In an unfortunately familiar act of racial prejudice, the state of Arizona has only just revised an act that requires the government to monitor public school classrooms to make sure that teachers are “fluent” in English, after just under a decade of sending monitors to public schools.
While the act was instated to ensure teacher competency in teaching Arizona’s children (and such an aim is perfectly reasonable) Arizona officials’ definition of “fluent” seems somewhat skewed. According to The New York Times, a federal review of the policy showed that the state had written up teachers for the simple mispronunciation of words due to a lingering accent, including teachers who made the negligible error of pronouncing “the” as “da” and “another” as “anuder.”
These teachers were not fired, but their school districts were forced by the state to allocate time and resources to improving their speech, even after the school district itself had already deemed the teachers sufficiently fluent in English.
“It was a repeated pattern of misuse of the language or mispronunciation of the language that we were looking for,” a spokesman for the State Department of Education told The Times. “It’s critically important that teachers act as models when it comes to language.”
This practice was nothing short of a heinous blemish on the face of American progress in race relations, one of several that Arizona seems to have been at the source of. If teachers can effectively communicate their lessons and students can effectively absorb them, then there is no need to allocate time and money to remedy this “problem” that Arizona officials are talking about. No other states feel the need to implement laws like these. If teachers could pass the exams and qualify for the position using their English language skills, their competency does not need to be furthered scrutinized by the state in a backhanded attempt to curb cultural presences in classrooms.
Unless students complain that they have difficulty understanding a lesson due to their instructor’s communication skills, these teachers should not be harassed any further because of slight impediments in their speech. Revising this policy was a step in the right direction for Arizona, and we can only hope that they continue to make progress in this department.
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