Guest Editorial: African American Education and the Ebonics Issue

Abstract

Ebonics, or American Language has been a source of vigorous debate and concern for the past 20-plus years. Most recently, the Oakland (California) Unified School District (OUSD) generated renewed interest in the topic with its late December 1996 and early 1997 resolutions addressing the use of Ebonics as a bridge for teaching Standard English to African American students. The school district's public positions resulted in much controversy and contention. Concomitantly, fervent misconceptions and earnest defenses alike emanated from educational and sociopolitical arenas. In this period of relative quiet after the storm (and perhaps before yet another storm erupts), the purpose of the Journal of Negro Education's special focus on Ebonics was to bring together a roster of authors to address the most salient issues and concerns relevant to the education of African Americans who speak Ebonics as a dialect or vernacular of Standard English. This issue features articles by some of the leading thinkers on this highly publicized topic. To begin, Richard Wright, a longstanding authority on human communication, presents a sociolinguistic perspective. His article critiques the form, content, and function of the OUSD's original resolution, explicating the specific impact of these features in generating the maelstrom that accompanied that document's issuance. In doing so, he reveals the manner in which the Ebonics debate has become politicized, and how this politicization has led to the distortion of the public's perception of Ebonics and its speakers. Next, my co-authors, Grace Reid and Cecilia Wisdom, and I discuss the impact of Ebonics use on the results of traditional psychoeducational assessment measures. Our article also highlights alternative measures, such as ecological and curriculum-based assessments, that allow Ebonics speakers to demonstrate skills that are often not readily apparent when traditional assessments are used. Only by adopting such measures, will the risk of misdiagnoses in the psychoeducational assessment of children who speak Ebonics be reduced. For their part, Frederick Harper, Kisha Braithwaite, and Ricardo LaGrange address the role of the school counselor in facilitating intervention strategies for and attitudinal awareness among classroom teachers who work with Ebonics-speaking youth. Not only should counselors work one-on-one with Ebonics speakers, these authors posit, but they also must collaborate with teachers and administrators in order to create an educational environment that is conducive to these students' acquisition of Standard English. Their contribution highlights the importance of both innovative and time-tested counseling techniques as means of improving the Standard English usage and comprehension of African American youth and adults. Orlando Taylor wrote extensively on the topic of Black English in the early 1970s. In this issue, he presents a historical overview of policy matters related to Ebonics and discusses the implications of recent developments in this area. Taylor then challenges educators to apply the lessons learned from this debate to the schools of the 21st century: that the use of Ebonics must not be mistaken for a deficiency in Standard English, and that all educators working with Ebonics speakers must become familiar with this language system and the culture of its users. Last but not least, Mary Hoover, one of the leaders of the OUSD's efforts and a member of the African American Task Force that drafted the resolutions, offers a recommended reading list of articles, books, and other resources that can help build teacher' knowledge base and improve their attitudes toward youth who speak Ebonics. Dr. Hoover's decades of work with such students and literacy learning have greatly contributed to the research which demonstrates that educators' attitudes improve if (a) they are introduced to the structural features of Ebonics and the culture of its users, and (b) they are made aware of the stereotypical thinking about African Americans ingrained in American culture. …