Lessons from the media’s coverage of the 1996 Ebonics controversy

So glad to see Alexander Russo provide this update on the potentially positive role that Ebonics can play in our nation's classrooms only if it were better understood rather than dismissed as an effective pedagogical approach for nonstandard speaker of English that speak Ebonics, or African-American English, that has roots that derive from West Africa.  Apt quotes from within:

To its defenders, Ebonics was a legitimate program being proposed by a largely black school board and attacked by a mostly white media establishment. To its critics – including middle-class African-Americans and black celebrities like Maya Angelou – it was a mistaken idea that would set kids back rather than launching them forward.

While the student population is more diverse than it was two decades ago, classroom teachers in America are predominantly white and monolingual. This population often brings with it negative judgments about dialects – which some linguists call “dominant language ideology” – based on their own experiences and culture.

The power of Ebonics, or African-American English, as a vehicle for student achievement has gotten a raw deal in the media and public policy debates. This is because it is misunderstood and indeed, derogated from within the African American community itself, particularly among some members of the middle class who see it as objectionable rather than a wonderfully rich dialect that can and should inform the instructional process for its speakers.  

Russo provides a helpful update together with resources that you can link to below.

Angela Valenzuela

Lessons from the media’s coverage of the 1996 Ebonics controversy

A long-forgotten uproar illustrates some of the chronic failures of media outlets covering polarized, racially-charged situations. But it’s not just a historic concern. The controversy could re-emerge any time now, as schools search for better ways to serve low-income students. 

By Alexander Russo

On December 18, 1996, the Oakland (CA) school board passed a two-page resolution that highlighted the plight of African-American students in the district and — as part of a plan to improve their academic success — claimed that African-American English spoken by many students was its own language and should be used to help children learn standard classroom English.
The notion generated enormous attention and controversy at the time, the vast majority of it critical. Nearly everybody – Jesse Jackson, the New York Times editorial page, Clinton education secretary Richard Riley, Maya Angelou – all came out against what Oakland was proposing, which had been dubbed “Ebonics.”
“One school board, in one city, passed one little resolution,” writes Michael Hobbes in a 2017 HuffPost Highline piece revisiting what happened. “And the rest of the country spent the next six months freaking out about it.”
In response, the district rolled back its plans. The superintendent left soon thereafter. And districts haven’t dared to try anything similarly dramatic in the 22 years that have passed since then.
As it turns out, however, the main thrust of the Oakland proposal was overwhelmingly supported by linguists, and the approach it was recommending – using children’s home dialect to help teach standard English – had proven successful in other places in the past.
But the general public had little chance to grasp the larger picture. Traditional news coverage was eclipsed by hyperbolic op-eds and editorials. Cable news failed to provide any depth of understanding. Few in the general public would ever know that the district went ahead with its program under another name, or that several of those most opposed at the outset would later modify their positions. Even now, few know that the population of a group some call “standard English learners” goes far beyond African-American students or that a handful of districts have quietly created programs using their home dialects as a bridge around the country.
Revisiting the controversy provides an excellent opportunity to look at the strengths and weaknesses of media coverage of the Oakland proposal and its impact on subsequent efforts to address the needs of what some now call “standard English learners” in American schools.
The story is not merely a historical concern. To help meet their needs, a handful of districts and schools have quietly returned to the idea of using students’ home dialects to help them learn standard English.
The problems the Oakland school board was trying to address were serious ones. Just over half the kids in the Oakland were African-American – the largest portion of any California district. But they weren’t, as a group, being treated well in the existing education system. They received 80 percent of suspensions and made up 71 percent of kids with special education referrals. Their average grade point average was D+.
Then as now, the use of vernacular English spoken by some African-American students was corrected as “bad” in most classrooms. It was generally treated as a lower form of English that limited its speakers’ chances for academic and professional success.
The thrust of the Oakland plan was to teach standard English by contrasting it with African-American English. This approach had been shown to be successful in a pilot program in the district, as well as in a handful of other districts in the past.
In practice, the program piloted in Oakland was not nearly as radical as it might have sounded. Michael Bazeley, who was the education reporter for the Oakland Tribune at the time, visited a few classrooms where it was being used. “They very clearly were not ‘teaching’ students Black English or Ebonics,” he said. “They were acknowledging that Black English was real and using it as a bridge to standard English.”
But deep feelings of concern and guilt over the treatment of African-American children in schools is always near the surface in this country. The notion of “code-switching,” in which individuals learn to toggle back and forth between standard spoken English and another dialect, wasn’t nearly as familiar as it is today.
And, in what would prove to be extraordinarily distracting assertion, the Oakland resolution mistakenly declared that African-American English was its own language, rather than a dialect of English.
While many thought it was an effort to secure federal bilingual education funding, the claim was an unintentional error on the board’s part, according to some of those involved at the time. “They weren’t linguists,” according to Darolyn Davis, who handled crisis communications for the district during that period. “They didn’t use the word ‘language’ from a linguistic point of view.”
But that error – and resolution language referring to a “genetic” basis for African-American English that may also have been mistaken – would expose the board and the idea they were proposing to enormous criticism and ridicule, generally overshadowing the plight of African-American students in Oakland schools and the merits of the classroom approach being proposed.
The dominant narrative soon took shape that Oakland was trying to dumb down education by accepting Black English as a legitimate language of its own, and even teaching it to students. Oakland teachers were going to use street slang in the classroom or allow students to talk or write using it instead of standard English. The idea was pandering, political correctness run amok, and a sneaky attempt to win additional funding to boot.


