Black English and Special Ed

[Ronald Kephart]

I just wondered if folks are aware of a story last night on the
television news, and also reported this morning in the Florida
Times-Union, reporting a study that has shown that Black children in
schools are three times more likely to be tagged as needing special
education as White children. The study was carried out by Harvard
University's Civil Rights Project. The story is not on the T-U's web
page, so I can't give you a link to it.

On the news, but not in the printed story, one researcher pointed out
that one of the diagnostics used is language: children found speaking
Black English do not have real language, and therefore need special
treatment. (I have heard personally from teachers and school workers
about this happening around Jacksonville, especially in the more
rural counties.)

Apparently, in some circles, Black English is *still* being treated
as a deficit of some kind, a malady needing to be remedied, shades of
the educational psychologists of the 1950s and '60s. Treating BE as a
normal manifestation of the human capacity for language is simply not
an alternative, it seems. That this still happens despite the work of
researchers like Labov, Smitherman, Dillard, Rickford and McWhorter
(and others I'm sure), all of whom have written about this subject in
ways that can be understood by normally educated people, is, I think,
frightening.

I apologize for the cross-listing, but I thought this would be of
interest to both lists.


Ronald Kephart
English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida