Arizona has been under fire for a controversial anti-illegal immigrant law and now its Department of Education is embarking on a course of action that many critics also believe is being enforced in a discriminatory fashion. “The Arizona 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,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “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. Nearly half the teachers at Creighton, a K-8 school in a Hispanic neighborhood of Phoenix, are native Spanish speakers. State auditors have reported to the district that some teachers pronounce words such as violet as “biolet,” think as “tink” and swallow the ending sounds of words, as they sometimes do in Spanish. http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0524/arizona-cracks-teachers-accents/ added by: zichi
