available for teaching English to children who came to school speaking
another language entirely, as they would cite in their resolution:
Whereas, the Federal Bilingual Education Act (20 USC 1402 et seq.)
mandates that local educational agencies “build their capacities to
establish, implement and sustain programs of instruction for children
and youth of limited English proficiency.”At this point, a well-established theory was raised: the best way to
introduce children to the idea of *SAE is to use the home language as a
conduit.^6 So why not propose that AAVE be recognized as a language
independent of English? If this approach worked, there would be more
money to get things done, and they would have the beginnings of a
program that valued AAVE as a fully functional human language. This
would be a good first step toward drawing disenfranchised children back
into the classroom.
The School Board wrote a proposal which said, in essence: We are
failing in our primarily goal to teach AAVE-speaking children SAE. They
are resistant for a lot of complex reasons, and nothing we have tried so far
has been successful. We have reason to believe that if we approach this
from their perspective things will improve. If we start with what the
children know, with the home language, they will understand that we’re
not trying to take anything away from them. They’ll begin to expand their
skills until the point they can code-switch between AAVE and SAE
according to situational factors.
This is what the School Board was saying, but they didn’t put it this
way. Note that their position is very conservative and traditional. All
parties agree that schoolchildren must learn *SAE because the command
of that language is crucial to success. No one raises the issue of the racism
inherent to this linguistic separate-but-equal approach. The Anglo world is
saying: you must assimilate linguistically, or we will systematically shut
you out. Fair warning: learn our language, be like us, or we will
discriminate against you.