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[pest2]

Just asking, maybe someone out there knows....

As compared to other teaching destinations in Asia, it seems like Thai government schools have a very consistent patern for teacher employment. It seems that in just about every case, each school has 1 native English speaker teacher (teacher from US, Canada, South Africa, (alot from) UK, AUS, NZ) for a necessary other teacher from a non-native English-speaking country (Western Europe other than UK, (alot from) Filipenes, etc).

So, for example, in my last job in Thailand, there as a teacher from UK, a teacher from AUS, and 2 teachers from USA. Then there were 4 Filipina teachers...

I know the non-native teachers make about 1/2 of the natives' salaries. I could only speculate that the government schools are given some block fund and told to hire x amount of teachers. The schools likely would rather hire all Filipinos because they are cheaper to employ and maybe the school director could pocket the excess cash... but the government requires 1/2 of the foreign English teachers be from countries in which English is the native language.

Anyone have the skinny on this? It's really unique to Thailand. In other countries in East Asia, I haven't even seen any non-native English speaking country teachers except those who came from whatever country the job happened to be in... In South Korea, the government wont even give an E2 teaching visa to someone who isn't from a non-native English speaking country, for example...