December 22, 2006
Ebonics III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 AM EST Josh Zeitz posts that “it’s worth dispelling the popular myth that today’s immigrants are especially resistant to learning English.” I agree, although I had not thought I had been propagating that myth. Josh also writes that “whatever we’re doing, it’s working.” The skeptics reply, compared with what? So the next question should be, how well is it working? By how well, the critics mean to query whether students would be doing better without the vast expansion of ESL programs, or with a stress on an immersion model. There is a substantial and acrimonious debate on those questions, and a very brief guide to some of it can be found here, in the May/June 1998 issue of the Harvard Education Letter. It is my impression that the decade of further debate since 1998 has not settled any of these questions to the satisfaction of most observers—here is another summary of the state of the debate in 2003.
Josh concludes that “(a) if classifying Ebonics as a language offered Oakland school administrators a back door to accessing more federal education dollars, then more power to them. It was a card worth playing. And (b) if teaching Standard English as a second language is a tried and tested method with immigrants, then why not employ this strategy with African-American children whose primary language (or dialect) is Ebonics?”
As for (b), the question remains “if.” As for (a), even if (b) is true, or more likely true in part, it does not necessarily follow that ESL would work as well for native speakers of black English. For example, there is some interesting evidence that possession of another language helps people learn Standard English. If this is true, it does not logically follow that possession of a given dialect helps in the same way, or to the same degree, or at all. There is also another possible problem, one of politics. The possession of a common language, including dialects of a common language, is one of the traditional markers of common nationality. Creating a common understanding that African-Americans are Americans, full stop, was a protracted and ugly battle; deciding that many African-Americans are native speakers of a different language will not necessarily help with continuing issues of race in our country. Having some fraction of the educational elite decide something that seemed ludicrous nonsense in the eyes of a vast majority of the citizenry, including much of the educated citizenry, might have had a lot of effects, some of them pretty nasty.
Oakland’s school officials may well have been aiming for flexibility, but there is some reason to think they hit a different target. Two years after Oakland tried to make Ebonics a language for the purposes of ESL, California’s voters passed Proposition 227, which drastically cut back ESL programs in the state (the portion of students being educated in Spanish dropped from almost two thirds to 11 percent). I do not think the Oakland Ebonics controversy is what produced this result—but I’d bet it contributed to that outcome.
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