When the DeKalb County fifth-grader answered a question with a double negative - "not no more" - the teacher asked, "Would you code- switch for me?"
The student responded: "Not any more."
While the Oakland, Calif., schools have drawn fire by declaring Ebonics, or "black English," a separate language worthy of classroom use, DeKalb County has been quietly targeting the same dilemma for the last 10 years without raising a debate over whether such dialect is right or wrong.
DeKalb's approach is to teach children to switch from their "home speech" to "school speech" at appropriate times and places, such as the classroom. "Home speech" is respected, but not racially defined or encouraged as an appropriate speech in the classroom.
In a fifth-grade class at Cary Reynolds Elementary School this week, teacher Jeff Carter told the 20 students there are many types of home speech, but only one type of "school speech. "Why?" Carter asked.
"Because when you talk, everybody can understand," said Emani Morris. DeKalb's "Bidialectal Communication," which is taught to every fifth-and sixth-grade student in eight selected schools rather than singling out students, teaches that the dialect they might use at home is valuable and "effective" in that setting, but not for school, for work - or for American democracy.
"We call it bidialectal because we're trying to espouse the notion that you may need more than one way of speaking," said program director Kelli Harris-Wright, who designed the program when then-Superintendent Robert R. Freeman asked for a way to address the growing problem of students speaking non-standard English.
Last year, about 600 students took the course, supported by $ 500,000 a year from federal Title 1 funds for low-income areas. Harris-Wright said she knows of no other program like DeKalb's. State and federal officials said they also did not know whether similar programs exist. But they said such programs would be eligible for Title 1 money, not bilingual education aid, as Oakland sought.
When the program began, DeKalb was especially sensitive to the gap between so-called "black" and "standard" English because of the dramatic increase in black enrollment during those years of a massive desegregation court case, Harris-Wright said.
Today, DeKalb officials de-emphasize race, pointing out that Cary Reynolds and two other schools have more international than black students.
Cary Reynolds' principal, Dorothy Blackwell, insisted that it is "absolutely wrong" to discuss the bidialectal program in light of race. "We shouldn't join the Oakland tirade," she said.
DeKalb's approach is also distinct from Oakland's proposal in not using dialect to teach other subjects, such as standard English. Instead, it uses standard English to teach students to become aware of how and when to switch to standard speech.
The program has won a "center of excellence" designation from the National Council for Teachers of English. Last year, students who had taken the course had improved verbal test scores at every school. At Cary Reynolds, their scores rose 5.2 percentage points.
The students, by analyzing videotapes, are taught to contrast the organization, enunciation, grammar, body English and intonation of dialect and of standard English. The two types of speech are not presented as right or wrong, but "effective" or "non-effective," depending on who is being addressed, where you are and what you are talking about.