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By Ellis Cose
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IF OAKLAND'S SCHOOL BOARD ACCOMPLISHED NOTHING else, it gave people (at least those who were not howling in dismay) something to laugh at over the holidays. Yet, all the hooting over "Ebonics" notwithstanding, the board's call for change was justified. America's dereliction of its educational duty to black children is a national tragedy. Unfortunately, in lieu of a solution, Oakland, Calif., came up with stale, silly rhetoric.
The problem is not that the board embraced Ebonics, but that it put Ebonics at the core of its educational strategy. If schoolteachers want to learn black vernacular, or turn themselves into amateur linguists, that is perfectly fine, perhaps even desirable, but it won't necessarily transform them into better teachers. If Oakland educators truly are incapable of communicating with children from the " 'hood," they have a problem that a crash course in "black English" won't solve. The key to teaching black children (or any children) is not in convincing them that they speak a foreign language, but that they are capable of mastering any material put in front of them. Numerous teachers are already doing that--and without resorting to jargon about "Niger-Congo" idioms. Sadly, such teachers don't make up the majority of the educational establishment. And children pay the price.
Last month, the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, released a report documenting educational meltdown on a massive scale. After years of watching the achievement gap between white and minority children narrow, the trust found that the gap has grown over the last six years. Although one third of white eighth graders were judged proficient in mathematics, only one in 33 black students and one in 14 Latinos were performing comparably. The reason is simple, said the report: "we take students who have less to begin with and give them less in school, too."
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Yet, even in an ocean of failure, there are islands of success. Waitz Elementary School in Mission, Texas, with a student body that is overwhelmingly poor and Latino, saw well over 90 percent of its fourth graders place at (or above) grade level in the math and English sections of a standardized test. How? By closely monitoring students' work and relentlessly focusing on developing skills, observed the trust's director, Kati Haycock.
Waitz is not alone. Xavier University in New Orleans has worked wonders with black high schoolers through summer enrichment programs that routinely catapult youngsters to new achievement levels. Many of those students end up attending Xavier, which, largely as a result of its single-minded focus on academics, sends more blacks to medical schools than any other institution in the country. Philip Uri Treisman, a mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin, has worked similar educational magic, making math whizzes out of numerous black and Latino students, many of whom, without his help, seemed destined for math mediocrity. Over the last four years, administrators in El Paso, Texas, have reported a stunning turnaround in performance in 15 schools previously rated as disasters. The secret, says Susana Navarro, executive director of the El Paso Collaborative, is a philosophy rooted in the belief that "virtually all students are capable of high achievement." Robert Slavin, codirector of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research on the Education of Children Placed at Risk, reports equally heartening news from the more than 400 schools in 31 states associated with his center. The typical fifth grader in an affiliated school, he says, is a full academic year ahead of his nonaffiliated peers. "Some bright, enthusiastic, highly motivated kids are washed up by the third grade," beaten down by failure, and expectations of failure, all around them, says Slavin. "We try to break the cycle... so that these kids can succeed," he adds.
None of the miracle workers employs exotic techniques. (Delving into Ebonics, notes Slavin, is irrelevant to the enterprise: "It's just not an issue.") They all, however, insist on results, and they develop materials and teaching methods capable of achieving those results. Arthur Whimbey, a psychologist and director of the TRAC Research Institute in Albuquerque, N.M., who helped generate many of the materials used at Xavier and elsewhere, uses "text reconstruction" (which entails having students reconstruct vignettes they are given in scrambled sentence order) to hone grammar and reasoning skills. Although the vignettes may focus on black notables, the purpose is not merely to develop racial pride but to sharpen practical skills.
In my new book, "Color-Blind" (HarperCollins), I attempt to distill the principles that make the successful programs work: (1) find a group of young people motivated to learn, or find a way to motivate them; (2) convince them you believe in them; (3) teach them good study skills; (4) challenge them with difficult and practical material; (5) give them adequate support, and (6) demand that they perform. Unfortunately, far too many educators conclude, in effect, that it's easier to teach students to feel good about themselves--and even about their academic failings--than it is to help them raise their level of performance. Self-esteem becomes a goal unto itself.
Certainly, cultivating pride and self-respect is a worthwhile goal, but that self-respect should be rooted in achievement. Students already at an educational disadvantage should not be provided with false pride in the misuse of language. Rather, they should be provided with confidence that they can perform at the highest academic levels, and with the support and tools to do so.
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