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Ayanna Cooper, Kisha C. Bryan, and Babatunji Ifarinu explain how our teaching and attitudes need to adapt to the needs of Black English learners

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With recent attention being given to English learners (ELs) who are identified as Black and/or African American it's important to continue engaging in conversations around this particular subgroup of students. The unique history, needs, identification, and experiences of Black ELs is an important part of supporting them socially, emotionally, and academically. Ibrahim's ethnography "Becoming Black: Rap and Hip-Hop, Race, Gender, Identity, and the Politics of ESL Learning" showed that ESL is neither neutral nor without its politics and pedagogy of desire and investment (Ibrahim, 1999). The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans (WHIEEAA) and the U.S. Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) recently partnered to find ways to best support Black ELs. Since October 2015, they have released resources as part of a tool kit geared toward helping educators of ELs, including Black ELs, and their families. The data collected and presented leave a number of thought-provoking questions and aid in further investigation from a nationwide, regional, and schoolhouse perspective.

The statistics shown are a necessary part of identifying and providing "voice" to students who are at a higher risk of falling through the demographic cracks-not intentionally, but because the picture of an English learner that most often appears in one's mind is not a child of African decent. In teacher education, in-service teacher professional development, professional learning communities, and other venues for learning about ELs, very rarely are examples of ELs shown where the students are neither Latino nor Asian. How might we continue to learn about and support a subgroup of ELs when many people don't know this population exists? Let's review the statistics that help to frame the U.S. population of Black ELs.

* The data collected from the American Community Survey defines individuals who are Black as those whose racial self-identification included "Black, African American, negro, or mulatto, regardless of what additional race(s) the person reported, if any." These individuals can be "Black alone or in combination" with other races, regardless of Hispanic origin.

* 11-20% of the EL student population in New York and Florida is Black. Washington D.C., Maryland, and Texas report 6-20% of their EL populations as Black.

* 40% of EL students who are Black speak Spanish and approximately 18% of EL students who are Black speak French Creole at home.

* In the U.S., Maine has the highest concentration of Black ELs, 48.6%.

* Black African immigrants represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. immigrant population, increasing by about 200% during the 1980s and 1990s and by 100% during the 2000s (Capps, McCabe, and Fix, 2012).

(Stats adapted from U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2013. Estimates generated by NCELA using Census DataFerrett.)

What do these statistics mean for Black ELs and their educators in these areas? How might this information impact educator training preservice, in service, and in community outreach initiatives? What else do we need to know about Black ELs and do in order to become more aware and action oriented? Why does it matter? The questions about nationwide data are posed to encourage dialog and further research about Black ELs.

African American Vernacular English Debate
Nearly 20 years after the Oakland Unified School District sparked a fierce debate by declaring Ebonics (African American Vernacular English, AAVE) a distinct language, native-born Black students remain the most misunderstood, misidentified, underserved population of English learners. They are positioned in the center of the native/non-native speaker dichotomy and at the margins with regards to eligibility for language services offered at school. African American students remain at the lower end of the achievement gap, and as suggested by the Oakland School Board, this is due, in part, to the lack of attention given to these students' linguistic needs, the lack of language services being offered to them, and the lack of legitimacy given to their native tongues. In many states, native-born Blacks are ineligible for language services simply because it is assumed that they are native speakers of English and would not benefit from these services. Are these students really native speakers of English? There is no simple answer. For the most part, by the time they enter preschool, African American children have receptive knowledge of Standard American English. The majority of these students also have productive knowledge of Standard American English as well as AAVE.

Figure 1. World Englishes from McArthur (1987) above

In some regions of the U.S., like coastal Louisiana and Coastal South Carolina (Gullah-speaking regions), nearly all Black children grow up speaking a more creolized variety of English and AAVE (see Figure 1 for a list of world Englishes). While the majority of English Creole and AAVE label their languages as English and self-identify as native speakers of English, their English is significantly different from the language used in America's classrooms.

