Feb-Mar-97

In Praise of The Oakland School Board's Positionon Ebonics

WHEN THE OAKLAND SCHOOL BOARD in California passed a resolu-tion on December 18, 1996, recogniz-ing Ebonics as a second language, what should have been a serious discussion among professional educators and linguists became a circus where any voice, however shallow and uninformed, had a say. Columnists and talk-show hosts ignorantly and arrogantly anointed themselves experts on the spot and invited the public to do the same. Not to be left behind, the Clinton administration announced that federal funds earmarked for bilingual education will not be available for black English instruction. Rep. Peter King (R.-NY) inserted himself into the fray with a congressional resolution to make it illegal to use federal money to pay for school programs based on Ebonics. Members of the Oakland School Board went to Washington to appear before a congressional hearing and debate the issue with opponents. So far, minds seem to remain closed.

Misconceptions about the place of Ebonics in instruction were so farfetched from the beginning that the Oakland Unified School District issued a clarifying statement that said, in part:


·The Oakland Unified School District is not replacing the teaching of Standard American English with any other language. The District is not teaching Ebonics. The District emphasizes teaching Standard American English and has set a high standard of excellence for all its students.

·Oakland Unified School District is providing its teachers and parents with the tools to address the diverse languages the children bring into the classroom.

·The District's objective is to build on the language skills that African-American students bring to the classroom without devaluing students and their diversity. We have directly connected English language proficiency to student achievement.


What is the subject of all this furor about? A term coined from ebony + phonics in 1973 by Dr. Robert Williams, Ebonics is also called African American Vernacular English (AAVE), among other alternative terms. Dr. Ernie A. Smith, Ph.D., linguist, states that "Ebonics (African American Language) contains the linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a centric continuum represent the speech and linguistic competence of West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendants of African origin." We are not talking here about slang. Slang is a matter of vocabulary, of individual words-not a dialect or language with a sophisticated grammatical structure. Nor can a "dialect" be dismissed as a substandard form of "correct" language. The "correct" version of a language simply reflects what group is dominant in the culture.

The English considered acceptable by society today comes from a dialect spoken at the time of the invention of the printing press. It became ascendant over rival dialects when Chaucer's Canturbury Tales was published because Chaucer happened to speak London English; otherwise, our speech might well resemble a Scottish brogue. Then, too, languages which we recognize today as distinct-French, Italian, Spanish-were once dialects of Latin. Or to go a bit further back in history, Latin itself was an Indo-European language descended from an earlier language that had also spawned Norwegian, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Latin, Yugoslavian, Russian, Persian, Indian, and many others-all of them at one time Indo-European dialects which became so insulated and distinct from each other as to become languages. Where do you draw the line? At what exact moment did French cease to be a dialect of Rome or Spanish become a recognized language?

While the mainstream media only added to the confusion, Pacifica Radio's KPFA has been extraordinarily helpful. "Democracy Today" gave air time to Carol Lee Tolbert, a member of the school board that made the Ebonics decision, and to Professor John Rickford, a Stanford linguistics professor who teaches courses on AAVE and is co-authoring a book on Ebonics. Jerry Brown devoted a show to the subject, followed by another with Stanford professor Michael Kirst on related issues. These sources provided useful clarification.

Ebonics became an issue when the African American Task Force on African American students in the Oakland Public Schools found that 71% of "special education" students, 67% of students classified as "truant," and 80% of the students suspended from school are African American. The average grade of African American students is D+, the lowest in the District. The District wanted to know why.

Linguists, sociologists, and educators would point to many causes. Carol Lee Tolbert observes that low scores appear when students come from welfare families, from low income circumstances, from parents with limited education, and from racially isolated communities. Professor Michael Kirst is concerned about the lowering of California teaching qualifications after class-size reduction required hiring many new teachers. A member of the California State Board of Education for a number of years, now director of a think tank that studies educational achievement and consults to educational institutions around the world, Kirst said that when education for minorities and low income people were an American priority, the achievement gap between African American and white people closed from 1970 through the late '80s, multiplying the number of people who went on to college. "In 1980 if you were a Black high school graduate, you had a higher percentage of going on to college than if you were a white high school graduate. An astounding number!" In contrast, he says, the 1990s focuses on middle class concerns, welfare changes, and anti-immigrant programs. The number of African Americans and Hispanics going on to college has declined. Jerry Brown notes a parallel downward pressure as educational priorities are displaced by expansion of the prison population. In the rush to lock up more and more citizens, African Americans are more apt to get a jail term than a diploma.

Professor Rickford applauds the Oakland decision for several reasons, first of all because ". . . it casts a light on the devastating situation which has been affecting African American kids, particularly from the working class in the city areas." He reports that African American children all across the country fall more behind in reading and writing skills and standard English the longer they stay in school! Philadelphia data for 1976 showed that 31% of African American school children were scoring below the 16th percentile in reading in elementary school, 50% below the 16th percentile by junior high, and 75% below the 16th percentile by high school. East Palo Alto data for the Ravenswood school district (1989-90) showed that kids were reading at the 16th percentile in the third grade, but only at the 3rd percentile by the 6th grade, and at a bare 2nd percentile by the 8th grade-"which is about as low as you can get." By contrast, in Palo Alto-a white area-kids are reading at the 96th percentile in the third grade and at the 99th percentile by the 6th grade-"which is as high as you can get."

Clearly, white kids have been taught positively for decades, building on their linguistic skills, but within the African American community-Oakland, East Palo Alto, Philadelphia, New York-kids have been doing steadily worse.