NYT editorial page opposing the Oakland plan
Almost immediately, editorial pages, oped sections, and talk shows were all over the story.
The Ebonics controversy was “Topic 1 on radio talk shows across the country,” notes Gene Maeroff in his book, “Imagining Education: The Media and Schools in America.”
Jesse Jackson came out against it on NBC’s Meet The Press. The New York Times editorial page denounced what it described as “linguistic confusion.” Cable news hosts like Rush Limbaugh warned that “we be happy” was going to be taught alongside Shakespeare. Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist at the time, called the school board “deranged” and the resolution an “incendiary separatist manifesto.” There was even a Doonesbury comic strip.
“I don’t even want to say it was mixed,” says William Brennan about what he saw in his reporting for The Atlantic. “For every good article on the subject there were just 10 that were useless and furthered misunderstandings about the topic and language in general.”
“Nobody made an effort to actually figure out what the school board was doing,” says the HuffPost’s Hobbes. “Everyone went with this cartoon version of what they were doing.”
To its defenders, Ebonics was a legitimate program being proposed by a largely black school board and attacked by a mostly white media establishment. To its critics – including middle-class African-Americans and black celebrities like Maya Angelou – it was a mistaken idea that would set kids back rather than launching them forward.

NHSA ad against the use of Ebonics in schools.
By and large, the news coverage of the Oakland proposal was unobjectionable, if ineffective at generating much attention.
The Oakland Tribune’s Bazeley wrote a pretty straightforward front-page story about the program, which he observed in action. “I believed at the time that the criticism was overblown because most people had a distorted view of what was happening in the classroom,” says Bazeley.
And the NYT’s Peter Applebome wrote a series of pieces about the controversy, fleshing out Oakland’s distinct place in California politics, the political dynamics surrounding the vote in favor of the resolution, and a controversial figure who seemed to be behind the Ebonics proposal.
One exception noted by several of those interviewed is Jacob Heilbrunn’s piece in The New Republic, which blended opinion and reporting.
But reporting some of these news stories took time – Applebome’s deepest piece didn’t come out until March – and was generally produced by reporters who were not familiar with English dialects or the history of programs to help dialect speakers learn the dominant form of the language.
And the distinction between news and opinion, which is so obvious and important to journalists, is not nearly as clear to non-journalists who tend to lump opinion and news together if it’s being published by the same outlet.
News stories written at the time weren’t nearly powerful or timely enough to compete with the wave of opinion writing and cable news. In a recap of his experience at the time, Stanford linguist John Rickford criticized the media for promoting a simplistic narrative. “The media refused to focus on this massive evidence of how schools fail to teach African American students with existing methods.”
The real-world responses were just as strong. Clinton Education Secretary Richard Riley denounced the policy. The national Head Start Association put a full-page ad in the New York Times with the title “I Has a Dream.” At least one state legislature banned Ebonics from being used in classrooms. And the US Senate scheduled a hearing on the debate.
After the congressional hearing, Oakland released an updated resolution that removed every mention of the word Ebonics. And “since then, no district has tried anything that ambitious for meeting the needs of its African-American students,” writes Hobbes.

