The Ebonics controversy in Oakland, California, took many people by surprise. Most had never heard of Ebonics before December 18, 1996, and once they did, few understood what the school district meant when it expressed its intent to use this new "language" to teach the district's African American children.

To understand how Oakland wound up at the eye of this storm, it is important to recognize the current situation of African American students in that district, and the political history of Ebonics in California schools.

Anatomy of a Controversy

For the past fifteen years, California teachers have had the option of participating in the Standard English Proficiency (SEP) program, which was created to educate teachers who work with Black children about the history of African American language. Once it orients teachers in the historical and linguistic foundations of African American communication, the program then provides teachers with techniques that are said to have been proven to help children who speak Ebonics learn to "code switch" into standard American English. Code switching is the mental "translation" process that occurs in people who are bilingual or bidialectical. Code switching allows a person to both understand and convey thoughts in either language.

The SEP program emerged after decades of debate, political struggle, and frustration over the poor academic performance of a disproportionate number of Black children in the state. Although it is used by school districts throughout the state, including by the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), it is a voluntary program. Despite the reputed success of the SEP program, California's African American students continue to lag behind many of their peers in their mastery of American English.

Black students constitute slightly more than half of the OUSD student population, yet they represent 80 percent of all suspended students and have the lowest grade point average (1.8) of any ethnic group represented in the district. One in four of the district's students is not proficient in standard American English and 26 percent are immigrants. Nearly three in four of the students receiving Special Education services in the district are African American while only 37 percent of the students participating in the district's gifted student programs are Black.

The teaching staff of the Oakland Unified School district is 34 percent African American, 48 percent white, 10 percent Asian, 6 percent Latino, and 1 percent Native American.

Last summer, the school board formed a task force to investigate why so many African American children were having trouble. The group also was charged with devising a system wide strategy for improving the language proficiency of these children. The Task Force on the Education of African American Students members included an array of community and professional interests, including: parents, school administrators, teachers, scholars, psychologists, and civil rights and community activists.

Several months later, after the task force had completed its research, it submitted a series of findings and recommendations, a policy statement, and a resolution for the board to adopt. The resolution was loaded with controversial language. Nevertheless, it passed unanimously. At the time it voted on the resolution, the Oakland School Board consisted of three African Americans, two whites, one Chinese American and one Latino.

Among the resolution's more controversial assertions were: the statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based;" the implication that the primary language of African American students is something other than English and that Black students would now be taught in that language; the requirement that teachers would have to learn Ebonics; and the suggestion that the district would pursue bilingual education funds to finance portions of the new program. The resolution also painted all African American students with one brush stroke, making no distinctions between those who are proficient in standard American English and those who are not.

As news about the resolution emerged in the media, criticism began weighing in from as near as California's state capital, Sacramento, and as far away as the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Oakland school officials moved into a crisis management mode and found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to explain their intentions to the world. People wanted to know if the district was really planning to teach its students Black English?

Yet even after board spokesperson Toni Cook explained that teaching children to speak Ebonics was not part of the plan, pundits and media talk show hosts continued debating the issue. Media satirists and morning show radio disc jockeys poked fun at the idea of "Ebonics" as a distinct language and the Oakland school board members found themselves inundated with media calls and complaints from irate and confused parents.

The Debate Rages

"Among linguists, there is no such thing as a good language or a bad one," says linguist and Indiana State University professor C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay. But from the bitter tone of the criticism received by the Oakland School Board, it was clear that society in general does not take such a detached view.

Sherry Willis, Oakland Unified School District's public information officer, concedes the wording of the resolution was misleading. However, she is amazed at how the controversy continued to grow even after the board members explained their intentions. For example, the board its use of the term "genetically based was a piece of linguistic jargon meant to indicate origin rather than genetics.

"I think the dialogue [over Ebonics] is necessary because it speaks to who we are as Americans and it shows just how profound the differences are between us," Willis says. "It touches on issues of culture, language, race, education. And people have been quite impassioned in their responses. They have also been very rigid in their thinking about who ought to be doing this work [of teaching Ebonic speakers American English]. All I know is, whoever ought to be doing it, they're not."

Cheryl Garrett, principal of an Oakland elementary school also was perplexed by the national hysteria over the resolution. "We've been doing this all along through the SEP program," she said a few days after the resolution was signed. "We don't necessarily call it Ebonics, but the goal of teaching children standard English is the same. "

Garrett adds that the issue of compensation for teachers is a serious one in Oakland. At schools like hers, where a significant segment of the student population comes to school from homes where English is not the primary language, bilingual teachers who work with such students receive additional compensation -- as much as $5,000 annually. These teachers are also entitled to have an aide in their classrooms. There are no such benefits for teachers who work with African American students lacking American English proficiency.

