Immigration and the Production of a Teaching Force: Policy Implications for Education and Labour
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.1989.tb00470.x |
| Date | 01 December 1989 |
| Published date | 01 December 1989 |
| Author | T. Wotherspoon |
Immigration and the Production
of
a
Teaching Force:
Policy Implications
for
Education and Labour
T.
WOTHERSPOON*
Projections of teacher shortages and rising numbers of minority children in North
American public schools in the 1990s have made educational administrators
increasingly receptive to the option of recruiting foreign teachers’. A report by the
National Education Association revealed that twelve percent of school districts in the
United States recruited teachers from outside the nation in the 1987-88 school year
(Report on Education Research 1988, 2). School boards from California, for example,
have actively recruited teachers in Canada throughout the 1980s while New York schools
employed ninety-five teachers from Spain on renewable one-year terms beginning in
1985 (Wolff and Glaser 1986, 27). Despite
a
periodic resurgence of interest in the
importation of teachers, however, the phenomenon of migration of public school
teachers has received little attention in the general analysis of either teaching
or
labour
migration. Except with reference to specific concerns such as practitioners’ sociocultural
adjustment to teaching in new communities and the question of matching supply with the
demand for suitably qualified certified teachers (Hartrick 197 1, Williams 1979), teacher
migration has not constituted a problem for educational researchers and administrators.
Nonetheless, reliance upon foreign sources of teachers has been a continuous and often
substantial basis of teacher supply in advanced industrial nations
for
over a century.
International migration of professional and highly skilled labour is commonly
considered as ‘brain drain,’ refemng to effects of the flow of human capital from one
nation
or
economic entity to another (see e.
g.
Watanabe 1969). Such labour flows tend to
be depicted as the consequence of a complex series of rational individual decisions made
amidst various ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. As such, the importation of relatively privileged
professional and skilled labour is seen as a ‘good thing’ providing benefits to the
individual workers and necessary services to the nation
of
immigration. Nonetheless, as
with immigration in general, the importation of professional and highly skilled labour is
mediated by an array of state- and employer-imposed regulations and constraints
(Bolaria 1987, Sassen-Koob 198 1, Zolberg 1979).
Although arrangements such as conditions of entry and employment-related
restrictions may be common to all immigrants, selected categories of immigrants
*
University
of
Saskatchewan (Canada).
543
encounter constraints which are specific to an occupation
or
set of circumstances. In
teaching, as in other occupations in education, health care and social services which deal
with human clients, migrant and non-migrant workers alike are subject to several
regulations both in and out of the wage relation in order to ensure compliance with their
roles in the reproduction of labour power. To a large extent, a preoccupation with
teachers as professionals
or
craftspersons skilled in the techniques of educational
problem-solving has discouraged sustained critical analysis of how a teaching force,
including immigrant teachers, is organized and regulated as labour. Recent analysis,
however, has shown that, contrary to notions that teaching is somehow privileged as
professional work, claims to professionalism are a consequence of changing ideological,
political and economic factors (Johnson 1972, Lawn and Grace 1987). Several
commentators have argued forcefully that professional work including teaching is not
immune from the deskilling and degradation of work which accompany processes of
proletarianization (Braverman 1974, Gorelick 1982, Oppenheimer 1973, Ozga and
Lawn 1981). Teaching is subject to varying forms of state regulation, including policies
and practices intended to determine the size and nature of the teaching labour force. The
selection of a labour force through immigration policies is part of a wider process of state
assurance that schools will be staffed by and produce individuals who are part of a
reliable, disciplined and productive population. This paper, with reference to the
Canadian experience, is concerned with how immigration policy and school board
employment practices have been relied upon by the state as devices within the overall
framework of regulation over the teaching force.
TEACHING AS REPRODUCTIVE LABOUR
Teaching is commonly viewed in terms of professionalism, emphasizing professional
status accomplished through evolutionary historical development
or
dedicated service to
the community as the apex of teachers’ occupational objectives (see, e. g. Paton 1962,
Roy 1983). Although rarely conceptualized in political terms, teachers are often depicted
as a distinct interest group interacting with other autonomous interest groups, including
various bodies within the state, to serve as the representative of the public interest
(Lawson and Woock 1987). These views of teacher professionalism, however, ignore the
factors upon which teachers are able to base claims to professionalism and the structural
factors which give rise to such phenomena as changes in state policy, power disparities,
and inequalities within the education system.
As Ozga and Lawn
(1
98 1) and Warburton (1 986) emphasize, teachers are dependent
state employees engaged in a dialectic of regulation and resistance with the state.
However, teaching possesses qualities which place its practitioners under closer scrutiny
than many other productive workers
;
teaching is composed of two interrelated
dimensions as both a moral/subjective and productive endeavour. Teaching is subject to
state rule at the same time as it possesses degrees of autonomy and relations with the
learner which cannot easily be penetrated by managerial authority. By virtue of their
work with malleable human beings, teachers’ competence and suitability are determined
not only in accordance with how well given classroom tasks are performed but also in
terms of the teacher’s personal and moral characteristics. As a British Columbia judge
recently declared when he upheld the ruling of a school board to suspend two teachers on
grounds of moral turpitude, ‘Teachers must not only be competent, but they are expected
to lead by example’ (Vancouver
Province
1987).
Attributes which are often confused for professionalism
or
the peculiar nature of
teaching are in fact aspects of the ways in which teaching is constituted as reproductive
544
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