The new teacher struggles to keep the algebra lesson on track. An eighth-grader is fiddling with a broken pencil sharpener. Another sneaks out of the Compton, Calif., classroom. "Please be good," the teacher begs in accented English.

"Mr. Banas, where are you from?" one pupil asks.

The teacher smiles.

Relson Banas points to a spot on a classroom map, and a collective gasp goes up. "You mean you came all the way across the Pacific to teach us?" another asks.

Who would cross the ocean to teach middle-school math in one of Southern California's lowest-performing school districts? Who would leave behind a 2-year-old daughter to share a house with four other adults in South-Central Los Angeles?

Banas did. And many of the Philippines' best teachers are about to follow his lead.

Banas, who arrived in the United States in January, is at the forefront of a wave of experienced, English-speaking foreign teachers about to land on U.S. shores. With school districts needing to hire 200,000 teachers a year amid a national shortage, private recruiters plan to place at least 15,000 foreign teachers in American classrooms over the next five years.

"It won't be long before people will be saying, 'Relson, you brought along the whole island,'" Banas says.

The recruiting agencies also are eyeing India and China. But the Philippines - with an English-speaking school system founded by colonizing Americans - is emerging as the chief source of recruits.

The recruiting companies, once devoted to bringing nurses to the United States, are switching to teachers. Central to their success is putting the financial burden on the job seekers, not the schools. Foreign teachers pay the job agencies about $7,500, which covers the costs of passage and recruitment - and provides recruiters with a profit of up to $1,000 a head. With foreign teachers picking up the tab, their recruitment is a boon for U.S. school districts.

These pipelines are so new that they have gone unnoticed by many U.S. educators. Nevertheless, recruiters have found customers in the Boston and Houston school districts. Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City have made inquiries. But the strongest market has been midsize school districts in Southern California.

The story behind this new phenomenon began three years ago, when a Los Angeles couple read a newspaper article on the teacher shortage in Compton.

Randy Henry, a Xerox engineer, and his wife, Susan, whose company had been bringing Filipino nurses to staff U.S. hospitals and nursing homes, decided that a private company could find teacher applicants at no cost to the schools.

To recruit teachers, the couple traveled to Susan Henry's hometown of Cebu, the Philippines' second-largest city.

The response was overwhelming. At a seminar for Cebu teachers, the Henrys had planned for 200 to show up; 1,500 did. The lure was clear: Many American teachers receive starting pay of $30,000 or more, while their most experienced counterparts in the Philippines are lucky to earn $5,000 a year.

The Henrys culled the applicants by demanding five years' experience and requiring a passing grade on a test based on one that California teachers must pass to earn their full credentials. Worried that applicants might have too rosy a view of U.S. education, Randy Henry screened The Substitute 2, a movie about a violent inner-city high school.

Armed with teachers' resumes, the Henrys began to receive a few bites from school districts. San Bernardino, Calif., the first to call, had planned to hire 20 teachers. It ended up with twice that many, including the former dean of education at a Cebu university. A month later, the school district in Boston hired nine teachers from Cebu. In the spring, Inglewood, Calif., hired 50.

Officially, the Philippine government is "flattered" by the recruiting but worried about the effect it could have on education in that country.

"It is definitely a brain drain," says Erlinda Alburo, head of the Cebu Studies Center at the University of San Carlos, where some of the recruited teachers taught. "They take the best teachers we have."

Compton was desperate for qualified teachers - particularly in math and science. In spring of last year, Compton officials, working with the Henrys, took a recruiting trip to the Philippines. At one interview site, a line of 300 applicants stretched around the block.

By May of last year, the district had made offers to 58 teachers. They all accepted.

Relson Banas was one of them. The 31-year-old had grown up in a rural community outside Iloilo as the son of a successful rice farmer. Single and living with his mother, Banas had adopted a relative's baby daughter. He did not have the $7,500 fee required by the recruiting program.

He took the offer anyway, scrounging half the fee from friends and relatives. He would pay them back, and the other half to the Henrys, once he was on the payroll in Compton. "This was the chance to practice my vocation in the land of milk and honey," Banas says.

The teachers say the Henrys have done their best to help them, organizing outings on holidays and advising them on American standards of promptness. Philippine churches have assisted some of the teachers, lining up van services to take them just about anywhere. But the teachers see Los Angeles as too large, too sprawling and especially - for people from the tropics - too cold. "It's just freezing here," says Banas.

Many of the teachers have become close because few of their relatives have accompanied them - at least during this first year. The separation is hard. "I am grateful for my roommates and my fellow teachers," Banas says. "It's a slice of home for us. It's a refuge."

The American classroom - for all its wonders - is not.

"Get to work, get to work," Banas begs a class at Compton's Whaley Middle School. In the Philippines, his easy manner and corny math jokes were enough to handle students, some so well-behaved he wondered whether they understood the material. Here, holding attention is the challenge.

Banas presses on. Like the other Philippine teachers, he is in awe of the number and quality of textbooks and materials available to them. Teachers in the primary grades, whose classes back in the Philippines sometimes swelled to 60, cannot get over the small class sizes mandated by California.

But controlling American children is daunting.

Still, Southern California principals are mostly impressed, saying their new instructors are better steeped in their subject matter than many of their American counterparts. "They are among our best teachers," says Principal Kelcey Richardson of Compton's Dominguez High School, which has six of the new arrivals.

The teachers have been well-received in Inglewood and San Bernardino. But in Compton, union members, school board trustees and parents have questioned whether the Pacific Islanders are a good match culturally for black and Latino youngsters. "They seem to have some problems connecting with our kids," says school board member Marjorie Shipp.

Some students have found otherwise. When Yz Barrientos, one of Banas' housemates, asked her students to make a list of courageous people, one put the teacher on the list for "coming over and teaching me."

Joe Mathews writes for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.