Willis says the resolution paves a way for the district to systematize an assessment and service delivery process so that the language needs of African American children are better met, and teachers who work with them get the training and support they need.

School was closed for the holidays when the Ebonics furor broke. On Jan. 12, however, the school board drafted amendments to the original resolution. If adopted, Oakland's amended resolution would eliminate the description of Black English as "genetically based," and instead call for the recognition of language differences among Black students. The revised resolution also eliminates the implication that students will be taught in Ebonics.

The new school board president, Jean Quan, has said repeatedly that the intent was never to teach students Ebonics, but to use knowledge of Ebonics to teach standard English.

On a national radio show, Dr. Fay Vaughn-Cooke, chair of the department of language and communications disorders at the University of the District of Columbia, chided the OUSD board for not consulting the "credible experts" who have been working for thirty years on the subject of Black English. Had the board done so, Vaughn-Cooke maintains that the experts would have helped them avoid the firestorm of controversy that erupted when they adopted a resolution that contained "inaccurate linguistic statements."

"I believe the initial misunderstanding over the intent of the Oakland resolution had some negative overtones," says Karen Beverly Ducker, a speech and language pathologist with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs. "The positive outcome, however, is that the controversy has brought the issue to the forefront of discussion."

The Origin of Ebonics

Many Americans characterize the unique speech habits of many African Americans as nothing more than "bad" English. In fact, the term Ebonics was invented to replace such negative labels and to promote a greater understanding of the origins of African American communication.

The term "Ebonies" was coined in 1973 by Missouri psychologist Robert L. Williams. With funding from; the National Institute of Mental Health, Williams hosted a conference on the cognitive and linguistic development of African American children. The meeting convened in St. Louis and attracted scholars and practitioners, in six different disciplines, from around the country. The meeting offered a rare opportunity for these specialists to exchange research and information on what was then a relatively new area of research and scholarship.

"One evening, after our sessions, I called a number of the other Black presenters up to my room," Williams recalls. "I said, `You know, the white scholars are still depreciating our language. They're negating it. They're coining the terms and these terms become acceptable within the broader society.... We need to coin a term.'"

The group agreed that the term should have a positive Black reference to it, so when Williams suggested "Ebonics," -- a fusion of the words ebony and phonics -- the group responded enthusiastically.

Williams and Southern California linguist Ernie Smith later crafted a definition of the new term, which was released in Williams's 1975 book, "Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks." In addition to defining Ebonics, the book included scholarly papers on the history of African American language -- some of which had been presented by participants in the 1973 conference -- as well as the findings of Williams's own research. The book is currently out of print, but a reprint is expected later this year.

"My findings suggested that children brought certain linguistic patterns and codes with them to the school, but that the codes that they were accustomed to were not being used in the school," says Williams, who is now a retired professor emeritus at Washington State University in St. Louis. "There was a discontinuity between the child's code and the school's code, and the child's code was being denigrated."

Williams and his colleagues decided to administer two forms of a standardized test: one in American English, the other recoded in Ebonics. The test population consisted of kindergartners.

"For example, when we [showed them a picture and] asked them to point to a squirrel that was beginning to climb a tree, some of them got it, but many of them did not because they didn't understand the word `beginning.'"

Williams then recoded the problem using the words "starting to" and "fixing to" in place of beginning.

"When we used `fixing to,' they all understood it," he says. At the conclusion of the study, it was evident that the African American students who performed poorly on the American English tests excelled on the recoded tests.

According to Williams, Ebonics has both a grammatical and lexicological base. "For example, if I say, `The hawk is not jiving in St. Louis,' there is nothing grammatically incorrect [as far as standard English is concerned] about that sentence. But I'm using an Ebonics term."

The translation of Williams's example is, "In St. Louis, the wind is very cold." For Williams, Black slang is part of Ebonics.

The other part of Ebonics involves grammar, sentence structure and tonal omissions. For instance, failing to conjugate verbs such as "to be" and leaving the final consonant off words are "classically" Ebonic -- an example being, "The hawk don't be jivin' in St. Louis."

Language or Dialect?

Blackshire-Belay explains that the evolution of Ebonics, as a form of communication, commenced the moment the first slave ship left Africa.

"Ebonics would never have existed had it not been for slavery," Blackshire-Belay says. She and other linguists who have studied the unique characteristics of African American language reason that the speech of African Americans differs from what is commonly referred to as "standard American English" because its speakers have retained grammatical and other linguistic elements from their West African mother tongues.

