Ebonics Is Not The Answer Essay Research

Ebonics Is Not The Answer Essay, Research Paper

EBONICS IS NOT THE ANSWER

Over the pass few months, a controversial subject regarding the education of African American students in the Oakland School District has made its way to the top of discussions across America. .Ebonics. or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Vernacular Black English (VBE) has been erroneously called .slang,. .broken English,. instead the full-fledged dialect that it is. Much heated debate, public and private, has brought an opinion from almost everyone who has heard of the subject. Without there being only one primary reason, evidence shows there are several important reasons such as lowering the English standards, wasting the taxpayers dollars and finally lowering the students. self-esteem and confidence are equally significant in the fight against Ebonics.

Oakland Unified School District strongly disagrees with the linguists and the Board of Education opinion of lowering student.s academic standards and proposes its ambitious professional development goal: ensuring that teachers understand the structural details of AAVE so that they can draw on Black students’ linguistic proficiency. Attitudes toward the vernacular dialect may well have to be overhauled, and some fairly extensive linguistic training will need to occur. Teachers will need to know how to weave dialect instruction into reading, writing, and oral language development in order to connect it to real communicative functions.

Society has a clear vested interest in educating its youth. In his most famous decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Brown vs. Board of Education “Education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments… In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.” An education that promotes success and esteem, not one that suggests lower standards. Warren’s words are no less true today.

President Kennedy once said, “A child miseducated is a child lost.” Ebonics has fast become a statewide concern because it promises to miseducate an entire generation of children by lowering academic standards, forcing students to underperform. Oakland.s proposal on Ebonics intending to improve performance of black students, who make up more than half of the distinct and whose average grade is a D-plus will not be successful as many studies prove it. Since 1966, linguists at Stanford University have done a number of studies of Ebonics and their researches show that black children who have been thought using the Ebonics program — which recognizes so-called Black English as distinct from standard English . have not improved their ability to read and write standard English. .These children deserve a first-rate education, not another feel-good trying to help program which failed in 1977 in the trial in Ann Arbor1,. said Jim Boulet, Jr., Executive Director of Standard English Proficiency Program. .The marketplace is demanding excellent communications skills. These children are being denied that opportunity,. Boulet said.

Ann Arbor High School is not the only failure in the history of African American Vernacular English. Twenty-six years ago, Brooklyn College offered a course, which taught “Black English” as the alleged native language of African-Americans. The outraged response of the NAACP to “Black English” is instructive to those who would defend Ebonics instruction today: “This language is merely the English of the under-educated with provincial variances in accent and structure from locale to locale throughout the English-speaking world,” declared the NAACP. “What our children need, and other disadvantaged American children as well — Indian, Spanish-speaking, Asian, Appalachian and immigrant Caucasian — is training in basic English which today is nearly an international language as any in the world… Let our children have the opportunity, and be encouraged to learn the language which will best enable them to comprehend modern science and technology, equip them to communicate intelligently with other English-speaking people of all races, and to share in the exercise of national power.”

There are many ways for tax dollars to be wasted on many things in California, but the Legislature in Sacramento should not waste a single tax dollar on Ebonics instruction in California’s public schools because Ebonics is an unacceptable dumbing-down of English standards that legitimizes academic underachievement by creating a role for slang in education. Oakland District states in its bulletin . Asian-American, Latino-American, Native American, and all other language-different children are provided general funds for bilingual education, English as a Second Language (ESL) and state and federal (Title VIII) bilingual education programs to address their limited and non-English-proficient (LEP/NEP) needs. African-American pupils are equally entitled to be tested and, where appropriate, shall be provided general funds and state and federal bilingual education and ESL programs to specifically address their LEP/NEP needs..

As far as Ebonics being genetically inherited from ancestors from the Swahili language and thus is a natural form of speech within African decent (view used by Oakland for support for the federal bilingual funding), is not being supported by many linguists. .Black E