Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times, 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.
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Nakila is part of a recent wave of foreign exchange teachers from the Philippines, who are primarily being recruited to fill chronic teacher shortages in math, science and special education throughout the United States. More than 100 school districts, including at least 20 in California, are recruiting from the Philippines, said Los Angeles immigration attorney Carl Shusterman.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has hired 250 to 300 teachers from the Philippines—the largest contingent among more than 600 foreign exchange teachers overall, a district official said.
The statewide budget crisis and impending layoffs, however, have prompted L.A. Unified to suspend its foreign recruitment this year, said Deborah Ignagni, a district human resources administrator.
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L.A. school officials have tapped the Philippines for several reasons, Ignagni said. The higher education system is similar, so credits are easily transferable for U.S. teaching credentials.
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And most Filipinos speak English and can understand some Spanish, which is embedded in the Filipino language as a result of Spain’s 300-year colonization of the islands.
Many of the teachers themselves say they jumped at the chance to work in the United States, lured primarily by far better pay. Most teachers in the Philippines earn $300 to $400 a month, less than one-tenth what they can pull down in Los Angeles.
But high processing fees from recruitment and visa sponsoring agencies have strapped many with debts of $10,000 or more.
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The teachers had hoped for work visas that would potentially lead to green cards. But L.A. Unified brings them in on three-year teacher exchange visas known as J-1s because they are easier to obtain, Ignagni said. The district is now applying for work visas for some teachers whose exchange visas have expired.
Rocky beginnings
Once the teachers arrive in Los Angeles, school officials give them a two-week orientation and offer job fairs to connect them with schools. But many describe a rocky start: loneliness, befuddlement over bus routes, apartment hunting, dealing with U.S. currency, American-style resume-writing. And, once in the classroom, utter shock.
Asked to describe his first year, Garcia leaned back in his chair, covered his face with his hands and murmured, “Oh, God.”
His ninth-graders’ average math skills were sixth-grade level. While he was trying to teach, students roamed the classroom, applied makeup, chatted with one other, tuned out with iPods. A hallway fight started spilling into his class, and when he tried to push the brawlers back out, he said, he was reprimanded for touching them.
During a recent evening interview at his Washington Boulevard apartment, Nelson de la Cruz pulled up his shirt to reveal a black and blue bruise. He got it, he said, after a student threw a book at him. Another teacher suffered injuries after a chair was thrown at her, said Daniel Gumarang of the Filipino American Educators Assn. of Los Angeles, which is aiding the teachers.
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Nakila, for instance, said he learned something every day about how to handle his students. One lesson: be sensitive to their backgrounds. Aiming to inspire them, he presented Latino success stories and asked students to write about their own heroes, but the reaction was negative, even angry. When he told them about his own heroic father and asked them to describe their own, Nakila said one lashed out, “I don’t even know his name, and I don’t want to know.”
Now he avoids lessons that might cause them to feel inadequacies in their own families.
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Original article
Email
Teresa Watanabe
at teresa.watanabe@latimes.com .
(Posted on March 18, 2009)
Comments
Hey, not to mention that many Filipinos might have accents which would make them difficult to understand? In medical transcription, a thick Filipino accent can be pretty difficult to understand.
I had a teaching scholarship out of high school (but in Florida). I eventually gave it back. Now, nearly 40 years after graduating from high school and reading about what goes on in today’s schools, I’m glad I didn’t become a teacher—although I have to say I’m still grateful for what good teaching I received myself.
Something like this happened in New York about 20 years ago. A white hating racist Judge was persuaded by MALDEF LARAZA to issue an order that the NY schools hire thousands of teachers who spoke excellent spanish for the next school year.
So NYC schools recruited several thousand teachers from Spain. Most were women. Many had just finished college. So these young Spanish ladies arrived and were of course sent to the worst Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Columbian infested schools.
It was horrible. The ‘students’ behaved in their usual way. Some of the teachers left after a few days. Others had to wait for their first paycheck for the airfare home. Most of them were gone by Christmas.
This is a job Americans actually won’t do. I’m not talking about teaching, but teaching at high stress schools in LA like the ones described. There shouldn’t be objections to the exchange program.
So the Third World immigrant students have made our public schools such a living hell that native-born Americans refuse to teach them- leading to the school districts importing teachers from the Third World!
Our country is doomed.