"Some African Americans get angry whenever there is the slightest hint that we have a history of our own that traces back to Africa," Blackshire-Belay says. "But you have to start with the linguistic foundations of the language." She points to the West African languages of Ibo, Yoruba, Ewe, Wolof, Fante and Mandinka as relatives of Ebonics.

"You can take examples from those languages today, and you see the similarities," Blackshire-Belay says. "Ebonics falls into the African form of languages. It is not a dialect of English, even though it uses English words."

Vaughn-Cooke says that Blackshire-Belay "is on the wrong track" when she classifies Ebonics as an African form of language rather than a dialect of English. She maintains that the research has not been done to link present-day Black English to West African languages.

"Black English is not a separate language from English," she says. "[However] once a statement has been diseminated throughout the country, it is very hard to retract it."

According to Ducker, there is no pure distinction between a language and a dialect. Still, her organization does not recognize Ebonics as a distinct "language," but rather as a social dialect of English.

"If a group of people cannot understand one another, in general, it is because of a difference in language," she says. Ducker, Vaughn-Cooke and Blackshire-Belay agree, however, that Ebonics includes not only the spoken word, but body language, issues of personal space, eye contact, narrative sequence and other factors.

"What has too often been left out of this recent discussion on Ebonics are the modes of discourse," Blackshire-Belay says. "It's not just how you form a sentence, it is how you express it."

It is unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached about whether Ebonics is a language or a dialect. However, when it comes to teaching African American children American English, these experts agree that, to some degree, the arguement is irrelevant.

The point, Vaughn-Cooke says, is to be able to speak the language of wider communication and yet "to be able to talk to your mom, and not be embarrassed by your mom or to embarrass your mom."

There is evidence to support the suggestion that Ebonics can be used, as Oakland intends, to help provide a transition for students who speak it into speaking and writing standard American English.

"Based upon my understanding of what Oakland's intent was, they're helping to explain to people that this [manner of speaking] is not a disorder," Ducker says. "[The Oakland Unified School District] is not advocating teaching Ebonics. These children already have Ebonics. What they're trying to do is help teach the teachers who do not have Ebonics, to give them an understanding of what the children are saying."

An important component of this process is teaching the teachers not to devalue whatever language the students bring with them when they first arrive at school.

"The language a parent uses with their child is often referred to as the language of love," Ducker says. "If you criticize that home language, then what you're telling me [as a child] is that the way my mommy talks to me is bad and sub-standard." Such criticism can undermine a child's self esteem and hinder the learning process.

Blackshire-Belay and Ducker say that Ebonics should not be validated just as a bridge to American English. It must be embraced on its own merit.

"It doesn't matter what whites say about Ebonics, but it does matter what we [African Americans] say," Blackshire-Belay says. "Ebonics simply expresses the common variety of sights and sounds of the African American language. It is the extension of the oral tradition of African people, it is used among African people to communicate, and it serves a very useful purpose."

"I think it's good that this controversy has arisen," Williams says. "It can bring a level of awareness that is needed. School districts around the country are hurting. The traditional approaches are not working for too many Black children. Certainly there are strengths and weakness in the Oakland approach, but I think this is the direction in which we need to go."

The Role of Higher Education

"It is criminal to graduate African American students who cannot speak and write standard English," says Orlando L. Taylor, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. "If we do, we are setting them up for failure. We, in higher education, must find a way to effectively teach Black children and then, we must prepare a teaching force to do it."

The lack of understanding about the language systems of African Americans is, in Taylor's mind, something that can be remedied by a greater focus of attention on the issue by higher education institutions.

"Most colleges and universities claim to have three roles in society: research, teaching, and service," Taylor says, adding that higher education institutions can do more in each of these areas when it comes to fields of research concerning African Americans.

"There is an incomplete body of research on the many ways that African Americans communicate," he says. "Another thing I think the academic community needs to do is help inform the public better.

"The public has been manipulated by not having the full benefit of thoughtful information on these topics. I think colleges and universities can do a better job of articulating -- not just about the language of African Americans, but about how language operates in general."

Taylor adds that scholars can help explain how communication, though related to language, is different. They also can remind people about the rich linguistic heritages of the United States, and about the survival of other languages in present day American English. Institutions can achieve this by using campus radio stations, sending faculty members out into the community to speak to civic groups about the nature of language, and engaging the media on the subject.

"The rhetoric has got to be lowered and thoughtful conversation has got to emerge," Taylor says.

On the subject of teaching, the dean says there are materials available that help teachers learn how to "bridge" students from a command of their home language to a command of English, but that these materials should be more widely distributed.

