Dialects in the Classroom

Prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, most children attending public school in New Orleans attended neighborhood schools.  In 2003, the Louisiana Legislature created the Recovery School District (RSD), a state-level district that was charged with overseeing underperforming schools.  RSD had overtaken five schools in New Orleans and turned their operation over to charters prior to Katrina; these joined a handful of existing charters in the city.  Hurricane Katrina severely damaged or destroyed nearly all of the 128 public schools in the city; in November 2005, the state legislature passed Act 135, which transferred 107 New Orleans schools to RSD.  Most, if not all of these were then turned over to charters selected by the state to operate1 (Amedee & Robertson 2015, Louisiana Believes 2015).  In New Orleans, it is possible for high-performing magnet schools to convert to charters, and schools anywhere in Louisiana may also open under a charter (Type 2 charter) provided by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).   By the 2023-24 school year, there were 189 public schools in New Orleans; only 63 of these were overseen by New Orleans Public Schools, and all schools in New Orleans were charters, six of them chartered by BESE2. The 2024-25 school year will see the opening of Leah Chase School, the first permanent direct-run school in New Orleans in 18 years.3 

With the shift to an all-charter system, admissions moved to a centralized lottery system, though existing charters such as Audubon and Willow (formerly Lusher) continued to hold their own admissions processes for years; parents famously camped out overnight to be first in line to register for a spot at Audubon. 4  Lusher/Willow, which has an additional testing requirement for entry, was the last school to be added to the centralized lottery system, joining in 2022-23.

Over the past twenty years, the public school population has changed demographically as well.  Prior to the storm, 93% of public school students were Black;5  by 2023 this number had dropped to 74%.6  The difference was largely filled by a doubling of both the White and Hispanic populations.7 The public school system primarily serves students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, with 86% of students in 2023 falling into that category.8   Roughly 25% of children in New Orleans attend private schools.9 

The change to an all-charter system in tandem with changes to the district’s demographics have had an effect on the composition of classrooms.  While many schools give priority in the lottery to students living within a certain radius of the school, and while most if not all give priority to siblings of existing students, public school students in New Orleans today are more likely than not to travel outside of their neighborhood to attend school and may even attend different schools than their siblings.  By 2011, only 37.6% of students attended school in the same city planning district in which they lived;10 the percentage of students who lived within a one-mile radius of their schools in the 2004-2005 school year was 49.9%; by 2011-12, that number had dropped to 21.5%. 

With students criss-crossing the city to attend school, classrooms may feature more diversity at all levels (racial, ethnic, socio-economic, neighborhood) than they once did; this often translates to linguistic diversity.  While many schools have a student body with a fairly uniform background, others will have variation to greater or lesser degrees. A linguistically diverse classroom can prove to be challenging to the teaching of literacy, but it can also be a wonderful opportunity for learning and celebrating differences between students and faculty, in itself a step on the path to student success. 

In this model, we will discuss the implementation of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in the New Orleans classroom.  Being culturally responsive includes recognizing and respecting dialectal diversity:  Recognizing the way students pronounce words and construct sentences is vital to ensuring success. We will therefore do three things:  first, we will review four cornerstones of teaching:   assessment, small-group instruction, and explicit and systematic instruction. We then review the Five Pillars of literacy instruction and provide some suggestions for the New Orleans classroom. Finally, we return to the concept of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and discuss ways in which dialect may be explicitly addressed in the classroom in order to ensure student success.  

1 Amedee & Robertson 2015, Louisiana Believes 2015 

2 Cowen Institute 2023 

 3 NOLA Public Schools 2024

 4  e.g. as described in White 2019

5 Black Brilliance 2020

6 Cowen Institute 2023

7 Louisiana Believes 2015, Cowen Institute 2023

8 Cowen Institute 2023

9 Cowen Institute 2023

10 Zimmerman & Vaughan 2013