a teacher who grew up speaking a stigmatized vernacular is assigned to
teach a first grade class in his old neighborhood, what does institutional
policy tell him about the kind of English he should use with those
children? Do teachers in this position follow prescripted usage rules, or do
they simply use whichever language works best in reaching the children?
How do they talk to children about their language? What advantages and
disadvantages might there be to this? This second issue will be taken up
again in Chapter 9, which deals with cases where teachers have sued their
schools and school districts for language-focused discrimination under
Title XII of the Civil Rights Act.
The setting of goals
Figure 6.1 provides some insight into one of the most difficult and
intractable problems in public education: there are large populations of
children who do not learn to read.^4 This is not a new problem, but it is one
that has evaded solutions. While educators, social scientists, government
agencies, psychiatrists and linguists spend a lot of time trying to figure out
(1) what’s going wrong, and (2) how to fix it, whole generations of
children leave school unprepared and perhaps even worse, uninspired.
Certainly language conflicts are relevant, but whether they are a part of the
cause or simply a symptom, that is yet to be fully determined. When the
subject comes into the public consciousness, it is almost always in
connection with issues of race and ethnicity, bilingualism and stigmatized
varieties of English. Despite strong evidence that poverty is at the root of
many of the problems, the subject is rarely raised (but see especially
Baugh 1999: 115 ff.).