The Ostrich Method of English Grammar : Education: Schools have quit teaching standard English, fearing political backlash. It’s minority students who suffer.
Minority education has gone 35 years years since the Supreme Court ordered classroom desegregation, without bringing equality to any of America’s 15,000 school districts and without being seriously questioned. Conventional wisdom places the blame for failure on either society or the children’s home environment.
Blaming society and environment became the education bureaucracy’s leading strategy after 1966, when a federal study of 570,000 students showed that neither racial integration nor standard educational practice could stop minority failure. This meant that the bureaucracy’s credentials for educating minorities amounted to intellectual forgery. Faced with admitting incompetence or defending the forgery, the bureaucracy chose the latter. The defense aims at keeping the public either uninformed or confused about technical issues, like dialect interference, that could serve as yardsticks for measuring the schools’ intellectual honesty.
For example, linguistic science has identified dialects in every racial and ethnic group that interfere with reading and writing standard English, the language of the American marketplace. But the English teacher has no appropriate linguistic training, does not know why minority children make certain kinds of crucial mistakes and, consequently, cannot correct their errors. Lacking correction, the children fail.
Dishonesty breeds dishonesty until, like Pinocchio’s nose, yardsticks sprout on the face of policy doctrine. The lying has become so gross that technical knowledge is no longer necessary to measure the schools. Common sense will do. A good starting point is the grammar lesson.
California’s Department of Education now promotes eliminating grammar instruction. Even stranger, the Los Angeles Unified School District, in which immigrants and dialect-dominant minorities make up most of the enrollment, has bought into the promotion.
The state’s proposal is published under the title “Handbook for Planning an Effective Writing Program.” It gives this advice to parents: “Watch out for ‘the grammar trap.’ Some people may try to persuade you that a full understanding of English grammar is needed before students can express themselves well. Some knowledge of grammar is useful, but too much time spent on the study of grammar steals time from the study of writing.”
The classroom model calls for splitting the children into small groups after they have written their compositions. They read one another’s papers, reach a consensus on “editing,” and correct one another’s grammar, with teacher as an editorial consultant. It is the only grammar the handbook would have the school provide.
Minority children now constitute more than half of California’s school enrollment. Standard English is not spoken in most of their homes. Indeed, Los Angeles district students come from homes where some 80 different languages are spoken. How can these children possibly teach one another standard English grammar while “editing?”
The handbook makes a mockery of them and of the functional aspects of their ethnic diversity. The dishonesty shows up on the state’s own writing assessment scores, published in August. The districts with the largest percentage of minority students were at the bottom; Los Angeles County had districts as low as the second percentile. These scores can be used as both a yardstick of intellectual dishonesty and a measure of how poorly the affected children will do in the job market.
Ironically, the Los Angeles Unified School District has embraced the handbook as the first step of yet another plan to achieve equality. Presented as the “Core Team Report,” it ignores vast technical issues, but it minds every political jot and tittle. The handbook is tucked away in the core report’s provision for adopting the state curriculum framework, hidden within like the Greeks in the Trojan Horse.
The education bureaucracy created the handbook to rationalize what already happens by default. The schools make ethnic children learn on their own any subject that involves political controversy. Standard English grammar falls into this category because language identifies ethnicity. For the schools to prefer one language or dialect to another has been taken as evidence of their somehow preferring one group to another.
Thus the English teaching profession gets off the hook for minority illiteracy. Junking the grammar lesson becomes a game of ethnic politics and poor children pay the fees for the adults who play. So does society, which along with the children’s homes gets the blame for the educators’ dishonesty.