I have worked with Philippino people often and still communicate with a good many of them. They are good people and VERY tolerant of verbal and in some case physical abuse, but they are unfamiliar with blacks overall. Those Philippinos that DO KNOW blacks do not like them.
“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.”
What this amounts to is the old LA Times leftist propaganda, turning the miscreants into victims. What is it this time? Oh, yeah, they don’t get breakfast and only kool aid sometimes, so that excuses their uncontrolled mayhem throughout the school.
If the truth were really known, this poor, shocked guy is parroting the PC party line for a salary that is 10 times what he could make in the phillipines, until he can get enough money to escape.
With slanted stories like this one it’s no wonder the LA Times is going out of business, just like the Seattle Post and the New York Times. The NYT and the LAT are on the ropes big time and the Post has already hit the canvas in a knockout.
There’s a web site now entitled Newspaper Death watch: http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/2008/04/29/circ-implosion-continues-top-10-sunday-papers-lost-635000-readers/
It tracks the newspapers during their continuing decline.
I can’t think of a better payback than complete dissolution of these liberal rags.
Of course, it’s the liberal journalism schools that put these types out, and the media organizations that set the standards for being PC, but in the final analysis the writers themselves are to blame mostly. This continuing spiral downward is going to put a lot of the leftist PC liars out on the street, looking for work.
Philippine people are very patient and well educated by and large. Phillipino doctors are also quite good from my experience. I’d have no problem living near a Philippine family over some third-world trash from Mexico or inner city blacks. If our leaders are insisting on bringing in immigrants, it’s a shame we can’t prioritize educated asians over uneducated latin americans and other third-worlders.
Why not send the “students” to the Philippines and let them go to school there?
The US educational system is a total mess thanks to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. Fifty years later, those judges should have stayed around to see the chaos they created in society as a whole, the next to the bottom in international testing, etc. etc. The crowning glory is the current president of that decision. Inexperienced and big question mark if he is even a natural born citizen. What does it take to go back to the intellectual and wisdom level of the Founding Fathers? What we have is housewife nancy pelosi, etc. in leadership positions.
“The teachers had hoped for work visas that would potentially lead to green cards”
Canada has such a program. In exchange for being a live-in nanny for three years with a Canadian family, Filipino women can apply for citizenship. They can then apply to sponsor their family.
Last year 6000 Filipino nannies became Canadians through the program.
Why does the U.S. need Filipino teachers? It’s an honest question, that any U.S. politician should be asked.
Nakila is part of a recent wave of foreign exchange teachers from the Philippines, who are primarily being recruited to fill chronic teacher shortages in math, science and special education throughout the United States.
The reason there is such a shortage of native born teachers is because Americans are well aware of the state of public schools so those with alternative choices for employment will not take a public school teaching job. What has caused the mess? Decades of liberal idiocy dominating the teaching professions, legal contstraints that prevent any sort of discipline from being maintained, and of course the ever larger proportion of blacks and Hispanics in our schools, the lowest and second lowest average IQ groups in our country.
When I was a child most public schools were serviceable if not great. If I had children today I’d home school them.
Reading about this behavior is almost incomprehensible. All I can say is that they need to put the nuns in charge. I shudder to think what Sr. Mary Catherine could do with just a look. We knew never to test her. Who wanted to be turned into a pillar of salt? The point is DISIPLINE!
I’ve caught flak here for defending Filipinos before, but let me reiterate: I’ve worked closely with several Filipinos and they have been respectful, consciencious, hard-working and easy to get along with. Furthermore, as citizens of an ex-US territory, they are somewhat familiar with US government, institutions, and customs. They are a far more desirable minority to have in one’s country than others.
“Now he (Ferdinan Nakila) avoids lessons that might cause them to feel inadequacies in their own families.”
In a world where most women don’t make advances towards subsistance wage earning men, having philipinos working and emmigrating everywhere around the world, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Taiwan, Japan, USA, Canada and more, especially at easier service type jobs, is nothing more than a plot to destroy Philipino men. Calling it ‘outreach’ or whatever doesn’t change what it is.
The best training for these Flippino teachers would be to spend some time at local reform schools and maximum security prisons. After that a good course in Martial Arts should be mandatory. Yes, I guess there are a few jobs that Americans won’t do.
Back in the 1950’s, my uncle took a teaching job in a NYC school (that was all black) after obtaining his degree via the GI bill. He lasted one year and then moved on to social work. So this is nothing new. For safe (read white and asian )suburban schools, there are probably 20 - 30 applications for each opening.
