I appear to be a bit late to this flame bait so how about a little talking about the article?

This isn't about Arizona being so just and noble and wanting to make sure all the little Mexican kids learn English from someone with a proper American accent.

The state of Arizona actively recruited teachers from Spanish-speaking countries who could hack it decent enough at English to come to Arizona and teach Spanish to English-speaking kids. These people were NOT hired as ESL teachers. Kind of like how Americans can go get jobs in Japan teaching English to Japanese kids, even if the American in question isn't so great at Japanese.

Then the voters of Arizona in their infinite wisdom decided voted to get rid of the Spanish immersion classes because WE SPEAK ENGLISH HERE DAMMIT AND WE CAN'T HAVE THESE HISPANICS INDOCTRINATING OUR CHILDREN WITH THEIR SPANISH. But the schools couldn't just fire all of the native Spanish-speakers they had just hired, so instead they transferred them to teaching ESL or just other non-language subjects. None of which they were hired for in the first place.

Now several years down the road, the AZ Dept of Education still has all these native Spanish-speakers on their hands and this new interpretation of No Child Left Behind (the law itself ain't all bad...) gives them a way to thin the ranks out a bit.

A lot of shoulda-coulda-woulda as I see it:

Maybe the AZ Dept of Ed shouldn't have hired quite so many native Spanish-speakers just to teach Spanish to the American kids.

Maybe the voters of AZ shouldn't have voted to get rid of the immersion classes when the state had just hired so many new teachers who couldn't readily transfer to other classes.

Maybe the AZ Dept of Ed should have invested more effort in re-training all their native Spanish-speaking teachers so they'd be better at their new jobs they were forced into by the voters of AZ.

So...we're here a couple decades down the line from the beginning of a cascade of stupidity, and the whole deal is fucked. Not that I have any bright ideas on how to fix it.