Teachers Wanted

Boston may soon be saying hola to a new crop of Caribbean imports, and we’re not talking about bananas. Faced with a rapidly growing Latino population—30 percent of children in the city’s public schools are Hispanic—administrators have begun aggressively recruiting bilingual teachers from Puerto Rico to teach math, science, special education, and English as a second language. While the merits of bilingual education remain controversial, this recruitment is a positive step to help level the playing field for students and promote their success in the classroom.

An article in the Boston Globe described the process of recruitment as a flurry of job fairs, personal appeals, and travel crisscrossing the small island nation. “If you have a problem, we’ll take care of it,” one recruiter told a contender. “We want to get you up to Boston right away.” Now more than ever, such initiative is paramount. In 2002, bilingual education was banned, making it illegal to teach students in a language other than English. In its place, English-immersion was promoted, in which a student’s native language can be used only to help explain complex ideas. Although such a program may be viable in theory, when a child cannot understand the words on the whiteboard, he or she is unlikely to do well on standardized tests. A monolingual teacher can do little to help, and frustration may only exacerbate the situation.

Bilingual teachers can help remove this language barrier by serving as a crucial portal to the English language. Studies show that teachers from culturally similar backgrounds can connect with students more successfully and reduce drop-out rates. With a shortage of bilingual teachers in the area, it is necessary to look farther afield. In this case, Puerto Rico is an ideal location for searching out candidates, both because it is a semi-autonomous territory of the United States with relatively lax immigration laws, and because Boston has a large Puerto Rican community that would benefit from Puerto Rican teachers.

Boston recruiters hope to hire over 40 new bilingual teachers in the next five years. Although they are eager for applicants, the decision process is far from indiscriminate: Teachers must have past educational experience in Puerto Rico as well as the willingness to commit to a master’s degree and a three-year contract.

Despite the need for bilingual education, recruiting teachers should not be considered a cure-all for the persistent achievement gap. Many disparities in educational achievement are attributable not only to linguistic differences but to socioeconomic ones. A 2004 study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard reported that Hispanics in Boston are more than three times as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, and this is reflected in the quality of education in those areas.

Nor is recruiting an adequate long-term strategy. With a sizeable pool of bilingual Spanish and English speakers in Boston itself, the problem now is more a lack of organization than talent. Efforts to channel the best and brightest native bilingual college students into teaching programs—much like Teach for America does—should be boosted immediately, especially in less wealthy neighborhoods where spending will be most effective.

In the interim, however, a generation of kids is falling behind. Public school administrators should be commended for coming up with creative ways of addressing the shortage—even if it takes them thousands of miles away, into tropical villages, tiny hillside towns, and fields of sugar cane.