Posted on 03/18/2009 9:25:21 PM PDT by Steelfish
Filipino teachers exchange homeland for jobs in America
More than 100 school districts, including at least 20 in California, are recruiting in the Philippines to fill teacher shortages in math, science and special education.
By Teresa Watanabe
March 18, 2009
Filipino exchange teacher Ferdinand Nakila landed in Los Angeles expecting "Pretty Woman" scenes of swank Beverly Hills boulevards and glittering celebrities.
What he got was Inglewood, where he stayed for two weeks in temporary housing and encountered drunkards, beggars, trash-filled streets and nightly police sirens.
It got worse. In training sessions about American classrooms he received in the Philippines, he was told his students might not be quite as polite and respectful as those in his homeland.
Nothing, however, prepared him for the furious brawl that broke out in one of his Los Angeles classrooms, where two girls rolled around on the floor clawing at each other while the other students jumped on the desks and cheered.
But Nakila said his American sojourn has transformed him into a far better educator than when he arrived in August 2007. In the Philippines, he was imperious and demanding, throwing students out of his classroom for inadequate preparation with little thought of their plight.
In Los Angeles, his daily encounters with students struggling to learn despite shattered homes, sexual abuse, physical violence or hunger have humbled him into a new vision of teaching.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
“Filipino exchange teacher Ferdinand Nakila landed in Los Angeles expecting “Pretty Woman” scenes of swank Beverly Hills boulevards and glittering celebrities.
What he got was Inglewood, where he stayed for two weeks in temporary housing and encountered drunkards, beggars, trash-filled streets and nightly police sirens.”
welcome to america!
that is about it. the glamour is gone. we are all going to be fighting for the best freeway ramp to live by.
" Wow, it took less than two years to transform him from a man who helped his students grow by expecting them to work hard to another liberal education enabler who pities the students and thus doesn't expect much.
Welcome to the third world of inner city schools. The victim mindset and self destructive behavior exhibited in these schools is an abomination. Woe to the kids who try to learn in these horrible environments. I think that a tough love with no tolerance for poor discipline would go a long way to fix the problem. At least the remaining students would learn something.
Don’t we have teachers here that will qualify? Oh, I forgot they will all be splitting rocks to build roads.
Remember the movie about Joe Clark, the educator? The first day of the school, he called an assembly and called all the miscreants up on stage. Then, he had a security team surround them and usher them out of the school, permanently. One kid came back, apologized and was let back in. The others were permanently expelled. The whole school begin to improve after that.
If the inner city kids learn to speak English and do math as well as the Filipino immigrant teachers, it’ll be a plus.
Where is the ‘another reason to homeschool’ ping list?
This is Hollywood, after all.......
******sarcasm-sequencer-disengages*******
Yep. I remember that movie. It was a movie and not real life after all. Based on a real life story but with creative control and license and all that.
LMAO! And the part where he locks the doors from the inside, fire hazard, and all that.
Life is so much less messy in movies and in minds of some people.
Betcha a dollar the LATimes published a story within the last week about homegrown American teachers who were laid off because of school budget cuts.
One sad thing about this recuiting from the Philippines is that there is a very big brain-drain from the islands. People who are educated and productive are leaving there for points world wide.
Socialism is practiced in the labor market in the Philippines which prevents personal advancement and hopes of increased salaries, and that is a big reason Filipinos want to leave there.
The Philippines employs socialist labor reform and socialist land reform. We have experience with both there, and it is a very corrupt government.
In our local paper last week (the Daily News) we were discussing this in Topix because the teachers were given warnings that they may receive pink slips. Then I mentioned that we give in-state tuition to illegal aliens, isn’t it probable that we have illegal alien teachers? I asked if we E-Verify teachers and the topic just died.
So, I went to Youtube and did a search. There was a video of teachers protesting, if you watched long enough you would have seen the teachers speaking in Mexican. Throughout the video you can hear someone in the background speaking on a megaphone in Mexican.
Reading the LA Times “story” you can see that we have 600 foreigners that can be let go before we touch a single American.