April 2018 article about African-American English in The Atlantic 

Since 1996, the debate over using African-American English in classrooms has mostly gone quiet.
However, the need hasn’t gone away, and the practice of using students’ dialects as a bridge to standard English has quietly re-emerged.
That’s largely because the case for schools teaching kids code-switching remains a powerful one. Roughly a third of African-American English speakers don’t learn to code switch on their own, according to Georgia State professor Julie Washington. Students who speak both versions of English score higher than those who don’t. Those who lag behind in this area need to be taught or it may never happen. And it’s not just African-American kids who might benefit from this kind of help. The estimated 100,000 standard English Learners in Los Angeles public schools were the district’s lowest-performing students, according to a 2008 LA Daily News article.
What would happen if a district proposed something along the same lines in present times?
Many factors have changed. States no longer require teachers to pass tests showing their ability to speak standard English. It’s become somewhat commonplace for teachers to use rap music based on Black English and other dialects to engage and instruct kids. Bilingual education is much more familiar and less controversial than it was previously. And the idea of code-switching is a generally familiar one. The sense of urgency around racial justice and economic inequality is as strong as it’s been in decades. And there are no outlets and voices of opinion out there.
Georgia State’s Washington describes the Oakland resolution as mistaken and remembers the media response as an expression of racist attitudes in America at the time. And she says she was extremely nervous about participating in the The Atlantic article featuring her work and the dialect that came out earlier this month. But she believes that, after years of keeping their heads down, advocates of using the dialect to teach mainstream classroom English are re-emerging. “The dynamics have changed… The times have changed.”
However, public opinion remains deeply divided on issues of culture and race. Teaching English to kids who are born and raised in the US remains unfamiliar and is negatively associated with the Ebonics controversy. While the student population is more diverse than it was two decades ago, classroom teachers in America are predominantly white and monolingual. This population often brings with it negative judgments about dialects – which some linguists call “dominant language ideology” – based on their own experiences and culture.
And few journalists have as much time as they did 20 years ago to check out facts. Social media adds layers and dynamics that make even the most vitriolic newspaper op-eds seem quaint. Hot takes are all the rage, and opinion journalists are encouraged to be less nuanced in their approach.
“I think it would go down differently,” Brennan says about the notion of a district proposing to use African-American English in 2018, “but not necessarily more successfully.”

Primary sources:
The Atlantic: Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools to Respect African-American English
HuffPost Highline: Why America Needs Ebonics Now
NYT: Dispute Over Ebonics Reflects a Volatile Mix That Roils Urban Education
Education Week: Students Learn to ‘Toggle’ Between Dialects

Secondary sources
New Yorker: The Case for Black English
Rickford: The Ebonics controversy in my backyard
Rethinking School: The Real Ebonics Debate
The Atlantic: Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence
LA Times: Oakland District Says Policy on Ebonics Misunderstood
New Yorker: Johnny Be Good
AP: Media Distort Black English Policy, Jackson Says
Washington Post: OAKLAND SCHOOL SYSTEM RECOGNIZES ‘BLACK ENGLISH’ AS SECOND LANGUAGE
NPR: Survey Raises Concerns About Non-English Speaking Students
New York Times: School District Elevates Status of Black English

Related columns from The Grade:
“Feel-Good” Philadelphia Inquirer Story Highlights Concerns About Racial Blind Spots
Just How White Is Education Journalism – & How To Encourage More #edJOC?
Fear, Complicity, & Guilt Get In Way Of Covering School Segregation, Says NYT Reporter

Why America Needs Ebonics Now

Great piece on African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) or "Ebonics" that every educator should read. In my earlier years as a sociolinguist, it was called "Black Vernacular English (BVE) and "West African dialect." Even if certain linguistic patterns are identifiably West African in origin, all of this gets quickly complicated by the fact that West Africa boasts and has boasted numerous dialects and languages historically.