Caribbean English and English Creole Speakers
While the Caribbean English-speaking population is significantly smaller than the AAVE-speaking population, Caribbean English- and English Creole-speaking families have been migrating to the U.S. in greater frequency over the past 40 years. Most settle in the larger cities such as New York, Miami, and Fort Lauderdale. Caribbean immigrants represent about 60% of the Black immigrants living in the U.S. and are a major source of growth in the total U.S. population. In 2008-2009, a reported 3.3 million Black immigrants were living in the U.S. Just over one million of these immigrants reported that they were born in one of the English-speaking Caribbean countries (Hernandez, 2012; McKinnon and Bennett, 2005; Thomas, 2012). Like African American students, anglophone Caribbean students are often marginalized, misidentified, and misplaced in (and out of) language education programs. Their language use often varies between Standard English varieties, African American Vernacular English, and English Creole. Such varieties reflect their identities in different contexts (Green, 2002; Nero, 2005; Pratt-Johnson, 2006). Indeed, this population of Black ELs has added a new and changing dynamic to the Black student population. Schools are often challenged by their presence, as either they are classified as native speakers of English with disregard to their actual level of English language proficiency or they are placed in traditional ESL programs where the assumption is that all of the students identify as non-native speakers of English.

While native-born Blacks are wholly ineligible for language services, the immigrant status of Caribbean English speakers often supports their eligibility. This eligibility, however, does not always equate to appropriate identification and/or programming. The linguistic identities of these students often leave school districts confused and this student population underserved. In her study of Jamaican Creole English-speaking students in New York City public schools, Pratt-Johnson (2006) found that upon entering school, these students were not provided the opportunity to linguistically self-identify, and when they did self-identify as native speakers of English, school personnel often challenged them. She noted that the Creole English-speaking students were usually faced with one of three situations:

1. Classified as English language learners when their language seemed decidedly creolized;

2. Identified as native English speakers when they were from dominantly English-speaking countries; or

3. Classified as disabled and assigned to special education classes in the hope that the smaller class size and slower pace would solve their obvious language differences.

Because these students fall outside of the native speaker/non-native speaker paradigm, they are often misidentified in terms of their native language and English language proficiency and abilities. In addition to their linguistic needs, several scholars have reported that Caribbean students often experience poor educational outcomes, including low academic achievement and high dropout rates (e.g., Roopnarine et al., 2004; Smith et al., 2004; Thomas-Hope, 1992). These poor outcomes are often attributed to diverse issues such as racial discrimination, and inappropriate assessment and placement in curriculum levels and programs (Mitchell and Bryan, 2007; Waters, 1999). Further, Caribbean immigrant students and other Black immigrants typically experience acculturative stress that manifests in poor psychological wellbeing, including feelings of isolation, anxiety, depression, identity confusion regarding race and ethnicity, difficulty making friends, and behavioral and family problems (Mahoney, 2002; Morrison and Bryan, 2014; Seaton et al., 2008; Winer, 2006).

Lack of Value, Lack of Affirmation
Country of birth and historical factors (e.g., colonization, slavery, etc.) make a huge difference in whether or not a language is valued as well as in expectations of proficiency for students. Anglophone Caribbean students are non-native to the U.S., so it is expected that their English may be different. Traditional ESL students have distinct native/first languages, so it is expected that they may need to be provided language services. In fact, all of the professional language organizations advocate for ESL and bilingual programs to be additive in nature. They endorse use of the first language as a bridge to support the acquisition of English. However, this is not the case with native varieties of English, as it is a deeply rooted sentiment that AAVE is slang, "ghetto," bastardly, and lazy and does not belong in the classroom, despite it being the first language of the majority of the country's Black students. Columnist Debra Saunders wrote, "Apparently the board hasn't noticed that many Black students speak English just fine, thank you. Their parents may not want their kids forced into a linguistic ghetto" (1996, p. A15).

The child who speaks in a vernacular dialect is not making language errors; instead, she or he is speaking correctly in the language of the home discourse community, which is often not a linguistic ghetto (Wheeler and Swords, 2004). In 1979, writer James Baldwin suggested that the argument concerning the use, the status, or the reality of Black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language and the status of its speakers. If the speakers are devalued and marginalized, then so will their language be devalued and marginalized.

