95th Street School: Ebonics in Real Life

Watching the raging Ebonics debate from inside the cyclone fence of 95th Street Elementary School is like waiting out a storm from the warmth of bed, touched only slightly by the turmoil outside.

Language, dialect or slang?

For the principal, teachers and students at this South-Central Los Angeles campus, settling on a label is largely irrelevant. Ebonics is, quite simply, the way many students speak--at least outside of class.

“Michael Jordan my cousin,” said 9-year-old Leonard Greer, stepping back to launch a basketball in the playground.

“You a liar!” said Darryl Jones, 11, as he rushed to block the shot. “I whup you.”

Just as surely, however, such abbreviated speech patterns are not the common currency of the classroom. When Darryl speaks that way in Mark Saterlee’s class, during a lesson on ancient Egypt--”The pyramids be big,” the fifth-grade teacher subtly guides him toward mainstream English with a leading question: “The pyramids are . . . ?”

The issue of black English, African American Language, Ebonics--call it what you will--erupted again on the national landscape when the Oakland school board last month recognized it as a distinct language and a Los Angeles school board member proposed doing the same. The noise has reverberated from coast to coast, dredging up a debate that seemed from another decade, like arguing about whether graffiti is art or vandalism.

Sweeping aside the rhetoric--at times raw, at other times downright racist--has left only one point on which most everyone can agree:

The real challenge is how best to help poor-achieving African American students, in part by helping those who speak a unique patois to learn mainstream English.

But that’s long been the goal at 95th Street. Four years ago, with little fanfare, the school joined a program now at 31 Los Angeles Unified School District campuses, each chosen because it had low test scores and a predominantly black enrollment.

The Language Development Program for African American Students now reaches about 20,000 of the district’s 93,000 black students, making it one of the most extensive efforts of its kind in the nation. Teachers and students at the 95th Street thus find themselves in the eye of the national storm.

Nearly two-thirds of the school’s teachers have been trained to understand African American students’ backgrounds--cultural and linguistic--and to use that knowledge in every class to coax them toward standard English. The teachers also are instructed in the gentler correction techniques familiar to readers of modern parenting guides--so gentle that they don’t even call it correcting.

During a word definition assignment in LaJoyce Johnson’s fifth-grade class, when a student complained that he was stumped because “didn’t nobody have” the definition card to match his word, Johnson quickly “modeled” more appropriate grammar.

“Somebody had it, you just didn’t find it,” she said.

Principal Helen Clemmons views the program as a natural extension of readily accepted methods for teaching English to Spanish-speaking youngsters, who make up about half of her 1,400 students. Most all the others are black. The school has two white students.

“I tell my teachers, new and experienced, all the children here need ESL [English as a second language], they need the speech patterns, what verb, what tense, and so on,” Clemmons said.

Teachers recoil from the outrage dominating talk shows. What right-minded teacher would actually teach in Ebonics? The children already know how to speak that way.

“That’s the only way they know, and we as educators should not strike it down,” said Calpurnia Weathersby, a special education preschool teacher who has been at the school for 30 years. “I tell my children, ‘This is the Ebonic way, but your life and job [are] not going to depend on that language.’ ”

Weathersby and her 95th Street colleagues firmly believe their approach is paying off both in student cooperation and performance. But they cannot prove it--which is one reason they worry about the public debate whirling outside their doors.

There is scant evidence that this program, or others like it, are boosting black students’ abysmal test scores, the very problem that inspired such efforts.

In fact, a study released last month by the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, found that the test score gap between blacks and whites nationwide began to widen in 1988, after more than a decade of improvement.

At 95th Street, reading and math results on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills have risen slightly in fourth grade--the year students are expected to be proficient readers and writers--since the program began there. But language comprehension dropped.

Nor has there been an overall upward trend at the other 27 elementary and three middle schools involved in the language development program, which is costing the district $2.8 million this year.

A special student evaluation developed for it, with help from UCLA, has yet to be completed.

To skeptics, the lack of positive findings raises questions not just about such programs, but about whether the struggles of African American students can be blamed on how they speak rather than on other factors, such as a disproportionate number of broken homes and poor schools.

“The idea is that black English is this barrier between these kids and standard English, but wouldn’t that mean they could read and write well in black English?” asked James McWhorter, assistant professor of linguistics and African American studies at UC Berkeley. “From what I understand, they can’t read or write at all. So doesn’t that indicate it’s the teaching in general that’s at fault?”

To be fair, it is hard to definitively measure any program in turbulent inner city schools. At 95th Street, 37% of the students move away each year. During the last five years, about a third of the teaching staff has left.

