[lg policy] Stanford Profs Oppose Arizona Stance on Teachers' Accents

[Harold Schiffman]

Stanford Profs Oppose Arizona Stance on Teachers' Accents
By Mary Ann Zehr on June 23, 2010 8:55 AM |

A long list of professors from Stanford University's school of
education have signed a statement condemning the Arizona Department of
Education's stance that teachers with strong accents shouldn't be
teaching English-language learners. "Not only is Arizona's policy
based on uninformed linguistic and educational assumptions, but such a
policy also has the potential to unfairly target Latina/o teachers and
their students by removing the very teachers who may be best qualified
to teach them," the statement says.

Let me pause here to say Arizona education officials weren't clear in
explaining to me what their policy is when I pressed them about it
after the Wall Street Journal reported on April 30 that Arizona
education officials had been telling school districts that they had to
remove teachers who had "heavily accented or ungrammatical" English
from classrooms with English-language learners.

Adela Santa Cruz, the deputy associate superintendent for the Arizona
Department of Education, told me in late May that Wall Street Journal
reporter Miriam Jordan "misinterpreted" and "misquoted" what she and
other state education officials said about the English fluency of
teachers in the state. I asked Jordan in an e-mail message to respond
to that charge, and I haven't gotten a reply from her.

"At no time did we say, you have to remove [teachers] and put them
somewhere else," Santa Cruz told me in a phone interview then. "We did
have the authority to say to the administrators at the local level
that they needed to look at the fluency of the teachers and assist
them."

But at the same time, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction,
Tom Horne, went on the air with CNN in late May saying that state
officials are concerned about teachers with "faulty English."

Interestingly, the Arizona education department has provided a link to
the blog post I wrote on its Web site under the category "articles of
interest."

Education department officials didn't give me anything in writing
about their policy, if it is that. But I was sent a protocol in
writing that state officials use when observing teachers that includes
a section on whether the teacher uses correct pronunciation and
grammar in English.

The signers of the statement by Stanford professors include well-known
experts in second-language acquisition such as Kenji Hakuta and
Guadalupe Valdez.

The department of linguistics at the University of Arizona and the
National Council of Teachers of English have also condemned the
so-called policy.

I'm on Horne's list to receive any press releases, and he hasn't put
out any statements further clarifying the issue.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2010/06/stanford_profs_condemn_arizona.html

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