Bashing Black English

...All resources of the district," in-cluding "all categorical and general program funding," will be used to ensure mastery of the core curriculum by all stu-dents...

...By avoiding ridicule of the dialect as "bad" or "sloppy" or "slang," the plan aims at inspiring students to reach a high degree of excellence in the standard...

...But you would never know any of this if you had read only the commentators cited above...

...Oakland's plan is so far from what the commentators claim that the contrast is startling...

...BASHING BLACK ENGLISH Dorothy Jane Mills The pundits got Oakland wrong Twenty-five years ago I published in this maga-zine an article on Black English explaining that the dialect, although socially stigmatized, is not merely careless speech...

...The commentators who criticized the Oakland plan were talking through their hats...

...Armstrong Williams, a syndicated columnist and talk-show host, declared that "teachers should not learn slang or bad English, just like [sic] doctors should treat the patients and not contract the illness...

...It took me about a minute, even though I didn't know the title of the document, to locate a copy of the Oakland Unified School District's "Synopsis of the Adopted Policy on Standard American English Language Development...

...Roger Hernandez of King Features Syndicate asserted that "teaching black kids proper English is secondary for pro-ponents" of the Oakland plan and claimed that for the teach-ers "the actual teaching of proper English to kids who need to learn it seems not to matter much...

...I found Oakland's web site at http://www.ousd.kl2.ca.us/oak-land.standard.html, and I printed the six pages of the syn-opsis in about two minutes...

...Furthermore, the original resolution's description of black children's speech as "ge-netically based" had not meant to imply that there was a biological basis to such speech...

...In a syndicated column, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post ridiculed the notion that teachers need to learn anything about Black English in order to teach the standard to the children...

...Ironically, the headline on the Times story read not "Oakland Rewords Its Resolution on Black English" but "Oakland Scratches Plan to Teach Black English...

...The immediate response to my article was the same kind of furor caused by the Oakland School District's announce-ment in the fall of 1996 that its teachers planned to do this very thing...

...After all, why teach kids what they already know...

...it has a definite struc-ture, probably influenced by the languages that West Africans brought with them...

...All these commentators might have avoided their mistakes by simply finding out what Oakland actually proposed...

...In other words, children will be made aware of the particular differences between their speech and the standard, and they'll be required to learn to use the standard...

...Newspaper columnists were the worst offenders...

...They had not bothered to read the plan, just as they probably never bothered to consider the proposals I made twenty-five years ago about teaching Standard English to inner-city children...

...So I typed in my remarks and several days later received a courteous e-mail reply...

...Oakland's e-mail statement also attempts to demolish the most common misperceptions about the plan: "The district is not teaching Ebonics," it states...

...In mid-January, the Oakland school board, reacting to the criticisms, did clarify its original resolution...

...Despite vehement denials on Oakland's part, writers like Leonard Larsen of the Scripps Howard Syndicate (see the Massillon, Ohio, Independent, December 28,1996) portrayed the school system as planning to teach the standard subjects-such as math and science-to Oakland's students by using the di-alect instead of Standard English and to secure federal money to do it...

...her use of confrontation and sarcasm, Maxwell reported, "scared us to death...

...Bill Maxwell of the Saint Petersburg Times decried "the foolish acceptance of Black English...as a distinct language," characterized the dialect as "a bas-tardization" with "few redeeming qualities," and conclud-ed that the only way to combat its use was to do what his own teacher had done: embarrass those students who use the dialect...

...First, it's clear from the plan that Oakland's goal is to bring African-American children's Standard English proficiency up to the same level as that enjoyed by children who come to school speaking the stan-dard, so that black children can achieve academically at the same level...

...Other columnists wrote that the Oakland schools were using the issue of black children's speech merely to get attention and money...

...It had never intended, it said, to give the impression that black children's speech was a separate language, as Spanish and English are separate languages...

...Cornelius "Pat" Cacho, who volunteers as a school advisor and grew up speaking the di-alect, wrote that although he understood the "noble objec-tive" behind Oakland's proposals, the latter had to be rejected because the program "recognizes Black English as a distinct language" (Naples, Florida, Daily News, January 19,1997...

...Second, Oakland understands that teachers need to know how the dialect differs from the standard so that they can better teach the standard...

...Proficiency in English is still and al-ways has been the goal...

...What could be clearer...

...Apparently, even those with a firm grasp of Standard English can get the story wrong...

...Because they seemed determined to misread the purpose and intent of the pro-posal, as well as the actual details of Oakland's curriculum requirements...

...Thomas Sowell decried "the self-serving fairy tales coming out of Oakland," and Mike Royko parodied Black English by writing an en-tire column in what he believed to be the dialect, ridiculing Oakland's program as a ploy for obtaining government money...

...If the original resolution had led the public to believe that the Oakland schools would require that core subjects be taught in Black English, that was never the plan's intention...

...Third, Oakland plans to avoid insulting black children and their families...

...And as reported in the New York Times (January 14,1997), instead of refer-ring to "black children's language," the new resolution uses the phrase "the language patterns they [black children] bring to school...

...The site, I discovered, even provided an opportunity to respond with my own comments via e-mail at this address: erakstra@ousd.kl2.ca.us...

...Securing and reading the plan is as simple as typing "Oakland" into a computer and getting a search engine to display it on-screen...

...As if Oakland had ever planned to teach Black English in the first place...

...The article ("Black Children, Black Speech," November 19, 1971) recommended that teachers recognize Black English as a nonstandard style of speech, learn the differences between the dialect and the standard, and teach the children the standard speech style without try-ing to denigrate the dialect...

...According to Maxwell, his teacher had informed students that dialect speakers were "murdering the English language...

...Critics ridiculed the Oakland plan, making un-warranted assumptions about it, and disparaged the teach-ers and the school system...

...Maybe they're the ones who are using the issue to make money...

...As for the ac-cusation that Oakland is using the issue in order to pilfer state and federal funds, the statement says that "nothing could be further from the truth...

...Rather, the term had been intended to connote that Black English had its origins in long generations of shared speech patterns...

...The new statement also describes the program as pointing out the differences between Standard English and the dialect by noting "African Language Systems' principles" such as the omission of certain sounds and other grammatical features...