This wonderful piece and must-see video is nevertheless a good followup to my recent post on Ebonics in a piece titled, "Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools to Respect African-American English."  Beyond the clear benefits of Ebonics instruction to student achievement—which is major and defensible unto itself, I agree—I also think that what must acknowledged in the process is the powerful and positive impact of Ebonics on American culture, especially pop culture and aesthetics.

Overall, what is needed  is an informed and respectful consideration of Ebonics as an effective pedagogical tool in the culturally relevant classroom.  Sadly, not all classrooms are culturally relevant—even if they should be.  That said, it's still good to know what you don't know—and by extension, what you absolutely must know if we're to seriously begin to impact the achievement gap. 

Thanks to education writer and journalist, Alexander Russo, for sharing. 

-Angela

Why America Needs Ebonics Now

By Michael Hobbes

September 25, 2017

Why We Need Ebonics Now from Sandra Garcia on Vimeo.

Rebecca Wheeler, a professor at Christopher Newport University and a language researcher for the last three decades, is telling me why her job is so fraught.
“Linguists have this saying: ‘As we see a people, so we see their language; as we see a language, so we see its people,’” she says. “Our attitudes about language and culture and people flow through each other without us realizing the equivalency.”
This explains why Boomers get so grumpy about “text-speak,” why your racist uncle freaks out when AT&T customer service asks him to press one for English, why half of Twitter consists of fights over Oxford commas: Hearing your language used differently, seeing it change around you, doesn't feel like progress. It feels like a threat.
The idea that Standard English must be constantly defended against marauders is an example of what linguists call “dominant language ideology,” and even well-intentioned, otherwise open-minded people display it without noticing. For instance, every semester, Wheeler gives her students, who are training to become teachers themselves, a sample essay from a 3rd grader. It’s written in African-American Vernacular English—better known as “Ebonics”—and includes phrases like “mama Jeep run out of gas” and “she walk yesterday.”
The first response from her students is always the same: The writer doesn’t understand possession, he’s failing to show subject-verb agreement, he’s struggling with basic concepts. “Truly 100 percent of my students who have not studied linguistics think this is a child who lacks the capacity for complex thought and writing,” Wheeler says.
It's only after she explains the patterns of vernacular speech—AAVE, Appalachian English, Hawaiian English, Chicano English—that her students finally understand that “she walk yesterday” isn’t a mistake. Just as a child who uses “y’all” hasn’t failed to speak in the second person, a child who says “mama Jeep run out of gas” hasn't failed to indicate possession. He's simply using a different set of rules to do it.
Over the last few decades, it’s become clear just how insidious dominant language ideology can be. “This way of thinking,” Wheeler says, “permeates our school system, our textbooks, our tests and our teacher education.”
Consider the Bridge series. In the 1970s, linguists created a curriculum that was specifically designed to boost the reading skills of black students. It started in vernacular, then introduced elements of Standard English one by one. The early pilots worked: Students who used Bridge gained six months of reading skills in four months, while kids on the traditional curriculum gained only 1.5 months. But as soon as the results got published, parents protested that the series would bring “Black English” into the classroom, that students would learn “she walk yesterday” as perfectly acceptable language to use in essays and job interviews. That they were wrong didn’t matter. The publisher pulled the series.
Or consider the Ebonics controversy, the starkest example of how “defending” Standard English ends up denigrating everything that isn’t. In 1996, the Oakland School Board passed a resolution declaring that AAVE was a distinct language and that it should be welcomed in classrooms
The freakout was immediate and intense. Cable news hosts warned that “we be happy” was going to be taught alongside Shakespeare. Frank Rich called the school board “deranged” and the resolution an “incendiary separatist manifesto.” An education NGO put a full-page ad in the New York Times with the title “I Has a Dream.” The Boston Globe said Oakland had voted to “teach black schoolchildren in ghetto-ese.”
Almost no one stood up to defend what Oakland was doing. And afterwards, as Ebonics disappeared from the national conversation, Americans could tell themselves that the entire episode was a close call, just another example of a time when patriotic members of the majority held the line against an attack on Standard English. 
But what the last 20 years have demonstrated, and what the video above explains, is the sheer scale of the missed opportunity. America’s out-of-hand dismissal of AAVE has widened the racial achievement gap, entrenched discrimination and made us all a little more scared of each other. Which raises the simple question: What’s keeping us from making another push for AAVE now?
Check out Episode 1 of I Misremember the 90s, on the Clarence Thomas hearings.

