Ramona S. Diaz, a filmmaker who lives in Baltimore, is making a film that investigates the city school system's experience with teachers from the Philippines. As a school board commissioner who typically interacts with the system through senior-level personnel, I was intrigued when Urbanite asked me to collaborate with Ramona and to provide my input on Baltimore's overall experience with the plan.

Our plan was simple. I would speak directly to students and to teachers while Ramona and her team watched, gauging from their responses the success of the Filipino-teacher experiment. I would like to say that I went into this without preconceptions, but rumors strongly implying that this experiment was not going well already swirled around North Avenue and throughout the city.

Teachers from the Philippines were not connecting with their students and the students were neither engaged nor impressed. Some of the teachers were considering going home well before their contracts expired. It was unclear whether the students would notice.

Given that our school system is perpetually beleaguered, constantly maligned, and always striving for improvement, this appeared to be yet another item about which to be depressed. As most system stakeholders know, teacher recruitment has been a long-standing issue for the Baltimore City Public School System. Year after year we have told our young people that teachers just aren't paid enough. So guess what? Many talented youth who would have made terrific teachers bypassed the opportunity, certain that they wouldn't earn enough to make a workable living. Meanwhile, those educators who entered the field en masse during the 1960s and 1970s now stand at retirement's edge. As a result of this and other factors, each year the system loses about fifteen percent of its teachers.

As if challenging demographics weren't enough, Baltimore City has to compete with surrounding jurisdictions for highly qualified teachers. Who wouldn't want to teach in Howard County, routinely judged to be Maryland's finest school system? Who wouldn't want to teach in the leafy suburbs surrounding Annapolis or in the general vicinity of Towson or Hunt Valley or Westminster or any number of other charming Central Maryland edge cities? And so, Baltimore City finds itself scrambling each summer for teachers to fill classrooms; and with No Child Left Behind upping the ante for highly credentialed teachers, filling the gap has become even more challenging.

So famously parochial Baltimore City decided to radically expand the geographic reach of its teacher recruitment to include the other side of the world. And why not the Philippines? It is a nation with a high proportion of English speakers, a nation known for its capacity to generate graduates with a deep and abiding interest in mathematics and science, and a nation with a historic connection to America.

And if this worked, Baltimore City might just have found a cure to its perennial problem of recruiting highly qualified teachers. After all, though the Philippines has made tremendous strides economically as a nation, their estimated annual per capita spending power of $5,000 pales in comparison to America's $41,000. And while Baltimore City has difficulty paying much more for teachers than surrounding school systems, it can compensate significantly more than the schools of metro Manila and its environs. Eventually, hundreds of teachers can be recruited from the Philippines, compensating for Central Maryland's insatiable appetite for highly qualified instructors and its inability to supply them locally.

Bottom line: There is much at stake. That's why I so dreaded my February interviews with Filipino teachers and their students. I presumed that I would hear the worst. What were we thinking? How could we expect there to be a meaningful and productive connection between teachers from Asia, with their culture of discipline and obsessive respect for elders and with our students, with their inner-city and American irreverence and questionable commitment to education.

If ever there was anything doomed to fail, if ever there was anything so poorly crafted short of war, this was it. But as an economist, I am quite accustomed to having the world work out differently than I had anticipated.

And as it turns out, the world is working out, at least in this instance. Shortly after the end of a bone-chilling school day, I sat down with eight students-seven African-American, one white-all of whom had at least one teacher from the Philippines and who together crudely approximate the simple demographics of our system.

It started exactly as I expected, with them telling me that they found these teachers from the Far East difficult to understand. As a school commissioner, I've developed a thick skin and I'm accustomed to grumbling from parents, administrators, staff, advocates, and of course students.

But then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the tone of the conversation changed. Apparently, by November, roughly two months through the school year, the language barriers had melted away and the pace of learning had accelerated. "Oh, I like Mr. Veracruz. He makes science fun," exalted one student.

"Before homeroom we talk about all kinds of things and she tells us stories about her life," another student said about a female teacher.

"What would happen if these teachers went back?" I asked. The resounding reply: "We would miss them."

Later that day, I went to the apartments at Symphony Center where many of our Filipino teachers live in one of Charm City's newest addresses. And through an interview with eight teachers from the Philippines, the magnitude of our success was confirmed. Our students respect these teachers and these teachers are passionate about their students and passionate about their schools. "Why are you closing Harlem Park Middle School?" one asked as if we commissioners work for her, which of course we do.

"Why can't we have smaller class sizes?" asked another.

"Why can't we hold students back if they can't read?"

"Why can't we expand wraparound services for our special ed students?"

And so on.

After about half an hour, they simply forgot that I was there and discussed the virtues of certain teaching techniques, issues of curricula, and the quality of interaction with their respective administrators.

It's important to recognize that it's not all joy and reward for these teachers. For many of them, coming to Baltimore represents a combination of lucrative opportunity and shocking despair. About half of those I interviewed have children they left behind, many of whom are well short of adolescence. Most have thought about returning to the Philippines on multiple occasions, typically when they are in their classrooms. But they stay and they toil on behalf of our children even as they long for their own.

Among the many failings of the Baltimore City Public School System come those occasional sweet successes. My only hope is that these teachers will be allowed to stay past the three years allotted to them by their visas. What we have on our hands is a permanent solution, not merely an interesting experiment. What we have is beautiful.

-Anirban Basu