Educators Defend Use of Ebonics

African American leaders, educators and parents gathered in Los Angeles on Thursday to angrily defend the Oakland Unified School District’s recent decision to declare black English a separate language--and two local school board members pledged to propose similar resolutions in their districts.

But after a three-hour discussion, representatives of the Los Angeles Unified and Compton Unified school boards said they hoped to avoid the criticism directed at Oakland by making their goal clear: to attack the poor academic performance of black students by improving their grasp of mainstream English.

“People took [the Oakland resolution] out of context. . . . The ultimate focus is standard English fluency,” said Los Angeles Board of Education member Barbara Boudreaux, who called the meeting at her Lafayette Square home, drawing more than 60 people.

Boudreaux and others supported the Oakland board’s assertion that Ebonics--a mesh of “ebony” and “phonics” used to describe speech patterns of some African Americans--is a bona fide language. While blaming critics and the media for distorting the issues, a majority parted ways in two key areas with the resolution adopted by the Oakland Board of Education on Dec. 18.

They disagreed with the description of Ebonics as genetically based. “That one-liner was a mistake,” Boudreaux said. All language, she said, “comes from your environment.”

And most of those who stood to speak in Boudreaux’s living room were firm that classes should not be conducted in Ebonics the way bilingual classes are taught in Spanish. Instead, the Los Angeles leaders said, teachers should be taught the structure of Ebonics so that they can better understand their students and accept their backgrounds.

“We want students to know that what they learned at home is not bad, but there is a better way,” said Saul E. Lankster, president of the Compton Board of Education.

Oakland’s resolution touched off a furious backlash, which continued Thursday in some quarters. During a news conference at a Long Beach elementary school library, Gov. Pete Wilson was asked whether he thought the Oakland school board had been misunderstood.

“I think, to be charitable, that they erred,” he said. “And I think the outrage you have seen from students, parents, not to mention outsiders, indicates that it was not a very good idea.”

Initially, the resolution even drew fire from some civil rights leaders, including Jesse Jackson, for being potentially damaging to black youths. After a hurriedly organized closed-door meeting with Oakland school officials on Monday, however, Jackson said he largely agreed with the board’s action and blamed the press for focusing on “the absurd, and that which is divisive.”

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Jackson was castigated for his about-face during Thursday’s debate in Los Angeles, with one grandmother shouting that the civil rights leader uses Ebonics in his speeches.

Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles) told the gathering: “What I hope people will get from this controversy is you cannot respond to the media before you’ve read the actual document.”

While Ebonics dominated the discussion, Boudreaux’s meeting also included a broad-reaching debate on why African American students are not succeeding. Opinions varied widely--from poor teacher attitudes to spotty parent involvement, societal racism and inadequate educational funding--but the solution was the same: teach children to speak mainstream English using whatever techniques work.

Frequent comparisons were made with bilingual education, which some African American parents complain takes money away from their children.

“For every [bilingual program] child in the district, there is a program to move them into English,” said Daniel Larson, administrator of the cluster of campuses that feed into Crenshaw and Dorsey high schools. Los Angeles Unified schools “have 92,000 African American students, but fewer than half of them are in a [language] program.”

Boudreaux vowed to push, beginning at the Jan. 13 school board meeting, for expanding the district’s language classes for African American students, which include a language development program in 31 inner-city schools.

The only other Los Angeles board member present at the meeting, David Tokofsky, said the proposal may meet with opposition from other trustees because there is no student test data to prove that the program is working. Cost, he said, would be another obstacle.

According to district chief financial analyst Henry Jones, L.A. Unified spends about $10 million a year on the language programs for African Americans. Expanding them districtwide would cost at least $24 million more, he said.

Times staff writer David Ferrell contributed to this story.