Problems in the recruitment of English teachers from the United States by the Department of Education of Puerto Rico: 1900--1910

The Department of Education of Puerto Rico throughout the first decade of its existence lacked the financial resources to be able to give a competitive salary to its American English teachers. This created a situation where an applicant for that position would find that they would be underpaid, overworked, and have to go to a strange new place that they did not know if they chose to accept it. Under such a situation the position of English teacher in Puerto Rico would be very unattractive to applicants especially since many of the teachers who the Department was recruiting came from the States that paid their teachers the best. This difficulty caused them to be unable to recruit teachers of the quality that they wanted which caused problems in the teaching of the new language.;The Department undertook a variety of strategies to attempt to overcome these deficiencies. Primary among these was creating a Circular of Information which would provide information about the island and the position to potential candidates. This information would be manipulated by the Department to its benefit. Once they convinced the teacher to come, however, the real problems would begin as they would be unable to keep him or her for more than two years on average due to better paying positions back home.;The ultimate fault for this problem falls on the lap of the United States Congress. Year after year the Department stated this problem to Congress and there were never any actions. Congress knew full well what was happening and the importance that the teaching of English held for purposes of Americanization but they never acted. In the end, saving the money they would have had to spend to bring more and better English teachers from the United States was a bigger priority for Congress than teaching the Puerto Ricans that language.