Arizona Firestorm by Otto Santa Ana

Author:Otto Santa Ana [Ana, Otto Santa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

8

Illegal Accents

Qualifications, Discrimination, and Distraction in Arizona’s Monitoring of Teachers

Jennifer Leeman

In the spring of 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) had begun requiring school districts to remove teachers with “heavily accented or ungrammatical” English from classes for English language learners (ELLs).1 The article described the state policy as requiring removal from Structured English Immersion (SEI) classrooms of those teachers with “heavy accents or other shortcomings in their English,” and went on to cite the difficult case of Creighton Elementary School in Phoenix, where the English of two SEI teachers was judged to be inadequate, despite their having completed accent reduction courses. In the context of the firestorm brewing in the state, many observers interpreted the policy as another move against immigrants, or as evidence of a broad anti-Latino racism. Media coverage explicitly linked the removal of teachers with accents with SB 1070—Arizona’s 2010 law allowing police to demand documents from anyone suspected of being in the country without authorization (see Chin et al., this volume)—and HB 2281, Arizona’s 2010 law banning ethnic studies in secondary schools (see O’Leary et al., this volume). Apparently concerned about the negative publicity, Arizona state education officials denied any anti-Latino or anti-immigrant intent and maintained that they were simply following the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which states that teachers of ELLs must be fluent in English. Further, Arizona officials claimed that they had been misquoted, insisted that they had not ordered teacher reassignments, and denied targeting teachers based on their accents.2 At the time Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne told CNN that rather than accents, the policy focused on teachers with “faulty English.”3

Amidst accusations and denials, precise information about the policy was surprisingly hard to come by. Because the monitoring of SEI teachers was not the result of new legislation (such as SB 1070 and HB 2281), but an apparent change in the interpretation and implementation of existing regulations, the policy was not part of publicly available records. Further, when journalists requested details about just what those policies and regulations were, state officials were not forthcoming. Instead of defining Arizona’s policy toward accents, a spokeswoman for the department provided journalists with a copy of the SEI classroom observation protocol, together with the relevant section of NCLB. The protocol has a section labeled “Federal Compliance: Teacher Fluency,” which consists of two yes/no evaluations of teachers’ language use: “Teacher uses accurate grammar” and “Teacher uses accurate pronunciation,” which shows that accent is indeed part of the official evaluation criteria.4 Further, despite denying the use of accent in the assessment of teachers, state officials repeatedly gave examples of cases of inadequate teachers in which the “problem” was clearly related to accent. For example, in his comments to CNN, Horne illustrated the notion of “faulty English” by citing a teacher who pronounced comma as “coma.” Officials from the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education were sufficiently concerned that they launched an investigation into whether Arizona was engaging in illegal discrimination.

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