Arizona Purges Accents and Ethnic Studies from Schools

Not satisfied with the passage of SB 1070, Arizona nativists have managed to get a couple more anti-immigrant policies in place: firing teachers with accents and banning ethnic studies.

The Arizona Department of Education is forcing school districts to remove teachers with heavy accents or ungrammatical speech from classrooms where students have limited English skills. The teachers can take an accent reduction course, but if they still don't pass some arbitrary muster, they either lose their job or have to be moved to a classroom with native English speakers. However, since they were hired to smooth communication with Arizona's 150,000 English second-language students, this transition makes no sense and is unworkable in many schools.

The decision has met with objections from principals and school administrators who say this will deprive students of experienced, qualified teachers. Kent Scribner, superintendent of the Phoenix Union High School District, states, "Student achievement and growth should inform teacher evaluations, not their accents." So, instead of testing teachers' accents, why not check student performance? And another thing: What counts as a "heavy" accent? I know native English-speaking Southerners with accents I'd consider heavy. What counts as "ungrammatical"? Even English first-language speakers will have some grammatical flaws in their speech.

Meanwhile, the Arizona state legislature has passed a bill banning ethnic studies or classes that "promote resentment toward a race or class of people." State Sen. Linda Lopez (D-Tucson) states that this is aimed at ending a successful Mexican-American studies department in her district. While school officials reject the claim that the historical program promotes racial hatred, teachers point out that the bill would nonetheless impact their ability to teach by technically making the bulk of a regular history curriculum illegal.

To illustrate this, Lopez proposed barring classes from teaching about the World War II Pearl Harbor attack because it promotes hatred of Japanese persons. Her proposal was rejected; it seems the legislation is only meant to stop courses that might include some bad things white people have done over the course of history. Maybe we should also stop teaching about slavery and segregation then? And while we're at it, we'd better leave out things like Japanese internment camps and European immigrants taking land from and killing Native Americans.

Photo credit: Editor B