Arizona goes after teachers with heavy accents; courses teaching 'ethnic solidarity'

Pure

Fiel a Verdad
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heavy accent will lead to re assigment to where no one is learning English

mexican american studies courses that teach ethnic solidarity or overthrow of the gov't to be banned.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703572504575213883276427528.html
Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency

State Pushes School Districts to Reassign Instructors With Heavy Accents or Other Shortcomings in Their English


By MIRIAM JORDAN
PHOENIX—As the academic year winds down, Creighton School Principal Rosemary Agneessens faces a wrenching decision: what to do with veteran teachers whom the state education department says don't speak English well enough.

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.

State education officials say the move is intended to ensure that students with limited English have teachers who speak the language flawlessly. But some school principals and administrators say the department is imposing arbitrary fluency standards that could undermine students by thinning the ranks of experienced educators.

The teacher controversy comes amid an increasingly tense debate over immigration. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer this month signed the nation's toughest law to crack down on illegal immigrants. Critics charge that the broader political climate has emboldened state education officials to target immigrant teachers at a time when a budget crisis has forced layoffs.
"This is just one more indication of the incredible anti-immigrant sentiment in the state," said Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who conducts public-opinion research.

Margaret Dugan, deputy superintendent of the state's schools, disagreed, saying that critics were "politicizing the educational environment."
In the 1990s, Arizona hired hundreds of teachers whose first language was Spanish as part of a broad bilingual-education program. Many were recruited from Latin America.

Then in 2000, voters passed a ballot measure stipulating that instruction be offered only in English. Bilingual teachers who had been instructing in Spanish switched to English.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100430/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1885

Arizona legislature bans ethnic-studies programs

Fri Apr 30, 12:45 pm ET

Just a week after signing the country's toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.

The bill forbids Arizona schools from using any curriculum that promotes "the overthrow of the United States government" or "resentment toward a race or class of people." It also disallows any curriculum that's "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" or that seeks to "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

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insert

http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument...mary/h.hb2281_03-18-10_houseengrossed.doc.htm
Provisions

· States that the Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.
· Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:

Ø Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
Ø Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
Ø Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
Ø Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals
================
[story resumes]
Arizona's superintendent for public instruction, Tom Horne, has said he's backing the measure because ethnic-studies programs encourage "ethnic chauvinism"; he's also suggested that such programs could breed secessionist sentiment among Hispanic students.

Republican state Sen. Jack Harper also voted for the bill, saying that certain Hispanic-themed ethnic-studies programs are "trying to say that somebody who came to this country illegally is somehow oppressed. That's crazy stuff."
But the legislation's opponents say that, if the bill is signed into law, the state, not the targeted programs, would be promoting a politicized curriculum. Democratic state Sen. Linda Lopez says the bill would target a Mexican-American studies program used in her home district of Tucson. She offered an amendment — which the legislature approved — mandating that Arizona schools adopt curricula that include discussions of incidents of genocide such as the Holocaust, so that such material would not be considered as promoting "ethnic resentment."
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It also disallows any curriculum that's "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" or that seeks to "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."
Theoretically this would also ban studies of all-whites, too. So I hope every class on history, literature, etc. is multi-ethnic :rolleyes:
 
My God they're demanding people speak English in an American class room. Oh and shock they don't want students to be taught it is okay to overthrow the government. Perhaps we can strive to have the same level of education students get in Mexico.

I had to sit through college classes taught by teachers who butchered the English language to the point we had no understand, but you couldn't fire someone for that. I remember one Indian graduate student who taught a class who you simply couldn't understand, but yet she was responsible for teaching undergraduates. I am sure she was a very intelligent woman, but if you can't communicate your knowledge you can't teach.

How about you teach kids about being proud to be an American citizen. Now that might leave out some kids, but those here legally whose parent's are working and are here legally will probably not have much of a problem reading and learning about all the good America has done.
 
Did the sponsors of this bill ever take a course in Mexican-American studies to see what was actually being taught? I admit that the idea of outlawing incomprehensible accents is appealing . . .
 
I do believe I heard somewhere on the News that Arizona was the only State with a bilingual education system. That does not excuse those who are not fluent enough to teach in English when English is the basic language of America.

