In “No Nativism to see here, folks” news

by David Safier

No Child Left Behind requires that ELL teachers be fluent in English. Sounds reasonable.

Arizona Dept of Ed took that a giant step further, until the Feds stopped it from trying to make decisions for the districts.

The problem, according to the federal attorneys, is how all that was monitored by state officials who visited the schools. They said the evaluations of teachers were often "subjective."

For example, the federal agencies said, state officials documented instances where one teacher pronounced the word "the" as "da." In a separate incident, a teacher pronounced "another" as "anuder" and "lives here" came out as "leeves here."

Based on that, schools were required to create plans to correct the problems, with complaints that otherwise qualified teachers were removed from classes.

The AZ DOE agreed to leave the teacher fluency issue up to local districts.

Horne, then Huppenthal clearly wanted to be part of the mix to bolster their conservative "If you don't speak A-mur-i-can like an A-mur-i-can, get the hell out" cred. Hupp is a big fan of studies, so he may know, studies have indicated ELL students often learn English better with teachers who speak with an accent similar to theirs, and even make a few foreign language-related grammatical slips. I'm sure those are studies Hupp studiously ignores.

The English fluency thing is part of the whole conservative, anti-immigrant push. Since I've been referring to ALEC lately, here's the beginning of a similar piece of ALEC model legislation relating to college teachers:

English Fluency Among Lectures in State Institutions of Higher Education Act

Summary

This Act requires state institutions of higher education to evaluate their instructional faculties for oral, aural, and written fluency in the English language; provides for certifications as to that fluency; imposing penalties; and conferring powers and duties upon the State Board of Education.

The concept is defensible. After all, who wants a college prof you can't understand? But that should be an in-house, in-college issue, just as it should be an in-district issue. Ballooning it to state prominence is part of the whole English Only push. It has far more to do with promoting fear of the Other than with education.

(h/t to Azazello for the ALEC model legislation link.)