Spellings Intrigued By Idea of Importing Teachers

Maggie is on the road as usual, campaigning among the corporate elite for the NCLB school privatization plan that she would like to accelerate. Yesterday she was in Arizona, where low pay for teachers and weak public support for schools makes it difficult to attract companies interested in top-notch schools. It is not surprising, then, that the Gates Solution was put on the table by one of her acolytes: instead of exporting the jobs to cheap labor markets, which has been a PR nightmare, let's import the workers we need so that we can keep the payrolls low.

Here, Olga Block, co-founder of Basis School, Inc. (one of Spellings's favorite corporate welfare schools), offers her part of the script, followed by the Secretary's thoughtful and un-rehearsed response. From the Arizona Republic:

Olga Block, also of BASIS, added that math and science teachers are hard to find. Most people in those subjects enter lucrative business professions, not education.

She suggested courting teachers from overseas to the fill the void. Right now, work visas are expensive and difficult to secure for K-12 teachers. That idea intrigued Spellings. "I'm going to investigate that," Spellings said.