K. C. McAlpin, Executive Director of Pro English, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for making English America’s official language said that he may support legal action against the Dallas Independent School District for its recent vote that will require some principals to learn Spanish.

Under the terms of the school district’s decision, in certain schools where the Hispanic enrollment is high, principals would be mandated to learn Spanish within three years.

[Dallas County Requires School Administrators to Learn Spanish or Else; Texas Plan Gives Principals Three Years]

McAlpin said that the school board has its priorities backwards, explaining:

“If the Dallas schools are failing in their responsibility to teach school children to speak English because they continue putting them in bilingual classrooms, the school board should address that failure rather than accommodate it by forcing school administrators to learn the students’ language.”

I am reminded of the Stockton Unified School District in California where, several years ago, administrators discussed the idea of forcing teachers to learn southeast Asian languages like Cambodian, Laotian, etc.

But the idea died out when the administrators realized that no one in California taught those languages.

And there was the additional problem of classroom demographic turnover. That is, while a teacher’s class may be predominantly Vietnamese this year but by the time she mastered Vietnamese several years down the road, her classroom might have consisted mostly of Russian speakers.

Let’s hope the Dallas case, through legal action if necessary, meets the same fate as Stockton’s ill-conceived plan.