Credits

Script, Animation, Editing and Voiceover - Michael Hobbes

Michael is a contributing writer and producer for Highline.

Creative Direction & Design - Sandra Garcia

Sandra is the creative director of Highline.

Development & Design - Gladeye

Gladeye is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

Music

"Jocose Jon" by Monk Turner
"The Place Beyond the Clouds" by MindsEye

It's great to see linguist William Labov cited in this piece as his research strongly and positively influenced my understanding of Ebonics, or West African dialect.  So happy to see that he got noticed early on, as well, by the Atlantic.  I'm happy to read about Dr. Julie Washington's advocacy and research in this regard, too.  

In the Mexican American community, we also struggle for respect of our code-switching into Spanish and English.  What people do not know is that you have to be able to command two grammars in order to code switch correctly, whether it's between or within spoken phrases or sentences.  Same with Ebonics, or African-American English, that has its roots in West Africa.  Very exciting work!

Thanks to Dr. Deb Palmer for sharing. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Tim Tomkinson

Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools to Respect African-American English

The speech pathologist believes that helping kids switch seamlessly between dialects is a key to their success.

• William Brennan | The Atlantic
• April 2018 Issue
• Education

Studying African-American Vernacular English wasn’t Julie Washington’s plan. But one day in the fall of 1990, her speech-pathology doctorate fresh in hand, she found herself sitting with a little girl at a school outside Detroit. The two were reading the classic P. D. Eastman picture book Are You My Mother?, which tells the tale of a lost hatchling trying to find its way home. The girl—4 years old, homeless, and a heavy speaker of the dialect known as African-American English, or AAE—listened attentively as Washington read:

“Are you my mother?” the baby bird asked the cow.
“How could I be your mother?” said the cow. “I am a cow.”

Washington closed the book and asked the girl to recount the story from memory. The girl hesitated, then launched into it. “She goes, ‘Is you my mama? I ain’t none a yo’ mama!,’ ” Washington recalls. “She did the whole thing in dialect.” Washington found the girl’s retelling deft and charming, and she left the classroom smiling.
 Only later, sitting in her office at the University of Michigan, did Washington have the flash of insight that would redirect her career. “As a scientist, I stepped back and thought about what that girl had to do,” Washington told me recently, while waiting to address a gathering of linguists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “She had to listen to a story in a dialect she doesn’t really use herself, understand the meaning, hold the story in her memory, recode it in her own dialect, and then say it all back to me.” The girl’s “translation” of the book might not sound like much, but translating it? “That’s hard,” Washington said, especially for a young child. The experience convinced her that dialect was playing a significant and unrecognized role in the reading achievement of millions of children—and very likely contributing to the persistence of the black–white gap in test scores.

In 1996, Oakland’s “Ebonics” proposal became a national punch line. New research suggests that the city was onto something.

