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Cleveland turns to India for teachers

Hannah Crumpet

Aside from a trip to Canada, Kevin Brown has never been outside the United States.

So when he boards a plane bound for Bombay this Sunday, it will be with no small measure of excitement. But Brown isn't a casual tourist: Instead of guidebooks, his bags will be packed with application materials and resume do's and don'ts.

As recruitment manager for the Cleveland Unified School District, Brown hopes to come home in two weeks with signed contracts for as many as 40 Indian teachers. He is part of a delegation of public school officials, who, with the help of a private company, have turned to India to cope with the current teacher shortage.

Several school districts across America, particularly in large cities such as Chicago and New York, have recruited teachers from abroad in recent years, mostly from Europe. But efforts in Cleveland -- one of the largest cities in the Midwest, with a metropolitan population of over three million -- have drawn attention because of the focus on India.

(Cleveland's situation may remind observers of the nursing and doctor shortage of the 1970s. India came to the rescue then. Ditto in the case of the declining number of Catholic priests, who were brought to America from their parishes in Goa and Kerala. And then came the need for hi-tech workers ... like the techies, the teachers too will come on H-1B visas. But unlike the keyboard clackers, their starting salaries -- in the $30,000 per annum range -- will be much lower.)

Cleveland's public school system is sending Brown, along with human resources director Carol Hauser and kindergarten teacher Michelle Rzucidlo-Rupright, to supplement their recruiting drive. The group will spend 12 days interviewing some 500 candidates in Bombay, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Madras. For the right matches, offers will be made on the spot.

"It will be a rigorous trip, but I'm looking forward to it," Brown said. "It will be an exciting opportunity for us to meet -- and, hopefully, hire -- a lot of great teachers to fill our needs."

Cleveland has about 77,000 students attending 122 schools. But of the 1,200 candidates interviewed for 800 positions last year, few were qualified -- particularly in the crucial areas of mathematics and science.

So when the time came to interview faculty for the fall 2001 school year, Brown turned to the Teachers Placement Group, a Plainview, New York-based firm that matches American school districts with teachers in India. Although it is only two years old, the company already boasts success with school districts in Maryland and Pennsylvania and has been approved by United States state department and the US department of education.

TPG has helped 24 Indian teachers find employment in America and hopes to add to that number with this year's trip.

According to Brown, India is an exceptionally attractive country for international recruiting efforts because of its strong educational system with an emphasis on maths and science. The high degree of English fluency also helps Indians to assimilate better into the US school system.

Indian teachers will have their credentials translated to American standards by a consulting group and they will then be accorded the same sliding pay scale as US teachers.

There has not been any negative reaction to the recruiting drive thus far, Brown said. In fields like hi-tech, efforts to import foreign workers have been vigorously fought by labour unions and other groups. "Actually this effort is being supported by the teachers' union," Brown said. "One of the members of our delegation [Rzucidlo-Rupright] is a union official and all the teachers we'll be bringing back will become union members, so it's a win-win situation for everyone."

"We're pretty desperate," added Allan Seifullah, executive director of external affairs for Cleveland's public schools. "I think this trip to India just underscores the problems that a lot of school districts have in recruiting teachers, particularly in the areas of math and science: Candidates are opting to go into business because the pay is much better."

According to Seifullah, Cleveland's recruiting push in India may in fact be part of a larger trend to solve the current drought in education. "Until we are able to address the factors that are preventing us from finding more teachers within the US, I think we're going to have to look to other countries," he observed. "And whether it's India or whether it's other nations, I think this is going to increase in the coming years."

(Nirshan Perera contributed to this report.)

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