“People say, ‘You’ve been there five years; why haven’t you made a difference?”’ said Noma LeMoine, director of the district’s Language Development Program for African American Students. “I’m just busy training new teachers. That’s not a game; it’s just a reality.”

And one small program, she said, will never be a miracle cure.

“If you’re looking at the scores, nothing we’re doing in any area is working,” LeMoine said. “But what’s the alternative? I’m not comfortable just doing nothing.”

So teachers try exercises like the one that was underway in Johnson’s class the other day. Its official name is “contrastive analysis,” in educational linguist-speak. But it is basically a three-way translation game.

Johnson began by asking the students what the acronym MAE means. “Mainstream American English,” they recited in unison. And AAL? “African American Language,” the kids responded.

Then she gave each student three sheets of paper filled with typed phrases, some in mainstream English, others in Spanish, and others in Ebonics.

With scissors and glue sticks, the fifth-graders tried to line up the statements that meant the same thing, so “Here it go!” would end up next to “Here it is!” and “Aqui esta!”

Johnson says the exercise makes students aware of connections between standard English and how they speak at home. It encourages them to interact with their peers, she said, and learn from one another.

Indeed, as the lesson unfolded, it triggered cross-cultural communication that is rare outside of class. Black students asked Latino students for help and vice versa. No one cracked a joke about anyone else’s way of speaking.

Still, this is the sort of lesson that enrages critics because it gives Ebonics equal footing with established languages. To the critics, that is a dumbing down of education that sacrifices standards to make youngsters feel good about themselves.

In Johnson’s class, though, some students clearly understand that one set of phrases is favored by society.

“I know this one’s the right one,” said Angel Hernandez, 10, pointing to the phrase, “It is always cold in here.” Turning to the Ebonics equivalent, he said, “And this one, ‘It be col’ ’ is wrong.”

Across the hall in Saterlee’s class, fifth-grader Darryl Jones has a different sense of it. He describes Ebonics as “another language, something like French.”

But Darryl says he is learning to flip-flop between Ebonics and English, as needed. And at home, he reported, “My mom say: ‘Don’t use that African American language with me. I don’t understand it.”

The foundation for modern-day Ebonics programs was a controversial 1979 Michigan court ruling in which a federal judge said 11 black students attending a predominantly white middle-class school in Ann Arbor had been discriminated against because teachers did not take into account their “home language.” He ordered 40 teachers to attend consciousness-raising sessions.

A decade later, the Los Angeles Unified School District released a report, “The Children Can No Longer Wait,” detailing ways public education was failing minority youths. It put a $430-million annual cost on addressing those problems with such measures as preschool for all 4-year-olds.

The report landed the same year as deep budget cuts, and only a few of the recommendations were ever implemented. One was the Language Development Program for African American Students.

In contrast to the current furor over Ebonics, creation of the language program set off no outcry, even though it touched on many of the hot-button issues emerging from Oakland’s December resolution and a similar attempt last week by Los Angeles school board member Barbara Boudreaux to require training in Ebonics for all teachers here.

The 1989 report declared Ebonics--which it called “African American language” and “Black language”--a “viable language with its own system of rules, sounds and meaning” and advocated using bilingual education techniques to teach students who spoke it.

One difference is that Los Angeles Unified was more careful than Oakland in its wording, not calling Ebonics a “genetically based” language, for instance.

McWhorter, the UC Berkeley professor, observed that “the Oakland document has a black nationalist tinge, which I think gets under people’s skin,” while Los Angeles’ “document sounds reasonable. It doesn’t make you think the kids are going to be taught in black English.”

When speech pathologist LeMoine started the Los Angeles language development program in 1990, she saw it as an opportunity to fulfill a personal mission to ease the way for black youths who speak the same way she did.

Educated through sixth grade in segregated Texas schools, she moved to Los Angeles and began junior high here. When she told a school counselor she was ready for Algebra I, she said, the counselor recommended remedial courses instead. In geometry classes the next year, the teacher corrected the words she used to express her answer rather than praising her for getting the answer right.

“This was my first experience with white educators,” LeMoine said. “I know what it’s like to be in a classroom and be demeaned. I know the disservice we do our youngsters when we do not respect their language.”

Today she is working toward a doctorate in linguistics at USC and is such an acknowledged expert in Ebonics that she was among those invited to Oakland recently to meet with the Rev. Jesse Jackson after he condemned the resolution there for glamorizing “black ghetto slang.”

LeMoine, who calls herself “bilingual”--in mainstream English and Ebonics--knows that it is not only whites who question giving such respect to Ebonics.

“We have as much of a problem with African American teachers,” she said. “They have not been trained in college. No teachers have had this training, black or white, and that is a travesty.”