In the decades since, Washington, now a professor of communications sciences and disorders at Georgia State, has devoted her career to exploring the challenges that speakers of African-American English face in the classroom. Not all African American students speak the dialect, but most do. Teaching kids to “code-switch” between their home dialect and the dialect spoken at school, Washington has come to believe, is an important step toward creating a more level playing field. She is not, of course, the first person to make this argument. Linguists pioneered the case for code-switching in the 1960s, and over the years at least half a dozen programs have sought to teach speakers of AAE how to speak standard English in the classroom. Most of them, however, have provoked furious backlash and quickly met their end.
The most notorious of these controversies occurred in 1996, when the school board of Oakland, California, approved the use of “Ebonics” as a tool for reading instruction. The board had hoped to raise students’ scores by teaching kids to code-switch. But the prospect of encouraging the dialect in the classroom elicited national, and near-universal, censure. As the White House and editorialists for the country’s top newspapers condemned the plan, several states banned the use of AAE in education, and Oakland’s superintendent was called before the U.S. Senate. The school board’s program was never implemented, and the word Ebonics became a national punch line. New research by scholars like Washington, however, suggests an interesting possibility: Maybe Oakland was onto something.

Washington grew up in an all-black part of Seattle, at the height of the civil-rights movement, surrounded by African-American English and fascinated by language from an early age. As a young girl, she played a game with herself, eavesdropping on her mother’s phone calls and trying to guess who was on the other end. She found that she could always tell just by listening to the different ways her mother spoke after saying “Hello?” Her father was a high-school history teacher and her mother was a gospel singer; like many middle-class parents in the neighborhood, they held AAE in low regard—they considered the dialect a barrier to “mainstream” success—and forbade Washington and her siblings from speaking it in the house. But Washington picked it up from friends. Today she code-switches effortlessly and unremarkably.

At the conference in Madison, linguists threw around phrases such as auxiliary alternation and diachronic precursor, speaking an academic code Washington avoids. She mostly kept her distance, skipping talks with boring titles; she lacks a linguist’s tolerance for obscure grammatical disputes, declaring herself more interested in “functional” matters. (“Oh my God,” she remarked after one particularly pedantic lecture.) As she waited to deliver her own talk, on the language and literacy of African American children, she walked me through one of her career’s guiding questions: Why don’t all kids learn to code-switch as easily as she did?

Like speakers of any nonstandard dialect, from Swiss German to Cypriot Greek, most speakers of African-American English do learn to code-switch naturally, Washington explained. “Some start during kindergarten, then we see a big wave at the end of first grade and another at the end of second. Then you get to third grade and it’s over.” At that point, about a third of them still can’t speak the standard dialect, and “code-switching isn’t going to happen unless you teach it. We know those kids will have trouble.” By the end of fourth grade, “switching” students—that is, students who are proficient in both their home dialect and standard English—score at least a full academic year ahead of their nonswitching classmates in reading.
Why exactly does speaking a nonstandard dialect stymie kids as they’re learning to read? In his seminal 1972 book, Language in the Inner City, the linguist William Labov advanced the reigning theory. A teacher writes a word on the blackboard—something simple, like told or past—sounding it out letter by letter as she does. For a speaker of standard English, the lesson is clear: The four letters represent the four sounds that make up the word. But the rule is more complex for AAE speakers. In the black vernacular, many consonant clusters—such as the -ld in told, and the -st in past—aren’t fully pronounced when they appear at the end of a word. A speaker of African-American English is likely to say told the same as toll (or even toe), and past the same as pass. The profusion of homonyms obscures the fundamental sound-to-letter principle: AAE-speaking kids are presented with an enormous number of words that are all pronounced the same yet spelled in nonsensically different ways. To help kids grasp the dialect of the classroom, Labov wrote, teachers should employ “the methods used in teaching English as a foreign language.”

Labov’s recommendation was largely overlooked outside his field. But last June, Washington completed a four-year study of almost 1,000 low-income elementary-school students in a southern city—the most extensive study ever of the dialect’s role in education—which led her to a similar conclusion. Strikingly, she discovered that African American students’ lagging growth in reading was accounted for almost entirely by the low scores of the students who speak the heaviest dialect. And location mattered: The majority of kids in the city she studied, Washington found, use a regional variety of AAE that is especially far from standard English. This suggests to her that children who speak one of the dialect’s “really dense” varieties are having an experience in the classroom not unlike that of, say, native Spanish speakers.

Washington suspects that dialect may very well account for a significant part of the black–white literacy gap.