Professional Development
Because Black ELs are a population whose voices often go unheard, we must begin to consider their voices, their plight, and our role as educators. In 1979, Baldwin stated, "It is not the Black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: it is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be Black, and in which he knows that he can never become white."

Teacher-training and professional-development programs in this country have an enormous task, theoretically training teachers to work with all students so that they are socially, emotionally, and academically successful. While most teacher-training programs aim to address the sociocultural foundations of education and the results of racial discrimination and cultural bias, to what extent are teacher educators providing opportunities for preservice teachers to consider their attitudes and ideologies regarding language varieties and how these views position and possibly marginalize students? How often do methodology courses incorporate strategies for teaching Standard English as a second dialect? How often do texts depict successful Blacks speaking AAVE, code switching, or speaking a language other than English? It is only when these questions can be affirmatively answered that Black ELs, and Black students who do not identify as ELs, will see themselves in our curriculum.

Community Outreach
In addition to teacher training, current educators must tap into communities' funds of knowledge and resources. In order to show that we value our students' languages and cultures, we must welcome them into the classroom. We can do this by inviting the elders and leaders of the communities into our schools to establish relationships and partner with teachers, administrators, and staff. The most successful schools in African American and heavily populated immigrant communities are those that have an open door to the community and those that actively seek ways to show culturally and linguistically diverse members of the community as role models. Figure 2 illustrates our goal, which is to ensure that Black ELs don't repudiate their experiences or identities, but that their unique linguistic identities are viewed as assets, their social and emotional needs are considered and met, and their academic and career trajectories are monitored.
Figure 2. Implications of Race/Ethnicity and Language
As the population of Black ELs becomes more highly recognized, the students bring forth the opportunity for educators and community members to think more about U.S. race relations, academic and career trajectories including barriers and opportunities, socioemotional development, diverse socioeconomic statuses and language and literacy as capital. It also encourages educators to self-assess their own biases and ignorance as catalysts for change. Inevitably, by being action oriented, we'll be on the forefront of improving outcomes for all English learners so that no subgroup will be silenced, be ignored, or go unrecognized.

Ayanna Cooper, EdD, is an educator, author, and advocate for culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Cooper supports educators in becoming change agents and leaders within the field of English language teaching. She's a co-author of Evaluating ALL Teachers of English Learners and Students with Disabilities: Supporting Great Teaching, Corwin Press.

Kisha C. Bryan, PhD, is clinical assistant professor of ESL at Texas A&M University. She is an advocate for ELs and other linguistically diverse populations. Her research focuses on identity construction among Black immigrant adolescents, language acquisition in urban contexts, and ESL teacher preparation.

Babatunji Ifarinu, MEd, is a success facilitator for English learners in one of the largest and most diverse school districts in Georgia. Ifarinu delivers workshops that demonstrate "practical and tactical" strategies, while delivering paradigm-shifting information that can be immediately utilized in classrooms.
All three authors are members of BELPaF, Black English Language Professionals and Friends, of TESOL. BELPaF is a forum for educators with an interest in issues related to the professional growth and development of ESL professionals of color and their students.

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No Longer the Silent Subgroup - Language Magazine

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Ayanna Cooper, Kisha C. Bryan, and Babatunji Ifarinu explain how our teaching and attitudes need to adapt to the needs of Black English learners With recent attention being given to English learners (ELs) who are identified as Black and/or African American it's important to continue engaging in conversations around this particular subgroup of students.

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Mathematics Literacy, Identity Resilience, and Opportunity Sixty Years Since Brown v.Board: Counternarratives of a FiveGeneration Family

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Mathematics Literacy, Identity Resilience, and Opportunity Sixty Years Since Brown v.Board: Counternarratives of a FiveGeneration Family

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A cross analysis of school experiences, from a maternal great-great-grandmother to her great-great-granddaughter, reveal a portrait of segregation, desegregation, and resegregation.

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Challenging School Segregation in the Twenty-first Century: How Districts can Leverage Dual Language Education to Increase School and Classroom Diversity

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Challenging School Segregation in the Twenty-first Century: How Districts can Leverage Dual Language Education to Increase School and Classroom Diversity

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Link to the author's speech: https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-7977/

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Worsening School Segregation for Latino Children?

