Emmelle Israel, AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow, took part in the Save Our Schools rally this weekend and sends us this report.

Educators, students and community members from across the nation joined together July 30 for the Save Our Schools March and National Day of Action. The crowd of thousands rallied for two hours in the Washington, D.C., summer sun on the Ellipse Park, just south of the White House. After hearing from speakers such as former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and New York University professor Diane Ravitch to actor/activist Matt Damon—whose mother was a teacher and union member—the crowd began a march around the White House. The rally united everyone under the cause of education reform, but the variety of signs and slogans on display (“We Need Teachers Not Tests,” “Equality for English Learning Students,” “Cut Corporations Not Education”) emphasized the variety of issues that need to be addressed to rebuild public education.

One contingent of teachers at the rally, the Pilipino Educators Network of Prince George’s County in Maryland, highlighted how the issues of budget cuts, immigration, labor and standards-driven education reform intersect. After No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001, several school districts were left scrambling to find teachers who met higher certification requirements mandated by the law. In Prince George’s County, school officials turned to hiring from abroad. Since 2005, Prince George’s County Public Schools actively recruited more than 1,000 of the school district’s 9,000 teachers from other countries, mainly the Philippines. These teachers came with special certifications and qualifications to fill positions that schools typically have difficulty finding candidates for—science, math, foreign language and special education.

However, as with many migrant and immigrant workers recruited to this country with the promises of a better life and U.S. citizenship, the international teachers in the Prince George’s school district were unwittingly exploited by their employer. The teachers paid thousands of dollars in immigration and legal fees that legally were the school administration’s responsibility. When one teacher blew the whistle on the school district, the Department of Labor in 2007 launched an investigation. In a ruling last month, the Labor Department said Prince George’s schools are a “willful violator” of labor laws and sentenced the district to pay the teachers $4 million in back wages. However, the district also was barred from sponsoring new visas or even renewing visas for the existing international teachers.

The fate of more than 800 teachers and the countless students that they serve are in limbo. Teachers aren’t sure if they will have a job or if they will be deported and students will be left without the familiar and qualified teachers they have come to rely on. The wave of education budget cuts and the attack on public-sector teachers unions will likely see that schools fill positions with under-experienced, uncertified and nonunion teachers from high-turnover teaching programs. This is not a model of education that works for students, teachers, parents or the larger community.

(Sign a petition in support of the Prince George’s international teachers here.)

The teachers in Prince George’s are fighting hard to challenge the ruling that unintentionally, but unjustly, punished teachers who did nothing more than stand up for their rights as workers and as educators. With an estimated 19,000 international teachers in U.S. public schools and similar cases of immigrant and migrant teacher exploitation popping up across the country from Louisiana to New York, the mass deportation of international teachers here could set a dangerous precedent.

At Saturday’s SOS March, the international teachers of Prince George’s marched in solidarity with all the other teachers, students and parents from across the county, both immigrant and U.S.-born, because even though each group’s individual issues are different, they are fighting for the same thing: a strong public education system that works for all.