“…The Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English to kids just learning to speak the language.

Oh boy! Did I land back behind the Iron Curtain half a century ago? My last 40 years of teaching would have never happened if the Arizona law had been the law of the land in 1966. Forty years of accented instruction gone by the wayside! Gone also the 40 years when American education, lower and higher, finally recognized the diversity of America.

It is amazing that we have to be reminded once again that America was made great by people with accents. Would Albert Einstein have made a better baker? We’ll never know?…”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126480169