So glad to see Alexander Russo provide this update on the potentially positive role that Ebonics can play in our nation's classrooms only if it were better understood rather than dismissed as an effective pedagogical approach for nonstandard speaker of English that speak Ebonics, or African-American English, that has roots that derive from West Africa. Apt quotes from within:
To its defenders, Ebonics was a legitimate program being proposed by a largely black school board and attacked by a mostly white media establishment. To its critics – including middle-class African-Americans and black celebrities like Maya Angelou – it was a mistaken idea that would set kids back rather than launching them forward.
While the student population is more diverse than it was two decades ago, classroom teachers in America are predominantly white and monolingual. This population often brings with it negative judgments about dialects – which some linguists call “dominant language ideology” – based on their own experiences and culture.
The power of Ebonics, or African-American English, as a vehicle for student achievement has gotten a raw deal in the media and public policy debates. This is because it is misunderstood and indeed, derogated from within the African American community itself, particularly among some members of the middle class who see it as objectionable rather than a wonderfully rich dialect that can and should inform the instructional process for its speakers.
Russo provides a helpful update together with resources that you can link to below.
Angela Valenzuela
A long-forgotten uproar illustrates some of the chronic failures
of media outlets covering polarized, racially-charged situations. But
it’s not just a historic concern. The controversy could re-emerge any
time now, as schools search for better ways to serve low-income
students.
By Alexander Russo
On December 18, 1996, the Oakland (CA) school board passed a two-page
resolution that highlighted the plight of African-American students in
the district and — as part of a plan to improve their academic success —
claimed that African-American English spoken by many students was its
own language and should be used to help children learn standard
classroom English.
The notion generated enormous attention and controversy at the time,
the vast majority of it critical. Nearly everybody – Jesse Jackson, the
New York Times editorial page, Clinton education secretary Richard
Riley, Maya Angelou – all came out against what Oakland was proposing,
which had been dubbed “Ebonics.”
“One school board, in one city, passed one little resolution,” writes
Michael Hobbes in a 2017 HuffPost Highline piece revisiting what
happened. “And the rest of the country spent the next six months
freaking out about it.”
In response, the district rolled back its plans. The superintendent
left soon thereafter. And districts haven’t dared to try anything
similarly dramatic in the 22 years that have passed since then.
As it turns out, however, the main thrust of the Oakland proposal was
overwhelmingly supported by linguists, and the approach it was
recommending – using children’s home dialect to help teach standard
English – had proven successful in other places in the past.
But the general public had little chance to grasp the larger picture.
Traditional news coverage was eclipsed by hyperbolic op-eds and
editorials. Cable news failed to provide any depth of understanding. Few
in the general public would ever know that the district went ahead with
its program under another name, or that several of those most opposed
at the outset would later modify their positions. Even now, few know
that the population of a group some call “standard English learners”
goes far beyond African-American students or that a handful of districts
have quietly created programs using their home dialects as a bridge
around the country.
Revisiting the controversy provides an excellent opportunity to look
at the strengths and weaknesses of media coverage of the Oakland
proposal and its impact on subsequent efforts to address the needs of
what some now call “standard English learners” in American schools.
The story is not merely a historical concern. To help meet their
needs, a handful of districts and schools have quietly returned to the
idea of using students’ home dialects to help them learn standard
English.
The problems the Oakland school board was trying to address were
serious ones. Just over half the kids in the Oakland were
African-American – the largest portion of any California district. But
they weren’t, as a group, being treated well in the existing education
system. They received 80 percent of suspensions and made up 71 percent
of kids with special education referrals. Their average grade point
average was D+.
Then as now, the use of vernacular English spoken by some
African-American students was corrected as “bad” in most classrooms. It
was generally treated as a lower form of English that limited its
speakers’ chances for academic and professional success.
The thrust of the Oakland plan was to teach standard English by
contrasting it with African-American English. This approach had been
shown to be successful in a pilot program in the district, as well as in
a handful of other districts in the past.
In practice, the program piloted in Oakland was not nearly as radical
as it might have sounded. Michael Bazeley, who was the education
reporter for the Oakland Tribune at the time, visited a few classrooms
where it was being used. “They very clearly were not ‘teaching’ students
Black English or Ebonics,” he said. “They were acknowledging that Black
English was real and using it as a bridge to standard English.”
