A2 Thursday, September 29, 2011 • THE BULLETIN
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Guadalupe Aguayo filed a complaint after being told that her accent would prevent her from teaching students. A federal investigation of possible civil rights violations prompted Arizona to call off its so-called “accent police,” after almost a decade of sending monitors to classrooms across the state to check on teachers’ articulation.
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Teacher accents stir civil rights debate By Marc Lacey New York Times News Service
PHOENIX — When Guadalupe Aguayo puts her hand to her heart, faces the American flag in the corner of her classroom and leads her secondgraders in the Pledge of Allegiance, she says some of the words — like allegiance, republic and indivisible — with a noticeable accent. When she tells her mostly Latino students to finish their breakfasts, quiet down, pull out their homework or capitalize the first letter in a sentence, the same accent can be heard. Aguayo is a veteran teacher in the Creighton Elementary School District in central Phoenix as well an immigrant from northern Mexico who learned English as an adult. Confronted about her accent by her principal several years ago, Aguayo took a college acting class, saw a speech pathologist and consulted with an accent reduction specialist, none of which transformed her speech. As Aguayo has struggled, though, something else has changed. Arizona, after almost a decade of sending monitors to classrooms across the state to check on teachers’ articulation, recently made a sharp about-face on the issue. A federal investigation of possible civil rights violations prompted the state to call off its accent police. “To my knowledge, we have not seen policies like this in other states,” Russlynn Ali, the assistant federal secretary of education for civil rights, said in an interview. She called it “good news” that Arizona had altered its policy. Silverio Garcia Jr., who runs a barebones organization called the Civil Rights Center out of his Phoenix-area home to challenge discrimination, was the one who pressed the accent issue. In May 2010, he filed a class-action complaint with the federal Department of Education alleging that teachers had been unfairly transferred and students denied educations with those teachers. The Justice Department joined the in-
Study: Students lack knowledge of civil rights history Ignorance by U.S. students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The report says states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem. “Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history,” concludes the report, which was released Wednesday. The report assigns letter grades to each state based on how extensively its academic standards address the civil rights movement. Thirty-five states got an F because their standards require little or no mention of the movement, it says. Eight of the 12 states earning A, B or C grades for their treatment of civil rights history are Southern states where there were major protests, boycotts or violence during the movement’s peak years in the 1950s and ’60s. — New York Times News Service quiry, but federal investigators closed Garcia’s complaint in late August after the state agreed to alter its policies. “This was one culture telling another culture that you’re not speaking correctly,” Garcia said. The state says teacher reviews were in line with the decade-old No Child Left Behind Act, which requires that only instructors fluent in English teach students who are learning English. State education officials say that accents were never the focus of their monitoring.
“It was a repeated pattern of misuse of the language or mispronunciation of the language that we were looking for,” said Andrew LeFevre, a spokesman for the State Department of Education. “It’s critically important that teachers act as models when it comes to language.” But the federal review found that the state had written up teachers for pronouncing “the” as “da,” “another” as “anuder” and “lives here” as “leeves here.” The teachers who were found to have strong accents were not fired, but their school districts were required to work with them to improve their speech. That was the case even when the local school officials had already assessed the teachers as fluent in English. “It’s a form of discrimination,” said Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center in San Francisco, who is representing Aguayo in a discrimination complaint. “People hear an accent and think it means something.” John Huppenthal, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, has sent mixed signals about the state’s position on accents. In an article in The Arizona Republic, he said he would seek authority from the Legislature to allow monitoring of teachers’ fluency in English. But Huppenthal’s spokesman, LeFevre, said that Huppenthal made that comment before he had all the information on the matter and that he had no plans to pursue the issue with lawmakers in the next legislative session. In the Creighton Elementary School District, where about a dozen teachers attracted the attention of the state monitors, an accent reduction specialist was brought in from Canada last year to address the state’s concerns. “Many of these teachers are fine teachers and have other great qualities,” said Susan Lugo, the director of human resources at the Creighton district, where 95 percent of the students are minorities and about a third of the students speak languages other than English.
