Teacher Shortage Leads to Offshore Recruiting

The American Federation of Teachers (ADT) has released a report that highlights the growing trend of school districts to look overseas for personnel that will take hard-to-fill teaching jobs in the United States. Typically the most difficult teaching roles to fill are in math, the life sciences and in special education.

The teacher shortage is just one scenario that speaks to the immigration issue over which there has been so much high-octane screeching in 2009. In 2007, there were 19,000 teachers working in the United States on temporary visas. Currently this represents a tiny fraction of our teaching population, which approaches three million in number. It is, however, a trend that the AFT suggests is worthy of notice. The report highlights the fact that similar importation of educated professionals began in the nursing industry fifty years ago. Today, one of three nurses hired in this country was trained in a foreign country.

For people who are looking to revamp their careers, teaching is an option for which there are multiple educational tracks. If you have some post-secondary education experience it may be that you can transfer many, if not all of those credits into a teaching program. Many special education schools are accustomed to training people who have been working in education as teacher's aides or teaching elsewhere within the system.

School districts across the nation are making adjustments in order to fill those difficult slots. Today people with an associate's degree in an unrelated field are returning to school and manage to complete teacher education at multiple levels in a relatively short period of time. For many school districts, there has a pragmatic approach on licensing requirements in order to find sufficient teaching personnel.

Online education at the K-12 level has become an accepted reality, in part due to the lack of sufficient teachers in some of the more difficult job slots. One math teacher can teach a course for multiple classrooms or for students studying from home. Kaplan Virtual Education announced this week that it will be providing online education in four Wisconsin school districts. All teachers will be accredited Wisconsin instructors. Completion of that agreement now puts Kaplan in seven states, providing middle school and high school online options.

Online education is a great option in the K-12 range but it shouldn't be the only option. Teaching jobs can be a worthy choice for people searching for a second career. If it's something you are considering, contact your local school district to determine what the requirements are today for credentialed teachers in the field you're considering. You can also look into the teaching and education degrees that are offered online if you need that sort of flexibility.