Supreme Court strikes a blow against minority language rights

[Tom Zurinskas]

Better to spend the money now and get those kids productively into the system, than to pay the price of illiterates turning jadedly to crime later on.  From the post below:

"But as Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out in his dissent, Arizona students classified as English Language Learners (ELL) show no signs of having overcome the “language barriers” that constitute discrimination based on national origin. Their high school graduation rate is 59%, compared with 75% for native English speakers. Overall only 28% of ELL students pass mandated standardized tests. Only 13% of ELL 7th graders pass the reading test, compared with 74% for students whose first language is English. Things are even worse in the border town of Nogales. With 37% of its students in ELL programs, Nogales High is ranked 575th out of Arizona’s 629 high schools in student achievement.

Despite these appalling numbers, the Supreme Court found that Arizona does so well educating its non-English speaking children that the state no longer needs to be monitored to make sure that it complies with the EEOA. "

Note that those that speak good English have more and better life opportunities than th

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
see truespel.com

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> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Dennis Baron
> Subject: Supreme Court strikes a blow against minority language rights
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> There's a new post on the Web of Language:
>
> Supreme Court strikes a blow against minority language rights
>
> In a blow against minority language rights, the Supreme Court has
> ruled in the case of Horne v. Flores that the federal government must
> stop monitoring how the state of Arizona teaches its non-English-
> speaking students, despite evidence that these students continue to do
> much worse than their English-speaking peers in school.
>
> Read the rest of this post on the Web of Language: http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
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> Dennis Baron
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