THE Jamaican government has banned New York City from holding recruitment seminars in the island’s hotels without clearance from the ministry of education.

The clampdown follows the loss of hundreds of Jamaica’s best qualified teachers last year, as New York launched an aggressive recruitment drive to fix its own shortfall.

“We are going to take it up at the level of the Commonwealth Heads of Government,” education minister Burchell Whiteman said this week, angry at the exodus of teachers to the United States. “I think all the presidents and prime ministers need to decide whether they want to preserve this imbalance where the richer countries get all the wealth, including the professional wealth, we have produced.”

Mr Whiteman said two recruitment seminars scheduled for this month will be blocked until the recruiters receive clearance from the education ministry. Surprised at the Jamaican reaction, and concerned that it is being accused of plundering teachers from a struggling developing country, New York board of education officials last week visited Jamaica’s consul-general in New York in an attempt to cool the conflict.

“We’ve decided this year to cap the number of foreign teachers we take,” said Kevin Ortiz, a board of education spokesman. “It’s a combination of not needing as many and wanting to be sensitive. We do want to make clear that our goal is to hire quality, qualified teachers to teach Jamaican kids in our schools.”

New York attracted more than 500 teachers from the Caribbean, 320 of them maths and science teachers from Jamaica alone last year. Most were to teach in the many failing schools in the city’s black neighbourhoods.

Paul Adams, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, said: “If it continues, we will have a serious brain drain, especially in the areas of maths and science and special education.”

Mr Adams said there is little that can be done to stop teachers going to the US when they are enticed with offers of salaries three or four times higher and the opportunity to become permanent US residents at the end of their contracts. The average teacher’s salary in New York is $44,000 (pound;30,400).

New York education chiefs targeted the Caribbean because they hoped its teachers would bring a traditional approach - strong on discipline and the three Rs - and provide a model of black achievement. The aim was to lead black pupils away from teen pregnancy and gang violence and raise academic performance.