Another Red Herring tossed out by the 'Pure' one; par for the course.

Amicus
 
How about you teach kids about being proud to be an American citizen. Now that might leave out some kids, but those here legally whose parent's are working and are here legally will probably not have much of a problem reading and learning about all the good America has done.

This sounds to me like a resurrection of the damned "culture wars" that the populist Republicans had pushed in the '90s, as well as fears of a demographic shift where latinos will wind up replacing Anglos in the Southwest (never mind that much of that area was Spanish, then Mexican, before the era of Manfiest Destiny).

Quite frankly, it seems the intent here IS to force white, Christian, Euro-American identity as being the only thing. Schools will err on the side of caution and wind up cutting teaching about American Indian history and culture, as well as black, latino, Asian and non-Western cultures.

The idea is that all of those things are only pertinent to those groups. "Black history" is somehow seen as only relevant to blacks. "Asian history" is somehow seen as only relevant to Asians and Asian-Americans. But somehow "western" culture is seen as being bland and homogenous and applying to everyone. If you are whtie, it is expected that will be all.

What it completely ignores is the fact that all of these things wind up mixing together. You know there are plenty of whites who aren't Christian. There are white Muslims and white Buddhists in America. Should their culture be ignored simply because they are supposed to be "western." There are white Americans who are interested in China, India, Africa, Russia and other parts of the world. There are black people who are interested in Latino music, Asian-Americans who like Jewish food, Latinos who want to know about Islam, and so forth.

The fear of multiculturalism is what drives these reactionary conservatives because it threatens to undermine their culture and what little prestige and status they have inherited with it.

I do believe I heard somewhere on the News that Arizona was the only State with a bilingual education system.

Hawai'ian is an OFFICIAL language in Hawai'i. In fact, you guys are still a minority over there.
 
I do believe I heard somewhere on the News that Arizona was the only State with a bilingual education system. That does not excuse those who are not fluent enough to teach in English when English is the basic language of America.

Another Red Herring tossed out by the 'Pure' one; par for the course.

Amicus

I believe Nevada has some bilingual classes, I'm not 100% sure on that. The news story mention accents being a problem, is this only apply to Hispanic/Cuban accents, or could it also apply to Cajun, Bostonian, Maine, Deep south etc. How about a mild speech impediment? A lisp?
 
I envisage Patrick Stewart being denied a teaching job in Arizona because of his accent. ;)
 
I rather wish they'd done this to my German teacher in high school. I'd lived in Germany; she'd never been out of Virginia.

I feel a little bit better about the racial profiling bit on traffic stops in Arizona now. I learned my Julia Roberts-look-alike niece was stopped twice in Phoenix yesterday. Of course the cops might be just looking for an excuse to stop and chat with her.
 
Echoes of the Borg. Assimilate or be cast aside as useless.

It stinks.
 
New Mexico has been at least bi- if not tri-lingual since statehood, methinks. They definitely make a major thing of being tri-cultural.
 
New Mexico has been at least bi- if not tri-lingual since statehood, methinks. They definitely make a major thing of being tri-cultural.

Presume the three (in order of appearance) are native American, Hispanic, and 'Murican(?)
 
Presume the three (in order of appearance) are native American, Hispanic, and 'Murican(?)

American Indian, Hispanic/Latino and Anglo.

Of course, the Dineh (Navajo) were latecomers to the Southwest, their ancestors came from somewhere around Alaska and that is where the most closely related languages (save for Apache languages) are still spoken.

The Hopi, Zuñi and other Pueblo peoples had been there much, much longer dating back to the Mogollan and Hohokam civilizations. Despite shared culture the different Pueblo peoples are all different languages (notably the Hopi are part of the same Uto-Aztecan migration as the Aztecs, Comanche and Shoshone).

And then you have much smaller bands in the rest of the Southwest, like the Tohono O'odham, Cocopa, Yaqui and Mohave, who are much less familiar to the general public but are still down there nonetheless.

