Arizona has been under fire for a controversial anti-illegal immigrant law and now its Department of Education is embarking on a course of action that many critics also believe is being enforced in a discriminatory fashion.
"The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English," The Wall Street Journal reported.
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.State School Superintendent Tom Horne denies the crackdown is based on teachers' accents. "We are not going after any accents including Spanish accents. It has to be faulty English. If students are being taught English and they're going to refer to a comma as a 'coma' people are going to misunderstand them," said Horne.
CNN anchor Kyra Phillips disagrees with the new policy. "Would a guy like the Governor of California be allowed to teach kids how to learn English? Arnold's Austrian accent is as thick as his biceps but his English seems to be just fine," remarked Phillips.
"I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me," CBS News reported the Republican governor joked in his speech at Emory University.
Sean, I'd like for you to explain to me why it is that so many Libertarians and diehard Capitalists are at the lower end of the economic scale? I make less thatn $20,000 a year. I have numerous friends who are diehard libertarians, Ayn Randists, capitalists who are struggling college students, recent grads, low-paid military personnel, restaurant workers, mechanics, and generally blue collar libertarians.
ReplyDeleteHow is it that all these folks are so dedicated to libertarianism and capitalist philosophy?
According to your view, these people could not even exist. Every "capitalist" surely must be rich, and support libertarianism, "only to benefit themselves."
Ya think, it's possible that some of us just support capitalism because it's non-coercive and we believe it to be the most moral system ever invented?
You're a schmuck. You don't know jackshit about us libertarians. So, stop pretending to be such an intellectual.