Accent Monitoring: Innovation Or Rights Violation?

theodp writes "After almost a decade of sending monitors to classrooms across the state to check on teachers' articulation, the NY Times' Marc Lacey reports that a federal investigation of possible civil rights violations has prompted Arizona to call off its accent police. The teachers who were found to have strong accents were not fired, but their school districts were required to work with them to improve their speech. Interestingly, one person's civil rights violation is another's 'wonderful little phenomenon', which is how PBS described the accent neutralization classes attended by Bangalore call center workers who worked for the likes of IBM and Microsoft. On its website, IBM Daksh notes that 'To make sure that customers all over the world can understand the way our people speak, every new hire is trained in what we call voice and accent neutralization.' So, is accent monitoring and neutralization a civil right violation, as the U.S. Depts. of Justice and Education suggest, or is it an 'innovation', as IBM argues?"

Re:I guess it depends on the politics of the State

[Skarecrow77]

It's embarrassing for the teacher, and embarrassing for the students.

I took a chem class in college where the professor was just horrible at teaching. I don't know if he just didn't give a damn, or if he was just a really bad teacher who did really good grant work, who knows. Either way, it was well known that you basically had to bring a list of "what the fuck was he talking about" topics to your discussion classes to ask the TAs to explain. I had a brilliant TA who who was saddled with the thickest indian accent I've encountered in my entire life. We'd ask him to explain a topic, and he'd explain, and none of us would understand his accent, we'd sheepishly ask him to repeat again, and he'd just speak louder.

I actually talked to a bunch of the other students about it after class, and we were all releaved to find out we were experiencing the same problem. none of us could understand the guy. We all agreed that when we could cut through the accent, we thought he was much better at explaining the concepts than the teacher, and he certainly knew what he was talking about, but at least half the time it was almost like he wasn't speaking the same language as us.

Now, that's just a single TA in a class that had A. the professor, and B. other TAs to ask questions to. If this was a single teacher instructing the class, and that person was all the class had to turn to for explanation of the topic, say what you want... a lot of people are going to fail that class who otherwise shouldn't have.

I'm not sure how widespread a problem it is, since I only encountered it once in my life, but "people's feelings" be damned, it WAS a problem.

Re:Context

[snowgirl]

Innovation or violation?

It's interesting as well, because there is a difference in the application of the accent neutralization. The phone support providers are private employers, while the schools are public employers. As such public employers are restricted to certain conditions that private employers are not, because the public employers are both government and an employer.

The Supreme Court has held that discrimination even by private employers based on not speaking English is only permissible when English skill is absolutely necessary to perform their job, because otherwise it is discrimination based on national origin (which is illegal).

Therefore forced "accent neutralization" is clearly a discrimination based on national origin. So the immediate requirement is a necessity to show that it is absolutely necessary for job performance.

Of course, Indian call centers aren't beholden to US law anyways, so even if it is a violation, it doesn't matter because in their country, it is not a violation. Of course, the Indian call center workers are also paid less than the US federal minimum wage, but it's not a "violation" because it's in another country. So, why can't it be both? Or context/country sensitive?