open all summer, and there were no takers," he said."We go where we need to go to find certified teachers," he said. "They just happened to be from India. They're certified and qualified. We were looking for certified, qualified teachers.">

Should they have waited forever until the "right kind" of person applied????

[devilgrrl]

4. That's not what I'm getting from it.

What it seems to be insinuating is that the school district doesn't have to pay them as much as they would had they hired American teachers! Oh how convenient that they can't find people to fill the positions. Which doesn't say much for the state of public education, does it? The State of Mississippi is also paying to room and board these imported teachers as well as paying them lower salaries! You don't have a problem with that? It's just like all the tech job being exported, let's see you defend that! :spank:

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

2. I'm in Alabama and I can believe that there weren't enough qualified

people in the area...

But I really see the justification of an overseas trip a little more.


Unca Bill at an Interview

[juajen]

3. And, it begins

The breaking of the teacher's unions. Stupendous, because they will work for less. Stupid us, we keep trying to raise teacher's salaries.

On edit: The GHS principal said qualified americans were getting jobs that paid more. What kind of visa are these indians getting to work here? I know that here, at the university level, we have many foreign teachers, especially in the math departments. However, I have a genius brother who taught for many years, who has a PH.D in Mathematics from the Univ. of Chicago, and he wanted to teach. Problem was, he wanted a decent salary. They wanted to hire him part time for specific classes, paying practically nothing. We do have qualified people, they just want to be paid.

[devilgrrl]

5. Exactly.

n/t

[Lindsay]

6. Somebody from Cleveland, OH can correct me

if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember they've been hiring teachers from India for a while now, because of budget constraints. (In other words, the better teachers went for the better money in the suburbs.)

It's a race to the bottom...and don't even get me started on waivers and "No Child Left Behind."