A coalition called Black Californians United for Early Care & Education — BlackECE for short — has released a 10-point policy plan demanding that California preschools formally recognize and teach "Black English" as a pathway to literacy. Co-founder Ashley Williams told the New York Post that the initiative is about making sure kids don't feel like their voice "is not valued."
Oakland tried this exact thing in 1996. It lasted about five minutes before the entire country recoiled.
The plan calls for preschool curricula across California to incorporate what linguists call African American Vernacular English or AAVE. The examples offered as classroom-ready instruction include phrases like "He be working late on Tuesdays," "I'm finna go get some food," and "She been finished that project." These are presented not as informal speech patterns that kids already pick up at home, but as a formal linguistic framework that educators should actively teach alongside — or apparently instead of — standard English.
Williams framed the effort as a matter of dignity. "I don't want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can't be heard because he's not saying it one way or the other," she said.
Nobody's arguing that a kid should feel bad about how he talks at the dinner table. But there's a canyon-sized difference between respecting how people speak at home and building a preschool curriculum around it when the stated goal is improving literacy rates. California's literacy numbers are already a national embarrassment. The state released a dual language learning plan back in 2020, and the needle hasn't exactly moved.
The 1996 Oakland Schools ebonics resolution is the ghost that haunts this entire conversation. That initiative proposed recognizing ebonics as a distinct language for instructional purposes. The backlash was immediate and bipartisan. Civil rights leaders, linguists, and parents all pushed back, and the school board quietly walked it away. The core objection then was the same one that applies now: telling kids that non-standard English is an academic subject doesn't help them compete in a world where standard English is the language of contracts, applications, courtrooms, and college entrance exams.
BlackECE's 10-point plan repackages that failed idea with newer branding and a younger target audience — preschoolers instead of middle schoolers. The logic seems to be that if you start early enough, the approach that failed with older kids will somehow work with four-year-olds.
What the plan conspicuously doesn't address is the part where kids actually learn to read standard English. There's no phonics component. No measurable literacy benchmarks tied to the proposal. No explanation of how teaching "Don't nobody know where he went" as formal instruction gets a five-year-old closer to reading a book independently by third grade.
California has spent decades cycling through progressive education experiments while its reading scores sit in the basement. Every few years, a new framework arrives promising to fix the problem by doing something other than teaching kids to read in the language that every employer, university, and government agency in the country actually uses.
The kids who need literacy the most are the ones who'll pay the price when the experiment doesn't work. Again.
