if you are interviewing for a laboratory specialist who has no contact
with the students, then you have lower expectations. An African-
American accent would be more acceptable in a phys ed teacher, for
example, than it would be in a teacher of speech.
(Director of Evaluation Programs, interviewed June 1994)^13These issues rarely come to the attention of the public, unless the news
media takes interest in some particular case, as in the 1992 controversy
around teachers with foreign accents in Westfield, Massachusetts, a town
of about 36,000 people and a broad ethnic mix.^14
In July of that year, a petition signed by 403 residents was presented to
the school board in protest of a decision to reassign two bilingual
education teachers to positions as regular classroom teachers. The petition
specifically addressed the issue of accent, urging that no teacher be
assigned to first or second grade classrooms “who is not thoroughly
proficient in the English language in terms of grammar, syntax, and –
most important – the accepted and standardized use of pronunciation.”
George Varelas, former mayor of Westfield and simultaneously the
chair of the city’s school committee, had spearheaded the effort behind
this petition, promoting it vocally and with the press. Mr. Varelas is
himself a native speaker of Greek and speaks English with that accent, but
he found this proposal to the school board a compelling one.
“Persons like myself – and I cannot be confused with someone from
Boston or Alabama – should not be in a self-contained classroom for a full
year teaching 5- and 6-year olds the multitude of phonetic differences that
exist in the English language,” the Mayor said in an interview. “I would
only impart my confusion and give them my defects in terms of language”
(New York Times, July 5, 1992, Sec. 1, p. 12).
A debate ensued between Mr. Varelas and Piedad Robertson, a native of
Cuba, former kindergarten teacher and at the time of the petition,
Massachusetts Secretary of Education. Ms. Robertson openly called for
the rejection of the petition: “instead of fostering the acceptance of