DW 3b

Oftentimes Educators refer to AAVE as broken English or lazy English as main factor hinges African American students to succeed academically. According to a reading achievement data collect from students in several of urban school districts; African American students score 31.3% in relative to whites score 60.7% in K-6th grade, Blacks score 26.9% compare to 63.4% whites score in 7th-8th grade. This reading assessment data is partial prepresentation of great City School results on standardized, norm-referenced reading achievement tests taken in 1992-1993. the achievement tests are normalized so that 50 percent of the student who take them score above fiftieth percentile (Rickford. Linguistics, Education and the Ebonics firstorm). The reading data indicates that African American students make up most of African American students and have been failing at schools. The findings on student achievement in reading assessment are evident that current education system is not working for most African American students. The reading assessment present by Michael Casserly, Executive Director of the Council of the Great City Schools does not yield accurate assessment of African American students competence on school performance. 90% of African Americans are AAVE speakers. (Smitheman, AAVE). First, this reading assessment does not include math, science which the findings of assessment cannot be inference reasoning. Second, educators cannot assume that all African American students have failing because of they are AAVE speakers.
Academic institutions also link Intelligence with inability of writing/speaking standard English on African American students. Thomas J. Farrell’s study IQ and Standard English indicates that IQ tests pose a disadvantage on African American students who are more orally expressive. He regards that African Americans are much like their African ancestors are essentially oral people and the questions on IQ tests involve on abstract thinking which is a different way for oral expressive AAVE speakers who are more imagistic, visualized and creative thinker. In his text, he also indicates that literate thinking is abstract thinking and the kind of thinking used in both deductive and inferential reasoning the kind of thinking measured by various non-verbal tests of mental ability. Literate thinking is propositional, whereas oral thinking is appositional (Thomas, IQ test and Standard English). African American students make up a big portion in failing test are attributed to their appositional thinking. However, educators measure their students’ performance against this IQ tests to decide whether they are capable of doing well at school. In Thomas research, he does not conduct any case study to exam whether African American students are intelligent; instead, he adopts statistic data from Educational institution to interpret the results of those assessments and combine with psychological knowledge to support his arguments. I think IQ test is one of many factors that educators use to determine African American students’ performance at schools. From an objective point of view, IQ test cannot be attest on either side of perspective. School performance is not only involved with many activities and subjects, each of them involve with different methods of thinking. Likewise, educators cannot judge African American students’ intelligent based on this IQ tests, furthermore, make any associations with AAVE speakers simply because they do not do well on these IQ tests.