Count us skeptical as regards the Department of Education’s program of recruiting new teachers from overseas. As our Kathleen Lucadamo reports at page one of today’s New York Sun, the program has recently been expanded to the United Kingdom — on top of such sunny locales as Guyana, Jamaica, Panama, Trinidad, and the Dominican Republic, off to which lucky teams of recruiters jet. But while the Brits may be a valued partner in the War on Terrorism, it’s not likely they, or any help from distant lands, hold the key to winning the war in our schools. The problem in recruiting teachers is not, as the Education Department’s director of national recruitment, Marilyn Grant, said, that local institutions are not producing enough candidates. The problem is that the prospect of teaching in the tough New York City school system is a daunting one, and the teachers unions do little to ease the pain.

A major contributing factor to the shortage is a state mandate that requires all teachers be certified by 2003 — certification being the unions’ way of limiting the supply of teachers, despite the fact that uncertified teachers have done a stellar job throughout the history of this country in private schools. Perhaps a better solution to the teacher shortage would be to expand charter schools. As the American Federation of Teachers’ own report last summer, “Do Charter Schools Measure Up?” states: “[C]harter school teachers are more likely to rate teaching and learning conditions — workload, class size, planning time — more highly than other public school teachers.” Furthermore, charter schools in New York are allowed to hire some uncertified teachers, expanding the applicant pool. Even better, a voucher system could be implemented. It sure sounds like a better use of money than the $6,000 a head the Education Department is currently coughing up for its overseas recruits.