Here is a video of Philippines’ celebrating getting a job that pays 10 times what they would make at home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsc1EdbK81g
L.A. has been importing Filipino teachers for decades. The mother of a good friend of mine came over to teach in about 1970.
An economic downturn would result in a lack of foreign recruitment, not more of it.
There are tons of California teachers getting laid off...this infuriates me...there are no jobs that the globalist will not steal from Americans...go home now. Americans need jobs.
It is also my understanding that any Filipino veterans who served attached to American military units from 1942 to 1953 pretty much had/have an open door to the USA as a benefit for service. When I was a boy in California we knew many Filipino families who ended up in the USA on this basis.
To the Philippines government there is kind of a trade-off. Billions in foreign exchange get sent back to the PI. But they are not developing very much on their own for themselves in-country. Their scientists leave; their best teachers leave; their skilled medical people leave.
It is interesting that the Asian School of Management in Manila was rated in 2004 as the 17th best in the world. That's pretty high. But their best managers leave the Philippines with that diploma for other countries where their skills will be rewarded.
The Philippines is one of the most difficult places for the Filipinos themselves to develop a good resume. It's even hard to keep an entry-level job there.
College students take minimum wage jobs at fast-food restaurants and mall outlets, but in six months they are hunting another entry-level job. If they stay longer the company must pay their social security and health benefits, by law, so the companies just lay them off before they have 181 days on the job. Very few can stay long enough to ascend to management. The labor laws are very socialistic.
So college young people who have got the brains and tenacity to succeed plan early on to leave the Philippines for the USA, Britain, Australia, Israel, etc.
Some of this was explained to me by a one of the Philippines’ best cancer surgeons. He also does general surgery. He removed my son's appendix, and he repaired my hernia. He was trained in surgery there in the Philippines by American and German surgeons. But his income is surprisingly low. He has invitations after invitation to use his skills abroad, and continuously considers it. But the last I heard he is still there. His wife is a well-respected pediatrician. The two of them together quite literally saved my boy's life when his appendix split open like a pea pod. I am very grateful.
It's just a real shame that the Philippines in general stays so backward -— it is socialism that holds the country back. The government allows itself to be intimidated in its policy-making by the Marxist movements there that are actually terrorist organizations. Bombings and assassinations are a part of Philippines life.
Then with earthquakes, typhoons, and volcanoes, the country stays in a mess.
And of course, the terrorist Muslims that fight on-and-on for control of Mindanao, supported by Muslims in nearby Indonesia and the Middle-East drain the country of capital as they merely try to maintain some security and sanity.
Few like to admit that the greatest economic and infrastructure advancement the Philippines made in the last 100 years was under the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was no angel himself. But millions there wish they could go back to the days of Marcos — and those who so reminisce are often the most successful of the business people in the islands.
Several factors of course contribute to a remaining affection for Marcos. The USA had huge military bases there that brought capital and provided hundreds of thousands of jobs. Marcos heavy-handidly kept the communists and Muslims under control. When Marcos was not busy fighting the communists, he did work to promote free-enterprise in the country. That does not ignore the fact that there was a lot of government corruption, and Marcos took a lot of advantage himself.
One man with whom we still do work in the Philippines is the sugar cane operations vice president for one of the largest (if not THE largest) diversified conglomerates in the country. They operate commercial farms, construction companies, and a large broadcasting company. I've gained quite an education on Philippines history, economics, and social society from this man. His biggest beef? Socialism, including labor and land reform. He often says that what the country needs, in the near term, and only in the near term, is actually a benevolent dictator.
Well, he lived and worked under a dictator -— Ferdinand Marcos. He really doesn't believe in dictatorship per se, but he sees little in the current national government as full of corruption and Marxist influence as it is. He is one who laments the long-running brain-drain from the Philippines.
The U.S. Embassy in Manila is one big “billboard” actually advertising for workers to enter the USA, and each day there are very long lines of Filipinos applying for U.S. visas. The embassy publishes ads for nurses, therapists, teachers, and other skilled professionals, and there are large ads for these posted throughout the embassy, as well as in travel agencies, universities, and institutes throughout the country.
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