Banning H-1B teachers is a recipe for disaster

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) wants public schools in his state to employ “exactly zero” employees on H-1B visas .

His campaign-trail proposal would completely bar schools from employing anyone on the specialized work permit, impacting new hires and current teachers. If passed, this would be a stark reversal for the state that, in 2025, received more K-12 education H-1B visa approvals than any other.

Abbott’s rationale prioritizes protection against vague threats of “foreign influence” over the mundane but tangible consequences of thousands of students losing access to qualified teachers. H-1B reliant Dallas Independent School District bluntly described the implications: If these teachers go, it will need more Texans in the pipeline.

But the Texas pipeline of qualified teachers is running dry. We have each spent years studying teachers in America’s most challenged schools and the difficult decisions made in response to teacher shortages. Our findings demonstrate how educationally reckless the governor’s proposal is.

Our research, looking at three decades of math and science teacher qualifications, surfaced a significant finding: STEM teacher qualifications in the highest-need settings have been stable, even modestly improving. This is occurring despite the teaching profession being at a 50-year low , including coinciding enrollment drops in teacher preparation programs and relative declines in teachers’ pay.

How is it, then, that STEM teacher quality has been sustained, even improved? High-need schools got creative.

Recruiting foreign-trained teachers emerged as a critical stopgap. Foreign teachers’ share of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce in high-need schools grew from 1 percent in 1993 to more than 6 percent by 2020. They are concentrated where teacher shortages are worst: math, science, special education and foreign languages in high-poverty urban and rural schools.

In addition, foreign-trained teachers are, on average, more qualified than their U.S.-trained counterparts. In our study, 79 percent held a STEM degree , compared to 68 percent of their peers. Their graduate training was higher, too. Our in-depth examination of migrant teachers shows that these are not low-quality hires, but top-tier educators recruited to schools that domestic applicants avoid.

If the ban passes, the consequences will be immediate and predictable, including more out-of-field teaching and long-term substitutes. But the most common teacher shortage stopgap in Texas is employing instructional staff without any formal training at all . In the 2023-24 school year, more than half of new Texas teachers entered without any certification, and research shows their students learn less. The ban would accelerate a substitution already underway, trading qualified teachers for unprepared alternatives.

Let’s consider the “foreign influence” threat worrying Abbott. He cited a Qatari-supported Arabic language program and Chinese-backed Mandarin instruction. These programs can and should be debated, but they implicate very few Texas teachers. By contrast, he expressed no concern about the many certified Filipino or Mexican teachers, yet they would be swept up in far greater numbers.

Furthermore, banning H-1Bs will not shrink the demand for international teachers — it funnels employers toward J-1 visas , designed for cultural exchange, not labor shortages. That’s not a fix; it’s a swap for a more short-term, unstable working credential. What’s more, it fails to curtail the “foreign influence” motivating Abbott’s proposal while mechanically increasing teacher turnover.

U.S. schools should not rely indefinitely on international teacher recruitment. We have written about the risks of that dependency: the precarity of visa-tied teachers, the moral questions raised by drawing top talent from developing countries, and the vulnerability created when a pandemic, diplomatic disruption or $100,000 visa fee can suddenly cut off the supply.

The right response, though, is to invest in a stronger domestic pipeline. That means expanding programs like the National Science Foundation’s Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, which our research shows have improved STEM teacher qualifications and supply. UTeach, a Texas-born program now operating in more than a dozen states, has likewise increased the STEM teacher pipeline . Policymakers should also increase teacher pay and differentiate in subjects and schools experiencing shortages. Finally, they should remediate the working conditions that make schools difficult to staff in the first place.

Texas’s teacher pipeline has grown thinner and less prepared on Abbott’s watch. The children in the state’s high-need schools have been protected, in part, by the qualified international teachers he now proposes to expel.

Michael Hansen is a senior fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Lora Bartlett is the chairwoman of the education department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of “ Going the Distance: The Teaching Profession in a Post-COVID World.”