The Next Salvo In Arizona – Education

Apple Planet — An Apple For Teacher...? - Image by Leoncillo Sabino

With the passage of SB1070, Arizona raised the ire of immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Now, a new issue has come up along the same vein.

A mandate has come down to school districts from the Arizona Board of Education – teachers whose speech is heavily accented or whose speech is grammatically incorrect may no longer teach classes where there are students still learning English.

Now, on the surface, this sounds fairly reasonable. But it doesn’t take too much examination to see where this is a bad idea. And in many ways, bad in the same way that SB1070 was bad.

Let’s use a couple of examples. From a WSJ article:

Nearly half the teachers at Creighton, a K-8 school in a Hispanic neighborhood of Phoenix, are native Spanish speakers. State auditors have reported to the district that some teachers pronounce words such as violet as “biolet,” think as “tink” and swallow the ending sounds of words, as they sometimes do in Spanish.

These teachers “are very good educators who understand the culture” of their students,” said Ms. Agneessens, Creighton’s principal. “Teachers should speak grammatically correct English,” she acknowledged, but added, “I object to the nuance of punishment for accent.”

“It doesn’t matter to me what the accent is; what matters is if my children are learning,” said Luis Tavarez, the parent of sixth- and eighth-graders at Creighton.

“Student achievement and growth should inform teacher evaluations, not their accents,” said Kent Scribner, superintendent of the Phoenix Union High School District.

What we have to keep in mind here is that in the 90′s, Arizona hired 100′s of teachers who were native Spanish speakers to build a broad-based bilingual education program. These teachers were key in instructing the large number of Hispanic students in the state.

Then, in 2000, things changed, and Arizona went to an English-only education system. All these teachers who were hired to teach bilingually now had to teach only in English. What do you suppose the chance is that these folks had accents?

Now, those very same accents will be used to determine their suitability for teaching. Those who have strong accents will be moved to classes that have no English learners. In Arizona. With a large Hispanic population. How many of those classes are going to be available, and how many teachers will be forced to vie for them?

And who is going to determine how “strong” a “strong” accent is? What will be the determining factor? If they have a strong accent, but speak with correct grammar, and are easily understood, do they keep the job? And who decides that?

Like SB1070, this has the potential to be a very expensive decision for Arizona taxpayers. You can expect legal challenges galore, each of which will need to be defended by the state, and therefore, the taxpayer.

But of equal, if not greater import, is the service these teachers did give the non-native English speakers, giving them someone with whom they could communicate as they learned their new language. These students will lose a valuable resource.

I believe students should be taught to learn English, and taught to speak it correctly. Basing the measurement of competence on an accent is foolhardy at best.

But they didn’t stop there.

The Arizona legislature has passed a new law (From the Arizona Daily Star):

HB 2281 would make it illegal for a school district to have any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity “instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

It also would ban classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people.”

Again, on the surface this sounds fine. I don’t want teachers teaching my kid that she should overthrow the government. But this is the bait that is used to get people to accept the more insidious second clause:

are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group

That’s the tricky part. By hiding that behind “overthrow the government”, they hope folks will glaze over it. Just as you might have.

So any class in Mexican history, Japanese history, Middle Eastern culture, could be declared illegal to teach. There’s also the clause about “resentment toward a race or class of people”. As pointed out by AZ Senator Linda Lopez (D-Tucson), this means they should not teach a class including lessons about Pearl Harbor, as this could cause resentment against individuals of Japanese descent, or about the 9/11 terror attacks, as they might rekindle resentment of Middle-Eastern individuals.

Of course, she was using extreme examples. But those examples were rejected by the legislature. So what, exactly, are they opposed to having taught? This is another attempt by the Arizona legislature to address what they feel is an immigration problem by going after “ethnic studies”.

What it will do, in the end, is weaken their educational system, from the earliest grades through to the university level. Do you want to send your kid to a university that does not offer some type of ethnic study? Or that is selective about which ethnicities they will teach or cater to? Or more accurately, a university that is limited to what they can teach by law? If this law is upheld, I think we’ll start to see a decline in enrollment at UofA and ASU in the next few years.

The Arizona legislature seems determined to shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly. This time, that foot is education