If anyone thought the Arizona “papers please” law was going to be the end of the wildly racist legislating going on in Arizona, well, I wish I could say I had good news for you. But I don’t. Phase I appears to harassing adult Hispanics in Arizona, and now Phase II is an assault on children, teachers, and education in general. One law is aimed at killing the Mexican-American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. Another is a policy that is aimed at harassing and possibly firing Hispanic English teachers.
On the latter bill, there is some serious cause to worry that good teachers will be fired for nothing more than their race or ethnicity.
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.
There’s a “for the children” excuse, of course. Supporters are all about pretending that they want to make sure the kids learn English the “best” way. But it looks like the truth is the opposite, and that this policy is an attempt to keep students who don’t speak English from learning it, which in turn can keep them behind in their classes and shut them out of higher education. How do I know? Because this policy is aimed at firing teachers that were hired expressly to teach Spanish-speaking students how to speak English.
In the 1990s, Arizona hired hundreds of teachers whose first language was Spanish as part of a broad bilingual-education program. Many were recruited from Latin America.
Then in 2000, voters passed a ballot measure stipulating that instruction be offered only in English. Bilingual teachers who had been instructing in Spanish switched to English.
English-only is classic wingnuttery, right down to the bad faith. The stated intentions are to help kids, but the reality is that the initiatives are about making sure students don’t learn any other skills while learning English. It’s a racist program that aims to make sure the children of immigrants have just enough skills to do manual and service labor, but no skills that would make middle class aspirations a possibility.
And that’s bad enough. But what is the “ungrammatical” shit? Everyone is an “ungrammatical” speaker in someone’s eyes. I’m sure that you could make the case that speaking Texan is “ungrammatical”, with the “y’alls” and the “fixing tas”. And worse even is the accent thing. That’s just classic use of subjective judgments to make racist policies with plausible deniability attached. Who determines what the “right” accent is? A lot of English speakers on the border have Spanish-tinged accents and use Spanglish slang, even if their first language is English.
The bill that’s passed is apparently a direct attempt to kill a Mexican-American studies program. Which is kind of odd, because the bad faith right wing cover story for a racist law is written directly into the bill’s language, which seems to me like it would be hard to enforce.