A three year old in Oakland cannot read. A three year old in Compton cannot read. A three year old in South Los Angeles cannot read. That is not a crisis of vocabulary. That is a crisis of literacy. And right now, a coalition of California activists wants to respond to that crisis by teaching toddlers that the grammar they use at home is a separate, equally valid “language” that deserves the same official status as Spanish or Mandarin in the state’s preschool classrooms.
The group calling for this is Black Californians United for Early Care & Education, known as BlackECE, an umbrella coalition that includes Californians Together, Catalyst California and Early Edge. Its co-founder, Dr. Ashley Williams, has been open about her motivation. She says she was teased as a child for “talking white” and does not want her own son to feel shame about how he speaks. Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, put the goal plainly: state officials should recognize African American Vernacular English, sometimes called AAVE or Black English, as a legitimate rule governed language on par with the dual language programs already serving multilingual children.
Here is what this campaign gets right, and conservatives should say so plainly. AAVE is not “broken English.” Linguists have documented for decades that it follows consistent internal rules, things like habitual “be” and specific patterns of consonant simplification. It is not gibberish. It is not laziness. It is a dialect with real historical roots in the Black American experience, and no child should be mocked or shamed for how their grandmother talks at the dinner table.
But here is where the activists lose the plot entirely. Recognizing that a dialect has structure is not the same thing as arguing children should be taught it as an alternative to standard English in a public preschool. And that is exactly what this movement is asking for. Soto-Boykin herself said the quiet part out loud, “We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African American English speakers.” She wants Black children treated as a separate linguistic subgroup, one that needs its home dialect “sustained” by the state, right alongside children who are genuinely learning a second language from another country.
That is not the same situation, and pretending otherwise does these children no favors.
Consider the numbers. Pew Research found that 96 percent of Black Americans are fluent English speakers, and roughly 88 percent speak only English at home. This is not a population that needs bilingual dual language accommodation the way a Spanish speaking immigrant family does. Meanwhile, a 2020 study found that 44 percent of California children ages five to 17 are already bilingual in the traditional sense, learning an actual second language. Folding a domestic English dialect into that same policy category does not strengthen the multilingual education framework. It cheapens it, and it distracts from children who are genuinely navigating two separate languages.
Now let’s talk about what actually happens to Black children in California’s public schools, because that is the story BlackECE does not want you to focus on. Governor Gavin Newsom loves to brag about record education spending, and he is not wrong about the dollar figure. California is now projected to spend $28,282 per student when state, federal and local funding are combined for the 2026-27 school year, a record high and a 61 percent increase since Newsom took office. His own press office put that number on a graphic and celebrated it.
Here is what was not on the graphic: only 28 percent of Black fourth graders in California read at or above a basic level. In Mississippi, a state Democrats love to mock as backward, that number is 52 percent, nearly double California’s. Mississippi spends a fraction of what California spends per pupil and gets better reading results for Black children. That gap should be a five alarm fire in Sacramento. Instead, the conversation being pushed by activists and amplified by outlets like KQED is whether toddlers should be affirmed for saying “he be walking” instead of being drilled on phonics.
This is the actual scandal. California’s education establishment has presided over a generation of Black children falling further behind in reading, while spending more money than almost any state in the country, and now the proposed fix is not more phonics instruction or reading intervention. It is a new dialect affirmation framework for three and four year olds.
Ask yourself who benefits from that. Not the child who cannot decode a sentence by third grade. Not the parent who needs their son or daughter to read a job application, a lease, a court document, or a college application in the language that document is written in. The people who benefit are the consultants, the nonprofits, and the university researchers who get grants, conference invitations, and “language justice” fellowships out of a framework that treats standard English literacy as optional.
And here is the point that needs to be said clearly, because BlackECE’s own founder raised it herself. Standard English is not “talking white.” That phrase is an insult invented to shame Black children out of academic achievement, and no conservative, no parent, and no serious educator should accept its premise. Grammar is not a race. A well constructed sentence does not belong to one ethnic group. Millions of Black Americans, immigrants from Nigeria and Jamaica, Southern sharecroppers’ grandchildren who became doctors and senators and Supreme Court justices, all mastered the same standard English that every other American child is expected to learn. They did it not because they were betraying their culture, but because fluency in the shared language of commerce, law, and civic life is the single most reliable ladder out of poverty this country has ever built.
Teaching a child to code switch, to speak one way at home and another in a classroom or a job interview, is not oppression. It is exactly what every immigrant family in America does, and what every successful person navigating multiple worlds has always done. It is called bilingualism when a Korean American child does it. It should not be pathologized as trauma when a Black American child does it.
California’s preschools do not need a new framework to affirm dialects; they need a relentless, back to basics focus on phonics and reading instruction, especially in the Black and Latino communities the system has failed for decades. Every dollar of that record $28,282 should be chasing that outcome, not funding a movement that risks telling three year olds their path to literacy is optional.
Real love for these children does not mean lowering the bar. It means handing them the same tools every successful American has used to climb, and refusing to let ideology get in the way.
