Dreams deflected: The Ann Arbor King School "Black English" case.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the causes and consequences of the Ann Arbor King School "Black English" case. Filed in Federal District Court in 1977, the King School lawsuit sought to hold the Ann Arbor School District Board responsible for the low academic achievement of the plaintiff children, all residents of a low-income housing project. Chapter One introduces from the theory of Michel Foucault the metaphor of "archaeology," using it to describe the discrete sites out of which the King School case arose. Chapter Two analyzes the discourse of sociolinguistics which formed the core of the testimony presented in during the trial, focusing on the gap between the discourse of the sociolinguistic description of the structure of Black English Vernacular, and the testimony attesting to the "language barrier" present in the "unconscious but evident" attitudes in the King School teachers. Chapter Three challenges the epistemological and political position claimed in the discourse of "bidialectalism." It sets the King School case within a larger context, another site from which the assumptions in the King School case regarding Standard English and the aims and goals of literacy education--social, economic, and cultural integration in the mainstream--can be viewed. Chapter Four plays out the implications for literacy educators of a "double perspective" on difference, juxtaposing speaking of "difference" as an epistemological category with "difference" as a strategic category.