History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Concern over accented teachers not original to Arizona
- 05-25-2010
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Blog by Valerie Strauss/Washington Post
The state of Arizona has gotten a lot of attention lately for its decision to remove teachers who speak with pronounced foreign accents and/or whose speech is ungrammatical from classrooms with students learning to speak English. But the idea wasn’t original to the Arizona Board of Education. Almost 20 years ago, there was a proposal to ban teachers with accents from some elementary classrooms where kids were still learning English in Westfield, Mass., according to a 1992 New York Times story. The city’s mayor, George Varelas, a Greek immigrant who spoke with an accent, actually agreed with the proposed ban. He was quoted as saying: "Persons like myself -- and I cannot be confused with someone from Boston or Alabama -- should not be in a self-contained classroom for a full year teaching 5- and 6-year-olds the multitude of phonetic differences that exist in the English language. (more...)
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