Arizona Bans Non-American School Teachers With Heavy Accents

The Arizona Department of Education has begun telling schools that must remove teachers whose English is heavily accented or ungrammatical if they are teaching students who are still learning English themselves.

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.

If teachers fail the nebulous and undefinable "accent test" they can either be fired or reassigned.