More discrimination in Arizona

Just when you thought that Arizona couldn't get any worse, the Wall Street Journal reported today that the state's 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.

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.

Arizona still has many public schools with plenty of teachers whose native language is Spanish. State auditors actually complained about one school which has some teachers who pronounce "words such as violet as 'biolet,' think as 'tink' and swallow the ending sounds of words, as they sometimes do in Spanish." The principal of the schoold admitted they "should speak grammatically correct English", however he added that they shouldn’t be ostracized for their accents. Arizona's Department of Education also wants teachers to "take classes or other steps to improve their English". But if some teachers still aren't living up to these new standards, they will be fired or reassigned. Unbelievable.

Even worse, Arizona's state legislature passed a law on Thursday banning ethnic studies programs:

HB 2281 would make it illegal for a school district to have any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity “instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

It also would ban classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people.”

Tuscon Unified School District's popular Mexican-American studies department is being directly targeted by this new law, that according to school administrators simply offers "historical information" and not "ethnic chauvanism", as Arizona's school superintendent has claimed. A state representative attempted to demonstrate how absurd the new law is by suggesting that 9/11 shouldn't be taught in schools as it could create resentment against Arab-Americans.