I think last week's session brought up an interesting point: who, if anyone, is to blame for the misrepresentation of the Oakland school board's decision to implement Ebonics into the classroom. Is it the media's fault? Or was the media only portraying a deeper issue about race that persists in the U.S?
The Real Ebonics Debate is very insistent that the picture the media painted of using Ebonics in Oakland schools was incredibly skewed and biased. I am curious, though, if the biased opinions of the news would have been so universally accepted if the general public wasn't so ready to agree with what was being said by the media without looking further into the issue. And the end of the section we read, there is an excerpt from the Florida Teacher Certificate Examination which states: "A high rate of failure, particularly for Black students... possibly will result from the test" (131). Perhaps these types of assumptions are what allowed the media's libelous statements to go unchecked by the majority of Americans.
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ustin, you bring up a great point here. Although I think that the media is certainly to blame for its lack of research and its amazing ability to misconstrue the facts, there is definitely a deeper debate here!
ReplyDeleteAs we have been discussing, there was a surprising response from Black Leadership in the United States: a lack of support and the common mentality of "well I learned just fine, so why can't they?" What does the passing of the Ebonics resolution say to people unaware of the facts? For one, it says that African American students are not smart enough to learn English like other students. In actuality, as The Real Ebonics Debate has proven, over and again, Ebonics is its own language, or at least something more than a dialect.
The social implications of the Ebonics resolution were astounding! The Debate took heat, but what was really being discussed. Not the welfare of the students who as statistics showed made up "71 percent of the students enrolled in Special Education" or those with an average GPA of 1.8, etc etc. (see page 158 for the traumatic statistics). The discussion was Ebonics, it's lazy, it's wrong, its' (insert bad adjective), it's wrong, its' (insert bad adjective), it's wrong, its' (insert bad adjective), etc. Were those debating the language or the people who speak it? Unfortunately, it's a great deal of both. The Ebonics debate was so much more than a debate on language and so much less than an attempt to better the education of underprivileged Black students.