Thirty years ago I taught for three years in a Catholic school here in Chicago, and there were three Philipino teachers on the staff. On a whole, they were as good as American-trained teachers. They did have accents which some of the parents did not like. We also had three nuns, two of whom spoke with Polish accents. That is America.
I’ve caught flak here for defending Filipinos before, but let me reiterate: I’ve worked closely with several Filipinos and they have been respectful, consciencious, hard-working and easy to get along with. Furthermore, as citizens of an ex-US territory, they are somewhat familiar with US government, institutions, and customs. They are a far more desirable minority to have in one’s country than others.
I know a teacher with fantastic credentials; a master’s, advanced courses for teaching math and science….you name it. She makes big money teaching in inner-city schools in the Deep South. But she’s desperate to get out before something (exceptionally) bad happens. She’s been all over Northwest Arkansas, trying to get a job…even willing to take a huge pay cut….but even she cannot get ANYTHING. Nobody wants to teach blacks. Everybody is trying to get into the very few all-white school systems left in America.
I have worked with Philippino people often and still communicate with a good many of them. They are good people
In my experience, Filipinos are among the least odious of our non-white immigrants. Most of them are actually very likable. Would that all non-white immigrants were like them. However, the fact remains that we are white nationalists and Filipinos are not us.
This is one post where I wont bash the immigrants for coming here. I can certainly understand why filipinos would jump at the chance to come to the USA, the fact that the jobs cant be filled by US teachers is indicative of the chaos and stupidity of the California schools.
I live on a block with filipinos. They bought one house, then brought over more family, and bought the house next door. They now have the one across the street and each is immaculate. They have been nothing but good and generous neighbors, and I genuinely like them, and I am glad to have them here. Considering the other ‘diversity’ on my block, I would import filipinos myself if I could export some of my other neighbors.
I am a teacher on the south side of Chicago and I regret my career choice. It was my experiences in CPS that brought me to AR.
I’m a Spanish teacher and I must say that some of my best students are Filipino. None of them is a discipline problem nor are most Asian students. The main troublemakers are the Blacks, Hispanics and wannabe White trash.
Question — Why are school districts which are laying off teachers due to the economy and budget cuts importing
I had some brief experiences in the Philippines while in the military and they were mostly negative — I became aware that there was an awful lot of poverty, violence and corruption going on in those beautiful islands. But,
I had some brief experiences in the Philippines while in the military and they were mostly negative — I became aware that there was an awful lot of poverty, violence and corruption going on in those beautiful islands. But, all of my experiences since then with Filipinos who have immigrated to the U.S.A., whether they were neighbors, co-workers, fellow church members, my doctors and nurses, or whatever, have been positive. This pleasantly surprised me. There must be some explanation.
There is. Filipinos in the U.S. are not a typical cross-section of Filipino society for a couple of reasons. First of all, people who choose to leave their country and immigrate to a country thousands of miles away are a highly self-selecting sample. Second of all, the U.S. government is actually quite picky about who it lets in to this country legally, and it’s not very easy to sneak into the U.S. illegally from the Philippines for reasons which are obvious to anyone who knows anything about world geography.
I have also heard that South Asians (Indians, etc.) here in the states are not at all typical of South Asians in Asia. From what I’ve heard, the stupidity and corruptness of the average South Asian in South Asia rivals that of blacks.
To a smart Fillipino, getting to the U.S. is a career path. There are schools there that train people to pass the U.S. Postal Service exams. Or if a family has a smart, pretty daughter, she might be groomed to become the wife of a middle-aged American.
From what I’ve heard, the stupidity and corruptness of the average South Asian in South Asia rivals that of blacks.
I suspect the Asian corruption factor may be more in line with our own as opposed to African corruption. My justification for this thought, is that at least the Asian countries have functioning economies and are able to feed themselves which is not true of any African nation (or indeed, any black run U.S. city)
The Phillipnes were run by Spain for nigh on 300 years and then annexed by the USA for 50 years.
Filippinos in the US are mostly the most educated in the Philippines. They probably represent the uppermost 1% of the Filippinos in terms of educational background and academic achievement. And of course, education brings with it refinement. That’s the main reason why Filippinos in our neighborhood are probably the most cultivated, the most cordial and the most refine people we got
I agree with one of the posts here emphasizing about Discipline in the US schools. That seems to be the only way out so teachers may be encouraged to go back to the classrooms even in Black or Hispanic dominated schools
