File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-13.105, message 74


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





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