They.can.not.be.serious!

The Tucson Unified School District Governing Board made the only fair decision it could when it decided Tuesday night to end a graduation requirement that every high-school student had to take two credits of a foreign language.

It wasn’t a good decision in the sense that it was beneficial to students or a wise move — it was a decision made necessary by the realities of public school life in Arizona. Qualified and certified foreign-language teachers are too hard to come by and funding is too tight to allow for such a forward-thinking graduation requirement.

Bull puckey…

The sad truth is that foreign language programs are always  amongst the first to get axed in times of budget crunch.  Only drama departments (and occassionally music) are more prone to budget “trimming” with a chainsaw.  But God forbid TUSD (or any other N. American school) would ever think to cut money from the football budget…

Are FL teachers hard to come by???  For some languages, certainly, but come on!  In my experience, roughly 20% of Arizona residents speak Spanish as well if not better than most Spanish teachers in other parts of the nation.  Teacher recruitment is not the issue if we’re talking about a department-wide cut.  If that were the deal, we would simply see programs like Chinese and Russian folding up while Spanish expanded, but that’s not what’s happening.

No Child Left Behind has actually had tremendously negative impact on language teacher recruitment, by significantly upping the requirements for certification to teach foreign languages.  While I, for one, respect the spirit of the law (and, mind you, I’m probably about the only former high school teacher on record who’ll say anything remotely positive about it), as it wanted to ensure a high level of quality in FL education, it also worked to prohibit many completely capable people from teaching languages they know well.  To use myself as an example:  I graduated from college a decade ago with a degree in French, and minors in Spanish and Japanese.  I also got a K-12 teaching credential in the state of my alma mater, which at the time could easily allow me to become certified to teach any of those three languages in most of the states in the union.  Post NCLB, I can now only be certified in French.  The “fun” part of this is that my Spanish and Japanese have significantly improved since then (having lived in Spain and Japan, respectively), and I’ve got a teaching endorsement from the Japanese Ministry of Education.  However, as I only have minors in the two languages, I don’t have enough upper-division credit hours in the languages.  Never mind that I speak them better than a lot of people with bachelor degrees in the languages.  The same is true with Chinese, which I have no credentials whatsoever in, yet I speak fluently, have been paid (privately) to teach, and which I will soon (after finishing the PhD) will be paid to essentially teach others how to teach it….  Basically, I would argue that if one is certified to teach one language, one should be able to qualify to teach others via a basic language competency exam.  The pedagogy is largely identical, and especially at the K-12 level, where you’re teaching basic conversation and writing, a knowledge of literature is not likely to come into much play…

I agree completely.