The Dineh are important because they are one of the largest American Indian tribes and still control a significant portion of their homeland - Dineh Bizaad. There are close to 300,000 Dineh - REAL DINEH - who registered on the census. Unlike out east where being Indian means you might have one distant grandparent. Or you are a WASP who wants to claim something "exotic" like Cherokee. This has allowed the Dineh to preserve their cultural identity... and language.

Dineh may be one of the most widely spoken American Indian languages, probably surpassing the Ani-Yunwiya (Cherokee) and Sioux.

And no. Not all American Indian languages or cultures are even remotely similar. The Dineh language is about as close to the Hopi language as... oh I don't know... German is to Chinese, or English is to Swahili. Aside from the Apache languages the Athapaskan family doesn't even have any relatives for some 1300 miles away!

Like I said the ancestors of the Navajo and Apache didn't arrive in the Southwest until after 1000 AD.
 
note to jag

Oh and shock they don't want students to be taught it is okay to overthrow the government.

no, that wasn't the shock, it was seeing promoting 'ethnic solidarity' on the same list as promoting gov't overthrow!
 
no, that wasn't the shock, it was seeing promoting 'ethnic solidarity' on the same list as promoting gov't overthrow!

Wouldn't assuming that EVERYONE be part of this homogenous westernized culture be promoting ethnic solidarity or does "ethnic" only apply to non-whites?

Also I don't see anything wrong with questioning the government. In fact I would think Republicans (REAL Republicans) would like that.
 
This sounds to me like a resurrection of the damned "culture wars" that the populist Republicans had pushed in the '90s, as well as fears of a demographic shift where latinos will wind up replacing Anglos in the Southwest (never mind that much of that area was Spanish, then Mexican, before the era of Manfiest Destiny).

If they wanted to keep speaking Spanish and keep control over that vast area which is today the Western United States they should have fought harder.

The fear of multiculturalism is what drives these reactionary conservatives because it threatens to undermine their culture and what little prestige and status they have inherited with it.

multiculturalism isn't that code for let's sit around and blame the white males for everything? No, I'm sure that isn't the case. I think students should learn American history, because after all we're in the United States, and that includes all the good and bad events. I for one enjoy learning about different cultures and that is a perk of living in American, because so many are among us here. Other countries don't have such diversity, but we need to communicate and we do that with a common language.


Hawai'ian is an OFFICIAL language in Hawai'i. In fact, you guys are still a minority over there.

You guys...what do you mean when you say you guys? That sounds racist.
 
Oh and shock they don't want students to be taught it is okay to overthrow the government.

no, that wasn't the shock, it was seeing promoting 'ethnic solidarity' on the same list as promoting gov't overthrow!


Problem with ethnic solidarity as of late is you don't always have people celebrating their heritage. Sometimes they're covers for people with radical agendas...which many people have no problem seeking out when it comes to the white power crowd, but are hard to find among other groups. Still though it's a difficult thing to make policy on, but needs to be dealt with. Like sex education there are no easy answers.
 
Sometimes they're covers for people with radical agendas...which many people have no problem seeking out when it comes to the white power crowd, but are hard to find among other groups.

I call bollocks on that sir, and I'll tell you why.

Because there is a HUGE freaking difference between a rally for the KKK, neo-Nazis, "Aryan" Brotherhood or Christian Identity movement, and a legitimate celebration of Swiss, German, Spanish, Irish or Russian culture. Nobody to my knowledge has ever called the Highland Games, Oktoberfest or an American folk music festival "white supremacists."

In fact, I'd dare say that many people who participate are not of that culture to begin with. Are only Irish marching in St. Patrick's Day parades or are there Anglol-Americans, not to mention other whites like Italians, Poles, Portuguese, French, Hungarians, Swedes, etc.

Likewise, there are plenty of "ethnic" things that should be celebrated quite openly. What is wrong with acknowledging Diwali, Nowruz, Ramazan, Dia de las Velitas, Busk, etc. Is there anything wrong with REAL Mexican food, or Klezmer music, or wearing a cheongsam?
 
Nobody to my knowledge has ever called the Highland Games, Oktoberfest or an American folk music festival "white supremacists."

On the other hand, I thought Oktoberfest at Busch Gardens, Williamsburg, was a little lame last year.
 
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