
Bilingual ed for black English?
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