Compounding these challenges is the fact that most AAE speakers have teachers who are hostile to their dialect. In an illuminating investigation published in 1973 (but, according to several linguists I spoke with, still reflective of classroom conditions today), Ann McCormick Piestrup portrayed the AAE speaker’s experience as one of incessant interruption. Black children at the California schools Piestrup studied often answered questions correctly, only to be pounced on for irrelevant differences of pronunciation or grammar. This climate had a drastic effect: As time went on, Piestrup saw students withdraw into “moody silences”; when they did speak, their voices were soft and hesitant. The interrupted students had the lowest reading scores of any children Piestrup observed.

The social effects of this type of classroom environment have been acknowledged for decades, but what’s come to concern researchers more recently is the extent to which dialect differences between student and teacher increase the student’s cognitive load. “What does it do to your response times when you have to stop and interpret something before you can move on?,” Washington asks. “Over the course of a school day, those moments have to add up.”
In this way, Washington believes that dialect may very well account for a significant part of the black–white literacy gap. At the start of kindergarten, she notes, research finds a relatively small academic gap between black and white children, and what little gap exists can be entirely explained by controlling for socioeconomic status. Yet by first grade, the gap between them has widened considerably. If recent research on the effects of mismatched dialects is right, Washington reasons, one way to narrow the gap is to help kids learn the dialect of school, while also helping schools accept the dialect students bring with them.

To this end, one group of researchers has developed a code-switching curriculum called ToggleTalk, which has met with modest success; last year, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest school system, implemented it in a few dozen classrooms. (Teachers in the district have also requested lessons meant for speakers of Chicano English, a Spanish-influenced dialect used by a large minority of students there.) But getting code-switching lessons into schools remains a challenge.

As Washington learned early in her career, even seemingly benign conversations about African-American English can be fraught—and often, it’s speakers of the dialect who most fiercely resist efforts to incorporate it into the classroom. In preparation for one of her first studies of AAE, she sent out consent forms to parents, describing her goal of studying “the role Black English plays in children’s oral language.” Weeks passed, and not a single form came back. Eventually, Washington called a parents’ night and asked why no one had signed the form. Two dozen parents stared at her in silence until, Washington told me, one mother erupted: “How dare you say we talk different than other people! What the hell is ‘black English’? We don’t speak ‘black English’!”
“You do,” Washington said, and to make her point, she code-switched. “I think I said, ‘Look, we ain’t got no business doin’ this,’ ” she recalled. The room burst into laughter. “Okay, we do speak like that,” the mother granted. “But we don’t like you calling it that.” It was a lesson Washington never forgot: The dialect was so stigmatized that even among people who spoke it every day, she needed to tread carefully.
A new insight of Washington’s might offer a new path forward, however. In presenting code-switching lessons as a way to ward off catastrophic reading failure, she says, advocates have failed to convey the upsides of speaking African-American English. In a recent paper, Washington points to research showing that fluent speakers of two dialects might benefit from some of the cognitive advantages that accrue to speakers of two languages. She hopes that this line of thinking might at last persuade teachers and parents alike to buy in. “We see value in speaking two languages,” Washington told me. “But we don’t see value in speaking two dialects. Maybe it’s time we did.”

Washington believes that programs used to strengthen bilingual students’ grasp of English grammar could provide a stealthy way of slipping code-switching lessons into the classroom. “Many of the features covered for students who speak another language are exactly the same ones that cause African-American English speakers trouble,” she said. She has seen firsthand the ways such curricula can benefit kids who speak the dialect. At one elementary school she studied in Michigan, teachers implemented a bilingual curriculum for the majority-black student body and saw a 75 percent increase in the number of students who passed state reading tests.
Despite such results, code-switching remains a tough sell, even in academia. Some linguists I spoke with said they’d come to see code-switching lessons as well intentioned but ultimately marginalizing—a linguistic version of “separate but equal.” Washington told me she understands their concerns, and faults some code-switching programs for focusing too much on the “harms” of not being able to code-switch. But she said she refuses to lose sight of the children, usually poor and black, whose futures are on the line. Until and unless “the places these kids might want to go to learn, work, and live” change fundamentally, she told me, “you’re handicapping them by not teaching them the two codes.”