Oakland Vote Hopes to End Ebonics Uproar

OAKLAND —  Having retracted the most controversial portions of their policy on Ebonics, Oakland school officials said Thursday that they hope to finally shed the distraction of national attention and concentrate on improving the poor test scores of African American students.

The Oakland Board of Education unanimously voted just before midnight Wednesday to remove a reference to African American speech as a “genetically based” language and eliminate a proposal that students be taught in both English and Ebonics, a word coined from “ebony” and “phonics.”

The decision came after hours of emotionally charged debate that had educators and Ebonics advocates accusing the news media of mischaracterizing the intent of the policy and pleading for the school district to return to its primary educational mission.

“Now we need to focus on the real issue, and that’s to lift the performance of African American students,” said school board member Toni Cook, a leading proponent of the original Ebonics resolution who sought to remove the portions that most enraged critics.

The school district’s student body is 53% black, and the grade-point average for those students is D+, or 1.8.

“No one was concerned about the condition of African American students before this controversy,” said Sylvester Hodges, the former school board member who co-chaired the African American Task Force that drafted the district’s policy. “I wonder how many people will be tomorrow.”

The task force, Hodges said, reconvened last weekend to come up with “legitimate changes” to quell a monthlong firestorm of criticism from many quarters.

Besides providing an opportunity for radio disc jockeys to tell racist jokes, the policy was lambasted by black leaders, intellectuals and writers as a demeaning and ill-conceived plan that would stunt the educational growth of African American students.

The criticism continued Wednesday night as some community members scolded the board for turning Oakland into a nationwide laughingstock.

“People are upset, embarrassed and surprised that black people are putting this forward,” said resident Deborah Wright. “As a black person, I don’t think Ebonics is my primary language.”

While retracting the statement that African American students would be taught “both in their primary language and in English,” the board replaced other references to “primary language” with the phrase “the language patterns that many African American students bring to school.”

Under the new wording, the policy’s stated thrust will be to train teachers in “African American language systems” so they can help “move students from the language patterns they bring to school to English proficiency.”

Many African American students speak a dialect characterized by use of the verb “to be” without conjugation and phrases that include double and triple negatives. Linguists debate whether the speech patterns have ties to early England, the American rural South, Africa or all three.

“If the student is not understood by the teacher, then teaching doesn’t take place,” Oakland educator Ward V. Roundtree III told the board Wednesday.