But deep feelings of concern and guilt over the treatment of
African-American children in schools is always near the surface in this
country. The notion of “code-switching,” in which individuals learn to
toggle back and forth between standard spoken English and another
dialect, wasn’t nearly as familiar as it is today.
And, in what would prove to be extraordinarily distracting assertion,
the Oakland resolution mistakenly declared that African-American
English was its own language, rather than a dialect of English.
While many thought it was an effort to secure federal bilingual
education funding, the claim was an unintentional error on the board’s
part, according to some of those involved at the time. “They weren’t
linguists,” according to Darolyn Davis, who handled crisis
communications for the district during that period. “They didn’t use the
word ‘language’ from a linguistic point of view.”
But that error – and resolution language referring to a “genetic”
basis for African-American English that may also have been mistaken –
would expose the board and the idea they were proposing to enormous
criticism and ridicule, generally overshadowing the plight of
African-American students in Oakland schools and the merits of the
classroom approach being proposed.
The dominant narrative soon took shape that Oakland was trying to
dumb down education by accepting Black English as a legitimate language
of its own, and even teaching it to students. Oakland teachers were
going to use street slang in the classroom or allow students to talk or
write using it instead of standard English. The idea was pandering,
political correctness run amok, and a sneaky attempt to win additional
funding to boot.
NYT editorial page opposing the Oakland plan
Almost immediately, editorial pages, oped sections, and talk shows were all over the story.
The Ebonics controversy was “Topic 1 on radio talk shows across the
country,” notes Gene Maeroff in his book, “Imagining Education: The
Media and Schools in America.”
Jesse Jackson came out against it on NBC’s Meet The Press. The New York Times editorial page denounced what it described as “
linguistic confusion.” Cable news hosts like Rush Limbaugh warned that “we be happy” was going to be taught alongside Shakespeare.
Frank Rich,
a New York Times columnist at the time, called the school board
“deranged” and the resolution an “incendiary separatist manifesto.”
There was even a Doonesbury comic strip.
“I don’t even want to say it was mixed,” says William Brennan about
what he saw in his reporting for The Atlantic. “For every good article
on the subject there were just 10 that were useless and furthered
misunderstandings about the topic and language in general.”
“Nobody made an effort to actually figure out what the school board
was doing,” says the HuffPost’s Hobbes. “Everyone went with this cartoon
version of what they were doing.”
To its defenders, Ebonics was a legitimate program being proposed by a
largely black school board and attacked by a mostly white media
establishment. To its critics – including middle-class African-Americans
and black celebrities like Maya Angelou – it was a mistaken idea that
would set kids back rather than launching them forward.
NHSA ad against the use of Ebonics in schools.
By and large, the news coverage of the Oakland proposal was unobjectionable, if ineffective at generating much attention.
The Oakland Tribune’s Bazeley wrote a pretty straightforward
front-page story about the program, which he observed in action. “I
believed at the time that the criticism was overblown because most
people had a distorted view of what was happening in the classroom,”
says Bazeley.
And the NYT’s Peter Applebome wrote a series of pieces about the
controversy, fleshing out Oakland’s distinct place in California
politics, the political dynamics surrounding the vote in favor of the
resolution, and a controversial figure who seemed to be behind the
Ebonics proposal.
One exception noted by several of those interviewed is Jacob
Heilbrunn’s piece in The New Republic, which blended opinion and
reporting.
But reporting some of these news stories took time – Applebome’s
deepest piece didn’t come out until March – and was generally produced
by reporters who were not familiar with English dialects or the history
of programs to help dialect speakers learn the dominant form of the
language.
And the distinction between news and opinion, which is so obvious and
important to journalists, is not nearly as clear to non-journalists who
tend to lump opinion and news together if it’s being published by the
same outlet.
News stories written at the time weren’t nearly powerful or timely
enough to compete with the wave of opinion writing and cable news. In a
recap of his experience at the time, Stanford linguist John Rickford
criticized the media for promoting a simplistic narrative. “The media
refused to focus on this massive evidence of how schools fail to teach
African American students with existing methods.”