She designed a program that focuses on training teachers, offering workshops throughout the year to steep them in African and African American history, then sending them back to their classrooms with textbooks on that heritage.

Schools are provided with substitutes so their teachers can attend. And teachers who have gone through the program receive perks such as classroom computers, tape decks, televisions and multicultural literature.

Though the training may sound basic, even intuitive, Saterlee found it eye-opening. Reared in the west San Fernando Valley, the Calabasas High graduate characterized his background as “very white-based.”

“I think it’s very important to know where your kids are coming from,” he said. “It made me realize that they’re going to learn about European kings. Why not teach them about African kings too?”

LeMoine proudly refers to a UCLA evaluation of teachers in the program, which found dramatic attitude changes toward Ebonics and generally good use of techniques suggested in the training sessions, such as emphasizing writing through the use of student journals.

But LeMoine cannot yet show how changing teachers has helped their students, at least on standardized tests--which she pooh-poohs, in any case, arguing that any test based on a national median or “norm” cannot adequately assess a program aimed at inner city blacks.

“Insulting” is her description of last month’s public debate about Ebonics, set off by Oakland’s resolution. One radio commentator spent a morning mockingly teaching his listeners Ebonics, and the Internet is abuzz with spoofs--including one on Jewish language “Hebonics,” and another on Geekonics, the language of the offspring of high technology buffs.

The back and forth also has fueled jealousies between blacks and Latinos in inner city communities that were already simmering with racial tension, largely because some Latinos see the Ebonics movement as a thinly veiled effort to grab bilingual funds--even though state and federal officials insist that such grants will never go for Ebonics programs.

The issue has cleaved the African American community, with conservatives damning the notion and Ebonics supporters bad-mouthing some black luminaries for questioning Oakland’s wisdom: NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume, poet Maya Angelou, and Jackson before he changed his mind.

When school board member Boudreaux met with black community leaders in her living room this month, the target of ire was the “liberal white press.” Before those present could devise a proposed Ebonics resolution for the Los Angeles district, they wanted to set the record straight.

Coverage of Oakland’s policy was “mass media brainwashing to turn people against our children,” said Glenn Brown, vice chairman of the Black American Political Assn. of California.

A suggestion followed that all black children should be tested in English--the sort of singling out that, had it come from white educators, likely would have drawn cries of racism. Here in Boudreaux’s home, it brought only applause.

But within a narrower band, opinions varied even at that meeting. Most agreed Ebonics is a language, but a few did not. Most advocated preserving it, but some said it should be phased out at a young age.

“You must correct them, my dears,” scolded Marge Levy, a teacher for 38 years in Los Angeles Unified.

At 95th Street School, the shades of gray are just as evident.

One of the most recent initiates into the Ebonics training program, Barbara Bristow, said she relies on various tactics to reach her students, ranging from correcting their Ebonics writing in red pencil to slipping into Ebonics herself to get unruly students’ attention.

Bristow came out of retirement in the fall to fill a job that opened up when Los Angeles Unified reduced class size in primary grades. After putting off the Ebonics training for a few months, she went in December and it gave her a sense of deja vu: Bristow said she began her career at one of the state’s first desegregated schools, in Hanford, when a teacher like her naturally saw her mission as easing kids into the mainstream.

“This is nothing new,” she said. “So I asked the trainer, ‘Do we have to reinvent the wheel again?’ But then I thought about it and, as long as the kids are still struggling, yes, I guess we do.”

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Ebonics at a Glance

* WHY IS IT?: Linguists and educators have come to agree that a separate black vernacular exists, in many ways similar to standard English but different enough to handicap blacks who speak it.

* TERMINOLOGY: There is a debate about what to call it: black English, black language, black dialect or Ebonics--a term coined during the 1970s combining “ebony” and “phonics.”

* HISTORY: Some experts believe its roots are actually in England, but others assert that it arose from a common West African pidgin that slaves developed to overcome the differences in their tribal languages and communicates with one another and their English-speaking slave masters.

* EXTENT OF USE: It is the predominant language pattern among many urban blacks and is used at least some of the time by most blacks--not in business or professional settings, but informally at home and among friends.

* TEACHING METHOD: Using teaching methods borrowed from bilingual education programs, the California program, instead of “correcting” black English, uses it as a springboard for the teaching of standard English.

* SPEECH PATTERNS: Among the most common speech markers are its use “be” to denote an ongoing action (“he be going to work”), its dropping of linking verbs (“you crazy”), its shortened plurals (“twenty cent”), its dropping of some final consonants (“firs” instead of “first” or “des” instead of “desk”), and its substitution for some pronouns (“that’s the man got all the money”).

SOURCE: Times files