For a school teacher to be successful, he or she must be innovative, flexibleand patient. In many ways, today's teachers must not only instruct their students, but perform lesson plans in ways that stimulate and take hold of young minds. In the course of one school day, an educator may act as tutor, entertainer, counselor and reassuring friend to effectively communicate with students.

Increasingly, U.S. school districts are recruiting teachers from overseas to occupy positions that are historically difficult to fill. According to the New York Times, a report by the American Federation of Teachers used government data to estimate that 19,000 foreign teachers worked in the U.S. on temporary visas in 2007.

The report stated, "Overseas-trained teachers are being recruited from nearly all corners of the globe and are being placed primarily in hard-to-staff inner-city or very rural schools teaching the hard-to-fill disciplines of math, science and special education."

Michael Sarbanes, a spokesman for Baltimore Public Schools told the Times that recruiting from international sources has gotten "highly qualified teachers into [the] classrooms" with "exceptional results." Sarbanes also noted that recruiting domestically from the Teach for America program helped fill vacant positions and helped young professionals begin careers in teaching.

The Department of Labor Statistics reports that teaching openings in bilingual education and foreign languages are among the four most difficult subject positions to fill.