The real-world responses were just as strong. Clinton Education
Secretary Richard Riley denounced the policy. The national Head Start
Association put a
full-page ad in the
New York Times with
the title “I Has a Dream.” At least one state legislature banned
Ebonics from being used in classrooms. And the US Senate scheduled a
hearing on the debate.
After the congressional hearing, Oakland released an updated
resolution that removed every mention of the word Ebonics. And “since
then, no district has tried anything that ambitious for meeting the
needs of its African-American students,” writes Hobbes.
April 2018 article about African-American English in The Atlantic
Since 1996, the debate over using African-American English in classrooms has mostly gone quiet.
However, the need hasn’t gone away, and the practice of using
students’ dialects as a bridge to standard English has quietly
re-emerged.
That’s largely because the case for schools teaching kids
code-switching remains a powerful one. Roughly a third of
African-American English speakers don’t learn to code switch on their
own, according to Georgia State professor Julie Washington. Students who
speak both versions of English score higher than those who don’t. Those
who lag behind in this area need to be taught or it may never happen.
And it’s not just African-American kids who might benefit from this kind
of help. The estimated 100,000 standard English Learners in Los Angeles
public schools were the district’s lowest-performing students,
according to a 2008 LA Daily News article.
What would happen if a district proposed something along the same lines in present times?
Many factors have changed. States no longer require teachers to pass
tests showing their ability to speak standard English. It’s become
somewhat commonplace for teachers to use rap music based on Black
English and other dialects to engage and instruct kids. Bilingual
education is much more familiar and less controversial than it was
previously. And the idea of code-switching is a generally familiar one.
The sense of urgency around racial justice and economic inequality is as
strong as it’s been in decades. And there are no outlets and voices of
opinion out there.
Georgia State’s Washington describes the Oakland resolution as
mistaken and remembers the media response as an expression of racist
attitudes in America at the time. And she says she was extremely nervous
about participating in the The Atlantic article featuring her work and
the dialect that came out earlier this month. But she believes that,
after years of keeping their heads down, advocates of using the dialect
to teach mainstream classroom English are re-emerging. “The dynamics
have changed… The times have changed.”
However, public opinion remains deeply divided on issues of culture
and race. Teaching English to kids who are born and raised in the US
remains unfamiliar and is negatively associated with the Ebonics
controversy. While the student population is more diverse than it was
two decades ago, classroom teachers in America are predominantly white
and monolingual. This population often brings with it negative judgments
about dialects – which some linguists call “dominant language ideology”
– based on their own experiences and culture.
And few journalists have as much time as they did 20 years ago to
check out facts. Social media adds layers and dynamics that make even
the most vitriolic newspaper op-eds seem quaint. Hot takes are all the
rage, and opinion journalists are encouraged to be less nuanced in their
approach.
“I think it would go down differently,” Brennan says about the notion
of a district proposing to use African-American English in 2018, “but
not necessarily more successfully.”
Primary sources:
The Atlantic:
Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools to Respect African-American English
HuffPost Highline:
Why America Needs Ebonics Now
NYT:
Dispute Over Ebonics Reflects a Volatile Mix That Roils Urban Education
Education Week:
Students Learn to ‘Toggle’ Between Dialects
Secondary sources
New Yorker:
The Case for Black English
Rickford:
The Ebonics controversy in my backyard
Rethinking School:
The Real Ebonics Debate
The Atlantic:
Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence
LA Times:
Oakland District Says Policy on Ebonics Misunderstood
New Yorker:
Johnny Be Good
AP:
Media Distort Black English Policy, Jackson Says
Washington Post: OAKLAND SCHOOL SYSTEM RECOGNIZES ‘BLACK ENGLISH’ AS SECOND LANGUAGE
NPR:
Survey Raises Concerns About Non-English Speaking Students
New York Times:
School District Elevates Status of Black English
Related columns from The Grade:
“Feel-Good” Philadelphia Inquirer Story Highlights Concerns About Racial Blind Spots
Just How White Is Education Journalism – & How To Encourage More #edJOC?
Fear, Complicity, & Guilt Get In Way Of Covering School Segregation, Says NYT Reporter
