I did everything they told us to do. Send the kids to school, trust the system, believe that if they work hard they’ll get a fair shot. And then some goddamn bureaucrat in Phoenix decides the best way to help kids learn English is to make the test easier so he can call them ‘fluent’ and wash his hands of them.
Tom Horne, the Republican superintendent, approved lowering the score kids need to pass the English proficiency test. The pass rate went from 12% to 26% in one year. Magically, 30,000 kids are now supposedly ready for mainstream classes. Thirty thousand. That’s not a miracle. That’s a fucking sham.
Horne defends Arizona’s English-only model, says bilingual education would ‘sacrifice the students to dogma.’ But what does he call making the test so easy that it churns out ‘proficient’ students by the thousands? He calls it success. I call it cutting the cord and pretending the kids can swim.
The federal government has already slapped Arizona for this before. They forced a settlement more than a decade ago because pushing kids out of language services before they were ready violated their civil rights. Now they’re doing it again, and Horne is all ‘don’t worry, we tested it on 600 native English speakers.’ Bullshit. You don’t fix a broken model by lowering the standard. You fix it by teaching the kids.
Grijalva’s bills would actually fund bilingual programs, family literacy, teacher training. Good. But they won’t pass because the same party that runs on ‘family values’ and ‘law and order’ won’t spend a dime on kids who don’t speak English perfectly on day one.
This is the real family values playbook: look busy, claim victory, and let the kids drown. Take your flag pin and your moralizing and shove it. The kids know what’s happening. So do their parents.
Source story: Arizona Rep. Grijalva files three bills to fund English learner services.