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Worsening School Segregation for Latino Children?

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Worsening School Segregation for Latino Children

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Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts

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Is There Racial Inequality at Your School?

Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts. | About Our Data | Related Story Local Stories

This database was last updated in October 2018, and its latest data is from the 2015-16 school year. Researchers can find more recent data at the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection site.

School districts where White students are more likely to be in an Advanced Placement class or gifted and talented program, compared with Black students.

Note: When unified school districts do not exist, we display secondary school districts. In districts where there are too few students of a specific group to calculate a measure, we omitted the result.

Nationally, White students are 1.8 times as likely as Black students to be in an Advanced Placement class.

Compare student access to opportunities and discipline on average, across states. Click on each state for full details.

State

Nonwhite Students

Students Who Get Free/Reduced-Price Lunch

High School Graduation Rate

Opportunity (White students are this number of times as likely to be in an AP class, compared with Black students)

Discipline (Black students are this number of times as likely to be suspended, compared with White students)

State

Nonwhite Students

Students Who Get Free/Reduced-Price Lunch

High School Graduation Rate

Opportunity (White students are this number of times as likely to be in an AP class, compared with Hispanic students)

Discipline (Hispanic students are this number of times as likely to be suspended, compared with White students)

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Is there racial inequality at your school? Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts to see how they compare.

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Remember: The Journey to School Integration by Toni Morrison

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Remember: The Journey to School Integration by Toni Morrison

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Part history, part current events, and part imagination, Toni Morrison’s look at school desegregation in the 1950s and the civil rights movement that followed is all about people...The photographs and spare text invite us to put ourselves into this era of change and understand how it felt. They challenge us to ask ourselves how it still feels. And they remind us to remember.

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Library of Congress: Jim Crow and Segregation

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Library of Congress: Jim Crow and Segregation

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The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching.

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

For more than a century after the Civil War, a system of laws and practices denied full freedom and citizenship to African Americans, segregating nearly all aspects of public life.

Historical Background

In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation symbolically established a national intent to eradicate slavery in the United States. Decades of state and federal legislation around civil rights followed. In January of 1865, the 13th amendment to the Constitution officially abolished slavery in this country, while the 14th amendment, passed in 1866, set forth three principles:

All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. were citizens for the nation and no state could make or enforce any law that would abridge their rights of citizenship.

No state could deny any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

No state could deny any person equal protection of the laws.

Finally, the 15th amendment, passed in 1869, outlawed the denial of voting rights due to race, color, or past servitude.

However, immediately after the Civil War ended, some states began imposing restrictions on the daily lives of African Americans, whether they were survivors of slavery or had always been free. By the end of the 19th century, laws or informal practices that required that African Americans be segregated from whites were often called Jim Crow practices, believed to be a reference to a minstrel-show song, "Jump Jim Crow."

With the Compromise of 1877, political power was returned to Southern whites in nearly every state of the former Confederacy. The federal government abandoned attempts to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments in many parts of the country. By 1890, when Mississippi added a disfranchisement provision to its state constitution, the legalization of Jim Crow had begun.

Jim Crow was not enacted as a universal, written law of the land. Instead, a patchwork of state and local laws, codes, and agreements enforced segregation to different degrees and in different ways across the nation. In many towns and cities, ordinances designated white and black neighborhoods, while in others covenants and unwritten agreements among real estate interests maintained residential segregation. African Americans were denied the right to vote by onerous poll taxes, unfairly applied tests, and other unjust barriers. The signs we associate today with Jim Crow - "Whites Only," "Colored"- appeared at bus stations, water fountains and rest rooms, as well as at the entrances and exits to public buildings. Hotels, movie theaters, arenas, night clubs, restaurants, churches, hospitals, and schools were segregated, and interracial marriages outlawed. Segregation was not limited to African Americans, but often applied to other non-white Americans.

Segregation was often maintained by uniformed law enforcement. In other instances, it was enforced by armed white mobs and violent attacks by anonymous vigilantes. African Americans resisted these pervasive restrictions using many different strategies, from public advocacy and political activism to individual self-defense and attempts to escape to a better life. In the century following the end of Reconstruction, millions of African Americans moved away from the South in what became known as the Great Migration, only to discover that they faced discrimination in the northern states.

