The debate over language in the school system

In Arizona, the state with the most stringent immigration laws, officials are now clamping down on teachers who have heavy accents. It is mandatory for all teachers in the state now to pass an English fluency test. And those who fail this test or who have heavy accents are temporarily reassigned. In 2000, a referendum was passed that dictated that public schools were only allowed to teach English classes in English. Then in 2003, the No Child Left Behind policy reinforced this notion as it only provided federal funding to schools that had an English teacher who was fully fluent in the English language. Tom Home, the superintendent of public schools, defends this policy by saying "It's my jobs to make sure they're taught English in the most rigorous, possible way so they can learn English quickly, can compete with their peers, and succeed academically.” However, while on the surface this policy seems to be reasonable, I doubt that it is truly having the best effect on students. In a time of economic crisis with education budgets plummeting, the allocation of resources to weeding out teachers who do not speak English fluently seems wasteful.

While the standard of having a teacher fluent in English teach English seems to be an acceptable decision, it is not a comprehensive way to screen for high quality teachers. This policy assumes that teachers who are not fluent in English aren’t good enough to be teaching English. But this is not the case for every single English teacher in every single school. Spanish speakers might be able to connect better and learn better from a Spanish speaker who obviously would have an accent. That shared link between immigrant students can sometimes be necessary to learn a second language better. Roughly 150,000 out of 1.2 million students in Arizona schools are learning English as a second language. This policy is discounting not a small minority of students. By standardizing all schools, Home is making the decision that every single child will learn English better from a fluent English speaker, which may not be the case in all scenarios. And furthermore, to be spending large amounts of money on this cause seems wasteful. Instead of controlling a variable such as language fluency, perhaps more effort should be placed on the quality of the teachers allowed to teach in public schools. This is much more important because it is the quality of the teacher that truly correlates with success. If there is a trend between teachers who aren’t fluent in English and their negative abilities to teach, then these efforts would be justified. However, if not, then Home is depriving some students of better opportunities to connect and understand English from a fellow Spanish speaker. In addition, where are these teachers being relocated to? Are they still being paid by the state even though they are not working at a public school? Also, what is the definition of a heavy accent? To what extent do speakers qualify as having too heavy of an accent to be a competent teacher? This policy raises many more questions than it truly answers. While on the surface this seems to be a helpful policy, I think it could actually be extremely detrimental to a large sector of children in Arizona.