Chapter 13: Importing International Educators: A Neoliberal Assault on Public Education as We Know It

The profession of education has not escaped the currents of neoliberalism now roiling the globe (Giroux, 2004; Gutierrez, 2009; Harvey, 2007; Robertson, 2008). Teachers’ unions, which historically have pushed back against the encroachment of market forces into public schooling, have necessarily been a target (Harvey, 2007; Robertson, 2008). The erosion of teachers’ and other public-sector workers’ collective bargaining rights in 2011 and 2012, most publicly in Wisconsin but in many other states as well, was disheartening, but not surprising. Outside the United States, the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment policies have required many developing countries to pay teachers far too little (Global Campaign for Education, 2009; Spreen & Edwards, 2011). Meanwhile, chronic underfunding of many central-city and rural schools in the U.S. (Baker, Sciarra & Farrie, 2012; Kozol, 2005) has made these schools not very desirable places to teach or learn (American Federation of Teachers [AFT], 2009; Eaton, 2006; Hadley Dunn, 2011). Underpayment of teachers in developing countries and neglect of many schools in the U.S. support another practice in public education: recruitment of international teachers without a long-term stake in union negotiations to work in U.S. classrooms. This “burgeoning phenomenon in the neoliberal push for alternative teacher recruitment” (Hadley Dunn, 2011, p. 1381) has been justified in large part through undocumented claims of teacher shortages—a politically charged discourse that warrants far more scrutiny than it has received.¹