In a survey conducted in Oakland in 1987, Carol Lee Tolbert identified three major factors of success: (1) parent involvement, (2) student motivation and self-esteem, and (3) high expectations of teachers. What we have experienced over the last 10-15 years, she concludes, is "very low expectations of inner city youngsters."When the schools place these inner city youngsters in "special education" classes as dysfunctional or deficient-that is hardly the training or the self-image that they need. Professor Rickford compares it to taking a car that has something wrong with its carburetor to a muffler shop to get it fixed. Special ed classes will not "fix" their language patterns. What we need to recognize, he says, is that African American vernacular is not a random, hit-or-miss pattern. Like any other authentic language, it has very systematic and deep-rooted differences in grammar. "The point is, these differences are out there. All you have to do is walk into any urban schoolyard, talk to African American kids, or better yet, listen, and you will hear these patterns. . . if you take their system into account you actually improve the teaching of standard English."

The Oakland School District wants to change teachers' attitudes, change the way they instruct children, so that children receive positive messages that they are okay and can succeed. It is surely not too much to ask that teachers respect and acknowledge the history, culture, and language that African American students bring to school. Carol Lee Tolbert sees teachers as the most significant adult in children's lives other than parents. With their teachers' support, children can believe they have the ability to learn and that people are interested in teaching them. If, on the other hand, teachers treat them as pathologically deficient or dysfunctional or incapable of learning, that is how the kids will see themselves. If they come to feel uncomfortable and ashamed of their home language, they will develop resistance.

The assault is not only on them but on their parents, their families, their communities. As a caller from Trinidad explained on Jerry Brown's program, when children can't identify with the language spoken at school, when the only history they are exposed to is the history of their oppressor, when they feel alone and unvalued, they resent it, reject it, rebel, and cling all the more to the life raft of their identity-their home language.

The Oakland District wants teachers to be sensitive to issues that their students confront, recognize their own biases and become actively anti-racist, especially if they are of a different class and ethnic background. One important step is to develop the tools to "transition" children with a different home language to proficiency in standard English. Teachers need to recognize the children's social language and help them understand the difference between that language and the standard language of the economy, help them develop the skills they need for work and for communicating cross-culturally. "We want our teachers to see all children as whole, as healthy, as valued human beings," states Carol Lee Tolbert, "not relegate them to 'special ed' status or to classify them in any demeaning way because they are different."

Professor Rickford agrees. The connection between attitudes and expectations and performance has been absolutely established. He cites, for example, evidence in the 1979 Ann Arbor case, when parents brought suit against the school district of Ann Arbor for not taking the language of the kids into account. All the linguistic research shows that people's negative attitudes toward a language affect the students' expectations and performance. It's that clear cut.

Furthermore, explains Professor Rickford, very systematic linguistic evidence shows that the best teaching methods do "contrastive analysis of the difference between nonstandard dialects and standard dialects and use that to pinpoint the areas in which kids need to work and improve." He cites an eleven-week project in Chicago where an experimental group used contrastive analysis, comparing the structural differences between African American English and standard English, while the control group used traditional English Department techniques. The experimental group showed 59% reduction of the use of African American vernacular in their writing, while the control actually showed a slight increase.

Another study looked at 540 students in 27 different classes across the country in four months of instruction. The experimental group, whose home language was fully respected and utilized, began with "dialect" readers, transitioned through intermediate readers, then into standard English readers. The control group used traditional methods. Again, the kids using experimental methods taking advantage of their dialect gained 6.2 months of reading development, whereas the kids in the control group showed only 1.6 months development. These results are similar to earlier work in the 1960s. In fact, Professor Rickford explains, the earliest study of utilizing nonstandard vernacular was done in Sweden in 1961, resulting in far stronger and more successful learning than with regular approaches using only standard Swedish.

The caller from Trinidad on Jerry Brown's show concurred. He compared Ebonics with dialects in the Caribbean: "If you're not accustomed to the language, the dialect would sound like a foreign language," he explained: "Yet their literacy is around 96%. Why? Because they are being taught English in what we call a dialect":

They may not pronounce it the way we do here, but they're reading and understanding it correctly. If it's on paper and they're taking a test, they can pass it with flying colors. If teachers know how children speak they can tell them, 'Look, you may say this this way, but when you're actually writing it, you say it that way."

Educators everywhere would do well to follow the changes in Oakland schools. Whenever schools improve the teaching of minority students, they are improving teaching for all students. I saw this happen in my own teaching career. Many years ago I taught young people from the inner city of Oakland in a community college English class called "Black Readiness." Because I respected their home language, encouraged their writing, valued what they had to say, and proposed to "publish" their contributions, they ended the class with a collection of poems and essays that they and their parents could be proud of.

This approach, it turns out, works with any group of students. Take their writing seriously, give them self-confidence, provide them with engaging experiences and relevant tools, point them in the direction of "publishing" their work-even if only for parents and classmates-and they will invest serious effort in their writing, and be willing to revise and polish it for proficient English. This process proved effective again when I was teaching in the Puente Project, a successful program that prepares Latino students to succeed in higher education. Training these students to work in peer response groups-where they provide a live audience for each other's work and help each other through the writing process-taught me how to improve teaching in all my college English classes.

In short, what we give students with special needs does not take away from other students. On the contrary, it raises the level of teaching and learning everywhere. Students are students; human beings are human beings. They work and learn in similar ways. But we have to start where they are, help them with love and respect, and challenge them to stretch their capabilities and achieve their full potential.

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