“There has been more of a focus on Ebonics as a term than on at-risk youth as a fact.”—Jesse Jackson
Enough already. I haven't seen America indulge in such gloating since the trouncing of Sadam Hussein—an event that unleashed strong feelings that surprised many of those who still harbored them. The Ebonics bashing that has littered the U.S. media landscape in recent months is perhaps even more revealing.
What is it about the Oakland, California, school board resolution that has whipped us into such a frenzy? Is it the artless hubris embodied by the name—a cobbling together of the words ebony and phonics? Known for decades as black English, this African-American vernacular was merely a perplexing educational and cultural conundrum. The newer term may be silly, but is the rationale behind it arrogant enough to inspire such indignation and ridicule?
Whether Ebonics is ultimately classified as a dialect, a true language, or plain old street slang, it's clearly not the language itself that is so offensive. Our nation accepts this language as the lingua franca that is pressed into service in so many movies and TV shows—family entertainment eagerly gobbled up by the masses. Is it that we are offended by the effort to grant legitimacy to what many of us merely tolerate—and do so from a position of superiority?
Speaking for the Children
True, the Oakland school board may not have done its homework in conceiving its Ebonics initiative. Once the board announced its initiative to an immediate outcry, it may have been deceitful for the board to try desperately to close the lid on the Pandora's box it had inadvertently opened.
But let's face it: Board members were only trying to find a way to boost the performance of a population of students for whom more classic approaches haven't worked. Those who ride the standards bandwagon tend to forget that educators have often lowered standards when they could find no way to get their students to meet them.
And what of the Oakland school board's outrageous desire to procure federal bilingual education funds for its program? I cannot fault them for this. If the U.S. Department of Education has set aside resources to help students whose weakness in mainstream English seriously impedes their achievement, why shouldn't Oakland's students have access to these resources? I know of one program that received federal Title VII (bilingual) funds to work with limited-English-proficient students from English-speaking Caribbean countries. So what is the difference?
The Ebonics issue has leaned heavily on our nation's hot buttons. Now that the alarms are going off, it really doesn't matter what Oakland school board members intended or did or said. The talk show callers and media commentators are on a roll. They are only too happy to dream up related volatile issues to further fuel righteous indignation.
Tomorrow morning, like every morning, masses of youngsters will report to school in our nation's many Oaklands. They will resume their struggle with a daunting body of information that they are ill-equipped to master. Ebonics—by whatever name—is the language these students speak, the filter through which they define their interactions with the world. After the hysteria about Ebonics has died down, we must still grapple with how to educate the students who speak it.
A nation so insistent on teaching proper English should be wrestling with that problem, not leveling a world-class gotcha against a beleaguered school district that is wrestling with the problem.
