Okay, I knew a decent amount about AAVE from a linguistics perspective, but didn’t know too much about the actual Oakland controversy. As far as I can tell, the Oakland board somewhat flubbed the wording of the bill, and the NAACP overreacted, and then even after the wording was fixed, they continued to maintain their position, even after numerous linguists with hard, empirical, tested data came to set them straight.
The board’s resolution had nothing to do with “encouraging AAVE.” (There was some language in there about “maintaining the legitimacy and richness”, but the actual goal of the resolution was reading comprehension in SAE) It was noted that many child speakers of AAVE were delayed in language skills. It was noted, with empirical data about similar cases of both secondary language instruction and similar cases in other countries (and well documented by linguists and teachers alike), that by treating the language or dialect as legitimate, and issuing instruction with that language or dialect in mind they could much more easily facilitate the student’s ability to get up to acceptable levels in “normal” language skills at school.
In other words, the very thing you and the NAACP want – for lower class black people to speak better English, was the entire goal of the endeavor. It turned out, with hard data, that recognizing AAVE and using it to help with instruction was the best option of actually getting these kids.
In my opinion, going against a bunch of children’s well being just because it’s politically expedient isn’t exactly a great idea. Especially not when pretty much every Linguist and Secondary Language Instructor had real, legitimate, peer reviewed studies to support that it works and the side against it has diddly squat other than a vague feeling of unease.