Remember Ebonics? Worried about black students’ reading skills, Oakland’s school board declared black English to be a separate, “genetically based” language, not merely a dialect, in December, 1996. A resolution implied teachers would use Ebonics in class. The National Head Start Association ran an ad slamming the use of Ebonics in school. Among those who hated the idea were Maya Angelou, who was “incensed,” and   Jesse Jackson, who called it “madness” to make “slang talk a s

Mural by students at Broadway Elementary School in Los Angeles Los Angeles Unified is tripling the number of dual-immersion bilingual programs, but there’s a catch, reports Kyle Stokes for KPCC. Worried that their children won’t learn English, most immigrant parents are rejecting bilingual education. Only six percent of the district’s 150,000 English Learners have enrolled in a dual-language program. In dual language programs, students spend at least half – if not most – of t

Middle-class, native English-speaking, white parents are flooding into dual-immersion bilingual programs, writes Conor Williams in The Atlantic. In some gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re crowding out children from immigrant families. Let’s say a school offers a dual-immersion program in Spanish and English. The model calls for about half the students to come from Spanish-speaking homes (some may speak English too) and half from English-speaking homes.The model is very popula