Putting the accent on bigotry
In the 1930s, Bel Kaufman applied to teach in the New York City public schools. She took a written examination and then an oral one, which required her to recite a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A few days later, Kaufman received a curt letter in the mail: “Failed for poor background in English.”
In short, she had the wrong accent. Emigrating from Russia at the age of 12, Kaufman graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College. But she retained the “rolling Russian R” of her childhood, Kaufman recalled, so she was blocked from teaching. So were thousands of other talented and knowledgable immigrants, most of them — like Kaufman — Jews from Eastern Europe.
And if you think this kind of bigotry is a thing of the past, think again. Today, in 2010, an American state is poised to transfer or fire teachers with accented English. Can you guess which one?
It’s Arizona. Again.
The Grand Canyon State has been all over the front pages lately, of course, thanks to its new law allowing police officers to stop suspected illegal immigrants and demand proof of citizenship. There’s been far less publicity about a recent announcement by the state Education Department, which decreed that teachers with “heavy” accents must be removed from classes for students still learning English.
Yet the education measure is much more outrageous than the immigration one. No matter what you think of the new Arizona law targeting illegal immigrants — and I happen to think it’s deeply flawed — it addresses a very real problem. We do have millions of undocumented people flowing across our borders, and we need to do something about them.
Not so with accented teacher speech, which is only a “problem” to people who think there’s just one proper way to speak English. And I’ve got a word for those people: bigots.
Sure, we can all agree that kids must learn certain rules of grammar. And if some of their teachers don’t know the rules, of course these instructors should be removed from the classroom until they have been brought up to speed.
But why should the state police accents? Like Bel Kaufman, 70 years ago, most immigrant teachers today have full command of the English language. They just pronounce it differently.
For example, Arizona state auditors have reported that some classroom instructors pronounce words such as violet as “biolet,” and think as “tink.” Other teachers swallow the ending sounds of words, as Spanish-speakers often do.
So did Kaufman and her fellow European immigrants, back in the 1930s. The New York examiners knew it, too, which is why they often asked applicants to say words ending in “ng.” If you said “teachin” for teaching — or “learnin” for learning — you failed the test. It didn’t matter how much you had learned, or how well you could teach.
After World War II, similarly, black teacher applicants were often turned down because of their accents. As historian Christina Collins has found, examiners rarely made explicit reference to race in their decisions. Instead, they downgraded African-Americans for using so-called “regional” speech. In one notorious case, two rejected black applicants were told that they “speak with a Southern accent” — although neither had ever been to the South!
To be fair, there were — and are — distinctive African-American language patterns. But if a state today tried to keep out teachers with “black” accents — or ordered schools to keep those teachers away from students who shared the same speech habits — we’d call the effort what it is: bigoted.
And so is the new Arizona measure, which targets Hispanics rather than black people. Theoretically, though, it could affect anyone. Consider that Henry Kissinger, one of the dominant diplomats of the past century, would now be barred from teaching in Arizona — just as he would have been in New York, in the 1930s. Talk about a heavy accent!
Or listen to the Austrian-born governor of Arizona’s next-door neighbor, California. Over the past few years, Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken good-natured ribbing about his accent from Jay Leno and other comedians. But the real joke: he couldn’t teach school in Arizona, either.
The last laugh belongs to Bel Kaufman, who would eventually pass her oral exam — after failing several more times — and go on to a long career in teaching. She also would author a best-selling novel, “Up the Down Staircase,” satirizing her experiences in the New York school system. There’s a passage in the book about an applicant who gets turned down for her poor accent, after reciting a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It reads like fiction, but it’s history. Shame on Arizona, and the rest of us, for forgetting these painful chapters of our past. And let’s remember, right now, lest we doom ourselves to repeat them.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.