"We need to make sure than our colleges and universities do a better job of training the next generation of classroom teachers to be able to teach standard English skills to culturally and linguistically diverse students," he says.

Colleges and universities also must encourage new research in the field of education to discover new and innovative teaching methods. They must also sustain their commitment to diversity -- with respect to students, faculty and course content; and must help society to define and understand what it means to have a truly multi-cultural society where the languages of all cultural, gender and racial groups are valued -- a society where the ability to code switch between American English and Ebonics is held in esteem.

"I'd like to see us call together a national conference on Ebonics and invite the critics among school superintendents, politicians, educators, the media and others so we can educate them," Williams says. "What we need to say to those who criticize Oakland is, `Do you have a better idea?'"

RELATED ARTICLE: Recent Developments in the Public Life of Ebonics

1969 The American Speech Language-Hearing Association forms an office of Urban and Ethnic Affairs -- which today is known as the office of Multicultural Affairs -- to focus on the unique speech and language therapeutic needs of communities of color and to address professional development issues relating to African American speech and language service providers.

1971 The Center for Applied Linguistics, based in Washington, D.C., develops a series of "dialect readers" crafted in "Black English" as part of a program aimed at teaching Black children to read. The strategy is met with much public criticism both within and outside of the Black community, Black linguists among them, and eventually the primers go out of print.

1973 Psychologist Robert L. Williams, Ph.D., wins a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the cognitive and linguistic development of African American children. He convenes a conference in St. Louis of psychologists, linguists and professionals from four other disciplines to discuss research on the subject. He coins the term Ebonics during a brainstorming session at the workshop. Southern California linguist Ernie A. Smith, Ph.D., later joins Williams in crafting a technical definition of the term,

1974 Several Black parents in San Francisco win their suit (Larry P. V. Riles) against California superintendent of schools Wilson Riles in which they charged that their children were inappropriately placed in special education programs on the basis of performance on a racially biased Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test.

1975 Williams publishes "Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks," a record of his research and findings on the subject of Ebonics.

1979 A federal judge orders some schools in the city of Ann Arbor, Mich., to train its teachers in an appreciation of Black English. The program is discontinued after two years.

1981 California adopts the Standard English Proficiency program (SEP), aimed at improving the language skills of African American students by offering teachers an opportunity to attend voluntary workshops on the subject of Black English. The SEP program acknowledges Black English as a dialect of African Americans and defines it as "Black language." Several school districts throughout the state, including Oakland and Los Angeles, embrace the program.

1983 The legislative council of the American Speech Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) unanimously approves a position paper prepared by the Committee on the Status of Racial Minorities that recognizes Black English as a social dialect. The paper emphasizes that Black English is not a communication disorder, as it had sometimes been classified.

'96

July In response to the poor academic performance scores of African American students, Toni Cook, who was then chair of the Oakland School Board, orders the development of a Task Force on the Education of African American Students. The group's mandate was to develop a strategy for improving the performance of Black students.

Nov. 28 The findings and recommendations of the Oakland Task Force on the Education of African American Students appear in a few newspapers around the country. The news passes virtually unnoticed.

Dec. 18 Oakland School Board hears the findings and recommendations of the Task Force on the Education of African American Students and unanimously adopts a controversially worded resolution that recognizes Ebonics as a distinct language of African American students. The recommendations call for a system wide program of intervention to help Black students become proficient in Standard English using Ebonics as the bridge.

Dec. 19 News of the Oakland School Board action appears in a variety of local and national newspapers and on radio and television newscasts.

Dec. 22 Rev. Jesse Jackson, denounces the Oakland resolution on "Meet the Press." His criticism is soon echoed by Maya Angelou, Kweisi Mfume, Mario Cuomo and California Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, among others. References to Ebonics and the growing debate about it begin to appear on the Internet.

Dec. 24 U.S. Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley announces the Federal Government does not recognize Ebonics as a separate language and that programs using Ebonics will not be considered eligible for federal bilingual education funds. Ebonics becomes a favorite subject of public discourse and is repeatedly debated on television and radio talk shows.

Dec. 26 Upon meeting with Oakland School officials, Jackson retracts his previous denouncement of the resolution. Other African American leaders soon follow.

Dec. 30 Jackson asks Education Secretary Riley to reconsider his position on funding programs like Oakland's that aim to improving the educational performance of Black children.

'97

Jan. 3 The Linguistics Society of America adopts a resolution validating Ebonics as an a acceptable derivation of English and backing the Oakland school board's intentions to use it to help students learn standard English.

Jan. 14 Oakland school board is scheduled to vote on amendments to its original resolution on Ebonics.