A report to be released Tuesday by a group seeking to raise college graduation rates shows that despite decades of steadily climbing enrollment rates, the percentage of students making it to the finish line is barely budging. The group, Complete College America, is a nonprofit founded two years ago with financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation and others. Its report, which had the cooperation of 33 governors, showed how many students in states completed their degrees, broken down into categories, including whether enrollment is full or part time, or at a two- or four-year institution. The numbers are stark: In Texas, for example, of every 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 79 started at a community college, and only two of them earned a two-year degree on time; even after four years, only seven graduated. Of the 21 of those 100 who enrolled at a fouryear college, five graduate on time; after eight years, only 13 had earned a degree. Similarly, in Utah, for 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 71 chose a community college, 45 enrolling full time and 26 part time; after four years, only 14 of the full-time students and one of the part-time students graduated. Of the 29 who started at a four-year college, only 13 got their degrees within eight years. Because of gaps in federal statistics, students who enroll part time, or transfer have been nearly invisible, said Stan Jones, the president of Complete College America. “We know they enroll, but we don’t know what happens to them,” he said. “We shouldn’t make policy based on the image of students going straight from high school to college, living on campus, and graduating four years later, when the majority of college students don’t do that.” Currently, federal education statistics generally focus on first-time full-time students. But according to the report, about 4 of every 10 public college students attend part time — and no more than a quarter of part-time students ever graduate. “It’s really, really hard to get your hands on completion rates for nontraditional students,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College. “If somebody pops in and takes a community college class and they don’t finish, you don’t know whether they were ever planning to get a degree.” Among older students, as well as those who are awarded Pell grants, and black and Hispanic students, the report said, fewer than 1 in 5 of those attending college part time will earn a degree in six years. “Time is the enemy of college completion,” the report said. “The longer it takes, the more life gets in the way of success.” One factor, Jones said, is the increasing practice of amassing more credits than are required for a degree. Another factor is the large number of students mired in noncredit remedial classes that the report calls the “Bermuda Triangle” of higher education. Half of all students studying for an associate degree, and 1 in 5 of those seeking a bachelor’s degree — including many who graduated from high school with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher, previous research has shown — are required to take remedial, or “developmental” courses, and many of them never move on to credit-bearing courses, much less graduation. The report recommends that states adopt financing incentives to push colleges to pay more attention to completion rates. And it highlights strategies that have helped to increase graduation rates. Among those strategies are embedding remedial instruction in the curriculum, rather than requiring separate courses, and offering programs that students attend in a block, with a predictable schedule and a cohort of other students seeking the same credential.
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Oregon Lottery Results As listed by The Associated Press
POWERBALL
The numbers drawn Wednesday night are:
30 41 50 51 53 8 Power Play: 2.
MEGABUCKS
The numbers drawn are:
2
4 16 26 33 40
Nobody won the jackpot Wednesday night in the Megabucks game, pushing the estimated jackpot to $6.2 million for Saturday’s drawing.
Satirical ‘diversity bake sale’ sparks discussion at Berkeley By Lee Romney Los Angeles Times
BERKELEY, Calif. — Hundreds of students packed the University of California, Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza on Tuesday to express their views on the use of race and gender in university admissions decisions — and to weigh in on the tone of the debate. The dialogue in this bastion of the freespeech movement was triggered by a bake sale, sponsored by the Berkeley College Republicans, that promised goods priced according to the buyer’s race, ethnicity and gender. The event, met with anger by many students, was timed to counteract a phone bank in support of a bill on California Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk that would allow the University of California and California State University systems to consider such factors, as long as no preference was given. Proposition 209, passed by state voters in 1996, banned affirmative action in public university admissions. The current bill would not violate that ban. Instead it would permit schools to consider things such as ethnicity, much as they do extracurricular activities, when weighing
candidates. Under the bake sale’s satirical pricing structure, whites were supposed to pay $2 for the same pastry that would cost Native Americans just 25 cents. (The Republican club, however, accepted whatever people chose to pay.) Supporters formed a protective barrier around the group’s table on Tuesday; Prop 209 author and former UC Regent Ward Connerly, who is black, showed up to help the students sell frosted cupcakes. Republican campus clubs have held such sales over the years to challenge racial preference policies. But this time social media spread the news worldwide, prompting outrage and praise for organizers. The event spawned a secondary debate about civility and respect. “It’s kind of ugly,” said 21-year-old gender and women’s studies major Tatianna Peck, who held a sign in mock protest of the exclusion of “queer people” from the pricing structure. “It’s ... forcing people into a defensive position instead of an honest place of listening.” On Sunday, the Associated Students of the University of California’s senate passed a resolution condemning “the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or
Jim Wilson / New York Times News Service
Ward Connerly, right, former University of California, Berkeley, regent and the driving force behind Proposition 209, attends a satirical bake sale sponsored by Berkeley College Republicans on the college’s campus on Tuesday. The sale has incited anger and renewed the debate over affirmative action by asking students to pay different prices for their pastries depending on their race and sex. in seriousness.” In a message Monday, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and two vice chancellors endorsed that position and said that the strong reactions to the bake sale provided “a vivid lesson that issues of race, ethnicity, and gender are far from resolved.”
Anthropology major Damaris Olaechea, 24, and her roommate did their part Tuesday to create “an environment where people can come have dialogue with respect and sensitivity,” giving out hundreds of pink home-baked “conscious cupcakes.”