L.A. School Board Member Finalizes Plan for Ebonics

After more than 20 hours of meetings with African American educators and community members, Los Angeles school board member Barbara Boudreaux on Tuesday finalized her proposal to further embrace Ebonics.

The document, which Boudreaux said she will introduce to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s board Monday, calls for acknowledging that Ebonics is a distinct language requiring specialized training for all teachers who have contact with black students. That training, it states, should be “consistent with state requirements for teaching” bilingual program students.

Although the resolution does not specify where the money would come from, Boudreaux said her goal is to increase funding for language development programs for African American students, not to siphon money from bilingual education.

But Latino activists expressed concern that any moves to formalize Ebonics as a language could drain support for bilingual education and warned that opposition to the plan is growing.

“They’re looking to get money from the easiest target,” said Juan Jose Gutierrez of One Stop Immigration Services. “It pits two communities against each other that ought to be working together.”

Boudreaux’s proposal comes just a month after a similar resolution was approved by the Oakland Unified School District, touching off an avalanche of criticism and accolades.

But Boudreaux said she learned a valuable lesson from her colleagues in Oakland: wording is everything.

Instead of describing Ebonics as “genetically based”--a phrase in the Oakland district’s resolution--Boudreaux’s version gives a detailed description of the roots of the speech patterns. Bolstered by the recent endorsement of Oakland’s action by the Linguistic Society of America, it also notes that “linguists agree that, when compared with English, Ebonics is a different and not a deficit language system.”

And instead of calling for teaching African American students “in their primary language,” as did Oakland, Boudreaux’s motion calls for teachers to “have an awareness and understanding of Ebonics in order to move African American students to mainstream English.”

Teachers “would not have to speak it,” she emphasized, just comprehend it.

Some board members have questioned why Boudreaux felt a need to enter the controversy when Los Angeles Unified already has a $2.9-million Language Development Program for African American students. But Boudreaux said that program only exists in 31 schools, reaching about 10,000 of the district’s 92,000 black students.

Board President Jeff Horton said he would wait to see the resolution before deciding how to vote.

“It’s one of many needs we have,” he said. “There’s a big need for Hispanic students who don’t speak mainstream English, but don’t speak Spanish either and there’s not a penny for them. ‘Spanglish’ [speakers are] if anything a bigger group of kids, with just as low test scores.”