In the "WSJ Blogs" blog in the Wall Street Journal (9/13), Nathan Koppel writes that Arizona is now abandoning measures to monitor state teachers to see if they use proper grammar and pronunciation of English in the classroom.
In the "On Deadline" blog in USA Today (9/13), Douglas Stanglin notes that the reversal in policy comes as the US Departments of Justice and Education both began investigating the state's policy following "a civil rights complaint by unnamed parties in 2010 alleging that the state's on-site monitoring reports led to teachers being removed from classrooms based on their accents."
The Tucson (AZ) Citizen (9/13, Kossan) reports that last November, during the investigation, federal officials told Arizona the accent monitoring might "violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against teachers who are Hispanic and others who are not native English speakers." Now, Arizona's Education Department will take out the fluency portion of the form used by classroom monitors, and also will make schools "file assurances with the state that their teachers are fluent."
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