| February 3, 2001 Regarding Ebonics In a controversial movement centered around linguistic injustice, the Oakland school district made its bid to equalize “Black English” (Ebonics) with Standard English--or so the majority of the population believed. In actuality, the actions of the Oakland school district were not nearly so complicated or controversial as the confusion surrounding it. The misunderstanding began when people who didn’t clearly understand the Ebonics decision publicized their interpretation as fact rather than speculation. Many people criticized the school for being “materialistic” and trying to get more government funding by calling Ebonics another language. Other parents, full of righteous indignation, sent fiery comments to the school about how they never wanted their child to learn “Black English,” an incorrect, low-class, lazy form of the English language. But these parents neglected to inform themselves on what the debate was actually about. The Oakland school district never wanted to take the rights away from other children, or teach them in a dialect unfamiliar to them; the intention was to enable children who are unfamiliar with Standard English to receive an equal opportunity of learning by teaching them in a language they would understand. The point was to make teachers, parents, and peers aware of the difference between Standard English and Ebonics, to recognize it as another form of speech, one that could inhibit the learning of a child because of discrimination and ignorance. However, many people felt that Ebonics was recieveing too much prestige; a dialect created by slaves with lazy tongues was being given the title of language. This could be seen as positive reinforcement, encouraging people to continue their improper speech, maybe even causing them to scorn speakers of Standard English. “Ebonics is an unacceptable dumbing-down of English standards that legitimizes academic underachievement by creating a role for slang in education,” says Nick Buford, furious over the Ebonics decision. “Ebonics has fast become a statewide concern because it promises to miseducate an entire generation of children by lowering academic standards, condemning students to underperform” (http://www.sen.ca.gov/ftp/sen/district/sd_36/education/ed25.txt). His response is more emotional than factual, though. What it really boils down to is people who speak Standard English felt afraid; they were afraid the language they knew was going to be ripped out from under their feet and replaced with something strange and improper, from their point of view. The truth of the matter is, Ebonics is not a “dumbing down” of the English language, as Buford so unbaisly put it. It is only another form, and “as with all spoken languages, AAVE is extremely regular, rule-governed, and systematic” (http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/). If something is rule-governed and systematic, how can it be mistaken for laziness, slothfulness, and lack of interest? Ebonics is the language these children have grown up with. Buford states that “society has a clear vested interested in educating its youth,” and he is absolutely correct. But the Oakland school district never intended to prevent the education of youth from occurring. By establishing the Ebonics resolution, Oakland was insuring the equal opportunity of all students, even if they entered the school at a slight disadvantage because they didn’t already speak Standard English. The Oakland school district remained amazingly strong under this intense pressure. They understood that “people can’t learn from each other if they don’t speak the same language” (http://www.cal.org/ebonics/ebfillmo.htm). The school district also recognized the number one goal of a public education: to make sure a child learns. An intelligent child comes to school, ready to learn. But if that same child speaks a substandard dialect, he is quickly labeled “ignorant” or worse, labels that are a degradation that slows momentum and may even kill the desire to learn. Such children “perform poorly in school and typically fail to acquire the way of speaking that they’ll need in order to succeed in the world outside their neighborhoods” (ibid). If this is the result of a child not speaking Standard English, then obviously the child needs to learn Standard English. But the result is more of the child not understanding how to learn Standard English, a problem the Oakland school district was trying to alleviate. “For too many years, English teachers have been "dissing" their Black students by telling them that they are lazy, unmotivated, not paying attention, "slow" and other things (http://www.educationplanet.com/search/redirect?id=12449&mfcat=/search/Linguistics_and_Language_Arts/Ebonics& mfcount=2), all because the teachers didn’t understand the nature of Ebonics. But the Oakland school district saw much more than the education of its students at stake here; here was a chance to educate teachers, parents, and the community, as well. With a common goal and understanding between them, the Oakland school district had a chance to unify the community in a way previously not accomplished: by showing the respect and interest they have for each other. |