School districts in Arizona are under orders from the state’s Department of Education to remove from classrooms teachers who speak English with a very heavy accent or whose speech is ungrammatical.
Officials say they want students who don’t know much English to have teachers who can best model how to speak the language, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, some principals and administrators are concerned that the standards for removal are arbitrary.
The recent move by the department comes during the political firestorm over a new law in Arizona which requires police to question anyone who appears to be in the country illegally. It is the most restrictive immigration law in the country.
Arizona’s education department has sent people into schools to audit teachers on comprehensible pronunciation, correct grammar and good writing. Teachers who fail may try to improve, but if they don’t, school districts can fire or reassign them.
The Journal’s report says that critics of the new teachers policy believe the education department was encouraged by the new law, and that targeting teachers with heavy accents is just part of the anti-immigration movement in Arizona.
School officials say that is nonsense, and that kids should have teachers who they understand.
About 150,000 of Arizona’s 1.2 million public school students are classified as English Language Learners, the Journal said.
Nobody can argue that kids don’t deserve teachers whom they can easily understand, and teachers who use proper grammar. I’ve been in classrooms where I couldn’t understand a teacher, and in classrooms where a teacher’s grammar made me wince.
The issue here is how to determine which teachers really should be in the classroom and which ones shouldn’t be. Speech that one child can’t understand could be completely comprehensible to most of the students.
How does one fairly draw the line on grammatical mistakes? Hardly anyone speaks English perfectly according to the rules of grammar. Quick: Give me an example of the pluperfect and the future subjunctive. Is it enough to toss out a teacher because he or she routinely misuses the verb “to be?”
Uncovering exactly how Arizona goes about this will be most interesting.
What do you think of Arizona’s new policy? What standards should there be for removing a teacher on the basis of a strong accent or poor pronunciation?
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Great move for Arizona, it’s time now for them to give work to the people of Arizona, that’s the main reason why a state governments has been in place, to protect and serve the people of it’s state, not foreigners. I wish the rest of the country did the same.
Right on!, I am just about fed up of listening to these broken english speakers in school, in college and all over the place pretending to know while not even being able to pronounce the word fish correctly! damn it LEARN the language or leave, learn the culture or leave. Why should we service these foreigners in their language? while they will not even allow an american to even piss on their soil?
Oh yeah, where are the substantiating links to the stories that were used in the writing of this story?
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Or is this story just an assembly of bovine fecal matter by an assortment of demagogues? I think the latter is the reality.
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No factual citations mean this story is just bovine fecal matter, readily available at at cattle feed lot. The real stuff has far greater intellectual viability.
So this means that native speakers teaching foreign languages in public schools are to be dismissed. Oh well. Arizona, like Texas, descends into the 18th Century and begins losing high-tech employers such as Hewlitt-Packard, Motorola, and Advanced Micro Devices.
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The State of Arizona obviously doesn’t need the tax revenues nor the citizens who have any intellectual viability. With any luck, Mexico will reclaim Arizona and thereby raise of the collective average IQ of the United States.
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Of course given that the State of Arizona is already in financial straits, the loss of tourist spending, business from out-of-state companies, and increased spending for policing of illegal immigrants, the State will be bankrupt, financially and morally, by the end of the year.
Way to go again Arizona! I hope the next step will be declare the separation of the State of Arizona from the federal pigs’ (dis)United States.
ALL non-American teachers, employees, companies, managers, MUST BE removed, disbanded and/or repatriated to mexico or South America.
REVOLUTION NOW!