In the middle of the twentieth century, generations of resistance to segregation culminated in the Civil Rights movement, in which African Americans launched widespread demonstrations and other public protests to demand the rights and protections provided by the Constitution. As a result, a series of landmark court cases and new legislation in the 1950s and 60s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, relegated many of the Jim Crow laws and practices of the previous century to the dustbin of history. The impact of a century of segregation can still be felt today, and, although the specific segregation policies of the 19th and 20th centuries have been discredited, voices calling for equal rights for all can still be heard today.

Suggestions for Teachers

Select one primary source that reflects racial segregation and ask your students to consider segregation from multiple perspectives. How would they react if they were excluded? How would they feel if they were not excluded? What would they do if they were asked to enforce the rule or law?

Ask students to analyze several primary sources that express or illustrate views in favor of Jim Crow segregation. What are some of the ways that proponents of segregation make it sound like a benefit -- either to whites, to African Americans, or to both? Invite them to explore what is meant by the term "separate but equal." and how is this concept related to the arguments?

Ask students to compare and contrast several primary sources that express or illustrate opposition to Jim Crow segregation. What were some of the different justifications given for abolishing Jim Crow? What different methods - or approaches - of opposition can you identify? Brainstorm other forms of protest not shown in the primary sources and look for examples in either historical collections or the media of today.

Additional Resources

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Jim Crow and Segregation | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Jump to: Historical background Suggestions for Teachers Additional resources For more than a century after the Civil War, a system of laws and practices denied full freedom and citizenship to African Americans, segregating nearly all aspects of public life.

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Sixty years after the Little Rock Nine faced mobs of racially charged hatred and became cornerstones of the Civil Rights movement, Teach Us All examines how the present day United States education system fails to live up to that promise of desegregation as it slides back into a re-segregation of its modern schools.

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Sixty years after the Little Rock Nine faced mobs of racially charged hatred and became cornerstones of the Civil Rights movement, Teach Us All examines how the present day United States education system fails to live up to that promise of desegregation as it slides back into a re-segregation of its modern schools.

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Director Marc Levin highlights the recent effects of hyper-gentrification in New York City’s West Chelsea, focusing on an intersection where an elite private school sits directly across the street from public housing projects.

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Watch Class Divide, the original HBO documentary online at HBO.com or stream on your own device.

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Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

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Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

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Nikole Hannah-Jones

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Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (Published 2016)

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How one school became a battleground over which children benefit from a separate and unequal system.

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From Serial and The New York Times: “Nice White Parents” looks at the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.

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Introducing: Nice White Parents (Published 2020)

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A new five-part series about building a better school system, and what gets in the way. New episodes of “Nice White Parents” are available here, brought to you by Serial Productions and The New York Times.

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This American Life: The Problem We All Live With Part One

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This American Life: The Problem We All Live With Part One

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Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program.

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Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," depicting Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South.

Artwork approved by The Norman Rockwell Family Agency.

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The Problem We All Live With - Part One - This American Life

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There's one thing that has been proven to cut the achievement gap between black and white students by half: integration.

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Last week we looked at a school district integrating by accident. This week: a city going all out to integrate its schools. Plus, a girl who comes up with her own one-woman integration plan.

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Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," depicting Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South.

Artwork approved by The Norman Rockwell Family Agency.

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The Problem We All Live With - Part Two - This American Life

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If you enjoyed this episode, you may like these What happens when of a group of public school students in the Bronx goes to visit an elite private school three miles away. The rise and fall of a school maintenance man in Schenectady, New York who terrorized his staff and got away with it for decades.

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NYT: Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching About School Segregation and Educational Inequality

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NYT: Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching About School Segregation and Educational Inequality

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This teaching resource considers three essential questions:

• How and why are schools still segregated in 2019?
• What repercussions do segregated schools have for students and society?
• What are potential remedies to address school segregation?

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Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality (Published 2019)

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Although many students learn about the struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum. This teaching resource uses Times articles and Op-Eds to investigate the issue.

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There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide. We hear what happens when you get to see the other side and it looks a lot better.

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