Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 02:14:43 -0800 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari) Subject: M-I: Hooked on Ebonics The Oakland School Board has changed the wording of its resolution. The Board no longer claims that Ebonics is the dominant language among black kids; the board has also clarified that the Ebonics is not "genetically rooted", but now claims that this American speech pattern is derived from a Congo-Niger language (the evidence for which remains dubious). The school board also held a public meeting, which was televised on a local cable station. The main complaint was voiced by the parents who weren't black; they feared that resources would be diverted to the development of Ebonics programs and that their kids would suffer. And so the initial concerns raised by the young comrade about the potential divisiveness of this program seem to have been justified. But the whole Ebonics reform is based on a specious premise: the Oakland School District mainly suffers a Negro problem--that is, black kids are disproportionately in special education and that they score lower on standardized tests and that it is their disproportionate failure that brings the averages of Oakland as a whole down. As I have noted, this is a mishandling of stats to create a racial, anti-black panic: 1)Chicanos often drop out before being transferred to special ed, and have had higher drop out rates than blacks and as a result a smaller showing in special ed and 2)it has not been demonstrated that the special ed rates or low standardized test scores are best racially specified--it may be that kids in the schools in the impoverished "lowlands" have higher failure rates and that black kids, whose parents are overrepresented in the poorer sections of the working class, are thesmelves concentrated in these schools. The challenges confronting the Oakland School Board may not be "black failure" but the problems suffered by all children whose parents endure the worst degradations of the working class. (This is the conclusion I arrive at, based on my two year stint in a poor multiethnic high school.) How is it that the Oakland School Board arrived at the conclusion that the educational reform required was Ebonics (this is the same school board which helped crush a teachers' strike and has done nothing to make up the time children lost due to it)? It arrives at this conclusion by underlining the disproportionate black failure rate without being self-reflexive about the specification of the data in racial terms. As Yehudi Webster puts it in The Racialization of America, these stats do not describe a racial reality; they are data produced by a racial theory, which the data in turn imply racial solutions. And yet the solution is absurd: black kids cannot be failing because they don't understand the English spoken by their teachers because black kids understand standard English just fine. And since the failure cannot be corrected by teachers talking to them in the jive they putatively alone understand, one can only fear the conclusions which will be drawn *after* the specially funded, albeit still overcrowded, Ebonics program, perhaps to be supervised by Afrocentric fools, fails to lift children out of special education or raise standardized test scores. It is at this point that people will in earnest reintroduce claims about the unique genetic dispositions of blacks as exasperation over Negro problem mounts and the broader class problems remain ignored. Rakesh --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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