included lessons in Standard English, even implicitly, was viewed as discrim-
inatory and oppressive.
One cannot overestimate the importance of being sensitive to these percep-
tions and to the admittedly complex issues surrounding Standard English and
its usage conventions. But it also is important to recognize that there always is a
cost involved when one fails to follow convention.^9 The National Commission
on Excellence in Education sounded the alarm in 1983, when it issued its report
on the state of American education inA Nation at Risk: “Each generation of
Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic
attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills
of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those
of their parents” (1983, p. 1).
In the two plus decades sinceA Nation at Riskwas published, the federal
government has provided approximately $1.4 trillion in funding to improve
public education (funding for FY 2000 alone was approximately $123 billion),
but not much has changed (U.S. Office of Management and Budget, 2004).
Fewer classrooms have teachers who specialized in their subject areas than in
1983; the school year is more than a week shorter than it was in the 1970s; and
students do less homework than their counterparts did in 1982. Although SAT
math scores have improved, verbal scores have not and overall scores remain
about 100 points below their 1970 levels, even though in 1992 the College
Board “renormed” the SAT, which had the effect of raising all subsequent
scores by 150 points. NAEP scores have remained either unchanged or, in the
case of writing, have dropped along significant dimensions, such as sentence
fragments, coherence, and substance (a word that already has appeared several
times in this chapter) (U.S. Department of Education, 1999).
Asking nonstandard speakers to master the conventions of Standard and for-
mal Standard English does not—and certainly should not—entail any explicit
rejection or criticism of the home dialect. To counter the claim that it involves
an implicit criticism, we need to adopt an additive stance with respect to lan-
guage. That is, mastering Standard English conventions is not intended to sub-
tract from students but instead is intended to add to their linguistic skills.
We should not be so naive, however, as to begin thinking that nonstandard
English will ever shed its stigma. Many who argue against teaching Standard
conventions seem to believe it will. The reality is that failure to teach the con-
ventions of Standard and formal Standard English in our classes is unlikely to
TEACHING GRAMMAR 35
(^9) Consider this extreme example:Judgesrecounts how the Gileadites killed 42,000 Ephraimites sim-
ply because the latter pronounced the wordshibbolethassibboleth(12, 4–6). As Quintilian stated, “Us-
age ... is the surest pilot in speaking, and we should treat language as currency minted with the public
stamp” (1974, I.vi.1–3).