Houston -- New Visa Ceiling Called Threat to Teacher Recruitment
Urban Schools Fear Restriction Will Cause Fall Staffing Shortages
By Karin Brulliard
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A03
HOUSTON -- A year ago, Vivek Agarwal left his home and family in India for a job teaching science at Houston's M.B. Smiley High School, a dingy inner-city school where dropout rates have been high. Agarwal, 36, who has a master's degree in chemistry and 14 years of experience in the classroom, has since spent long hours preparing innovative lessons and study materials for his students, who had been taught by a substitute for the six months before he arrived.
He is driven, he said, by his "keen desire to be the best teacher in the world."
For more than a decade, urban school districts from Washington, D.C., to Southern California have relied on international recruitment -- and generous visa rules -- to attract thousands of foreign teachers to fill jobs in areas with critical shortages, including math, science, bilingual education and special education.
But recent changes to a foreign worker visa program are threatening schools' ability to recruit and hire teachers such as Agarwal, school district officials say. They say a new limit on H-1B visas, a category U.S. schools and corporations use to temporarily hire foreign employees for specialty professions, has curtailed a crucial supply of mostly Asian and Latin American teachers.
Last month, midway into the fiscal year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it had reached the new ceiling on issuing the visas{ndash}65,000, a 17 percent cut from the number issued last year -- and no more would be issued until October, when fiscal 2005 begins. Because corporations take most of those slots, the visa cutoff has forced many schools, which usually recruit most aggressively in the spring and summer, to cancel international recruiting trips, turn away foreign applicants and worry that they will be short-staffed when the new school year begins in the fall.
"It will be impossible for these schools to have enough teachers in place for the new school year," said Paul L. Zulkie, president-elect of the Washington-based American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Among those affected is the Prince George's County school system in Maryland, which was in the process of recruiting more than 40 math and special education teachers from the Philippines when the cutoff was announced. If Prince George's schools have teaching vacancies in the fall, officials will wait until October to hire the teachers, said Robert J. Gaskin, human resources team leader.
Since the early 1990s, urban and rural schools have struggled with teacher shortages caused by low salaries, retiring baby boomers, poor working conditions, growing enrollments and mandated reductions in class sizes. Education officials say that despite aggressive recruiting, advertising and job fairs by school districts at home, too few Americans want or are qualified to fill all the available vacancies for teachers.
To bridge the gap, school officials began looking overseas. The figures are fuzzy, but educators estimate that at least several thousand foreigners are teaching in the United States on H-1B visas, which are valid for as many as six years. Although teachers recruited overseas represent a small fraction of new hires each year, they tend to be concentrated in large urban areas.
Demand for foreign teachers has been particularly acute in fast-growing Texas, the nation's second most populous state, where Spanish-speaking bilingual education teachers are in short supply.
School district officials in Houston and Dallas say they knew this year's visa ceiling would be reached quickly, so they sought foreign teachers last fall. But the limit cut off valuable months of recruiting time, they say.
In Houston's main school district alone, it is thought about 500 foreign teachers are working on temporary visas. Walter Simmons, director for staffing and recruitment for Houston's 45,000-student Alief Independent School District, estimates the district will need 100 new bilingual teachers this fall, not all of whom could be hired in the United States. To make up the shortfall, 15 bilingual teachers were recruited in Mexico in November, Simmons said. Eleven have been issued visas, but applications for the other four are pending and they may not have made the cut, he said.
If not for the new limit, Simmons said, the district probably would have hired at least 10 more foreign teachers this spring. "We know that the odds are we're not going to find enough," he said.
Beginning in 2000, Congress tripled the annual ceiling for H-1B visas, to 195,000, mostly to accommodate the high-tech boom's soaring demand for workers. The higher ceiling was for a three-year period, and after a year or so, the slumping high-tech sector sapped demand for the visas. But even as high-tech sputtered, the demand for teachers' visas remained strong. Last year about 78,000 of the visas were issued, not only for high-tech employees and teachers, but also for foreign fashion models and health care workers.
Immigration lawyers have pushed Congress to raise the limit again and allow some foreign workers, including school teachers, to be exempt from the limit -- as college professors and visiting scholars are. But in an election year when immigration and weak job growth have become campaign issues, the lawyers say Congress is unlikely to raise the limit.
Critics of the H-1B program have complained that the visas allow companies to bring in foreign labor for jobs that Americans could fill. Educators say that is not the case in the classroom, pointing to federal estimates that schools will have to fill 200,000 teaching jobs each year until the end of the decade.
"The persons to fill those positions are not in the pipeline," said Linda Isaacks, an associate superintendent for the Dallas Independent School District, which hired more than 90 foreign teachers last year.
The new visa limit has meant hardships even for teachers who have already been recruited and hired, and it may have dissuaded others from applying. To ensure they made the cutoff, Mexican teachers recruited last fall for Houston schools were asked to pay a $1,000 U.S. government fee that guarantees visa processing within two weeks. As a result, the number of teachers in next fall's crop plummeted to 106 from 150, said Rene Ruiz, director of Region IV Education Service Center, a recruiting and training organization that finds Mexican teachers for schools in the Houston area.
For now, school districts say they are left to compete with one another for scarce teachers and scramble to devise ways to find others. Dallas officials are planning a recruiting trip to Puerto Rico, where teachers who want to work in the United States do not need visas.
At Houston's Smiley High, Agarwal, the Indian science teacher, says he would like to stay in the United States permanently. He acknowledged that teaching at Smiley High was tough at first. Some students had trouble understanding his accent; some were rowdier than students he had dealt with before. But in a few weeks, his wife, a journalist whom he has not seen since he left India, will join him in Houston. "I think I'm in the right place now," he said. "These kids need a good teacher."
Smiley High's administrators consider Agarwal and eight other foreign teachers recruited last year major assets, and the thought of doing without more like them is dispiriting for the educators.
"He's young, energetic, he has vast knowledge of the subject area, and he has a good rapport with the students," said Norris Rhines, principal of the 1,500-student school. "It would be very difficult to find someone of his caliber here."
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