to teach better, nor did it provide any reduction in the underlying tension be-
tween home and school dialects. If anything, the suit and the subsequent order
exacerbated the overall problem by declaring, as a legal finding of fact, that
Standard English is the language of schools and by simultaneously holding
schools and teachers accountable for the failure of students whose home dialect
causes difficulties when it comes to literacy. The ruling, in other words, was
profoundly illogical.
When we consider the place of BEV—or any other nonstandard dialect, for
that matter—in our schools, we ought to look beyond politics and consider
what is best for students. As teachers, we have an obligation to provide children
with the tools they need to realize their full potential as individuals and as mem-
bers of society. The politics of education too easily can blind us to the needs of
our students, which certainly was the case in the Bay Area when various
schools shifted instruction and textbooks to BEV. I worked with about a dozen
of these students in the early 1970s after they enrolled in college. They discov-
ered that they were underprepared for college work. Even worse, they could not
read their college texts. All but a few dropped out. It is worth asking how many
of these students would have been able to complete college if they had not been
caught up in an experiment.
To date, no evidence exists to suggest that substituting Black English for Stan-
dard English improves academic performance. Too often, the gap in educational
performance between blacks and Hispanics on the one hand and whites and
Asians on the other receives little notice. This gap, however, is huge and warrants
our full attention. Data from the 1999 NAEP report indicated a 4-year gap be-
tween black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts. In a
follow-up study, Thernstrom and Thernstrom (2003) reported that black high
school seniors have lower test scores in reading, writing, math, history, and geog-
raphy than 8th-grade white students. On this basis, it seems that efforts to validate
the use of nonstandard English in education will do little to modify the status of
students from disadvantaged backgrounds.^8 They do not expand students’ lan-
guage skills in any way that will help them overcome the very real obstacle to ed-
ucational success and socioeconomic mobility that nonstandard English
presents. These efforts merely keep these students ghettoized. Equally troubling
is that the argument for shifting to BEV as the dialect of instruction seems, inher-DIALECTS 241(^8) Thernstrom and Thernstrom (2003) argued that the primary source of these performance gaps lies in
home environments. Their research indicated that white and Asian-American parents commonly have
high expectations for their children and demand that they work hard. Hispanic children are handicapped
by the limited education of their parents, which makes it difficult for them to preach the benefits of educa-
tion and the necessity of making short-term sacrifices to achieve long-term goals. The poor academic
performance of African-American students, Thernstrom and Thernstrom argued, rests in “the special
role of television in the life of black children and the low expectations of their parents” (p. 211).