Friday, April 30, 2010

Arizona's Anti-Immigration Is All About Hate

Supporters of Arizona's bigotry like to claim that the new immigration law is all about crime. But the first wave of reports is coming out proving that it's all about hate and bigotry.

The Arizona Department of Education has now told schools that teachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes, according to a WSJ report.

This is quite an ironic development, since Arizona hired hundreds of teachers in the 1990's whose first language was Spanish as part of a broad bilingual-education program. 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.

Teachers who don't meet the new fluency standards have the option of taking classes to improve their English-- but if they fail to reach the state's targets, then they would be fired or reassigned.

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