ebonics parallel in hawaii

Speak pidgin, 
think pidgin, 
write pidgin?

That's the fear of some isle
educators, who blame local lingo
for poor writing scores. But
linguists say you can't ignore
pidgin when teaching

How pidgin helps -- and hinders

By Crystal Kua
Star-Bulletin

A child offers his playmate a treat.

Waving his hands, the playmate replies, "Nah, I no like."

Should the schools embrace or reject the everyday way of talking to improve education?

It's a question that has been debated not only in Hawaii since the turn of the century but across the country and in other parts of the world.

The pidgin English debate surfaced again last month when national writing scores for Hawaii eighth-graders were released.

'Every time we close the door
on pidgin, we close the
door on culture.'

Lois-Ann Yamanaka
HAWAII AUTHOR

The disappointing results led Board of Education Chairman Mitsugi Nakashima and state Schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu to suggest looking into whether Hawaii's pidgin English has played a role in the scores.

Pidgin English, or what experts say should be called Hawaii Creole English, is part of the culture of nearly anyone who grew up in these islands.

"It's a language of solidarity," said Alan Ramos, a Department of Education specialist in English as a second language. "It's basically one that affirms that you are from here."

But is that good or bad for island children learning to read, write and speak standard English in the public schools?

It depends on who is making the argument. Nakashima said standard English should be the norm in the classroom.

If people speak pidgin English, they will think pidgin English and will then write in pidgin English, Nakashima said.

Ebonics issues similar

But that's not necessarily so, nationally recognized experts on language say.

"None of us writes the way we speak," said Walter Wolfram, an associate professor of linguistics at North Carolina State University. "Record somebody who gives a talk or transcribe what someone says."

Wolfram, a member of the Linguistics Society of America, said the debate over Hawaii pidgin English is similar to the mainland controversy involving black English, or ebonics.

"I think the same issues are at stake," Wolfram said. "Do people recognize it as a legitimate language? Knowledge of pidgin should be taken into account to learn standard English. That would mean, in teaching standard English, people need to know the structures of pidgin."

The Oakland school board in 1996 recognized ebonics -- a term combining ebony and phonics -- as a separate language in trying to teach standard English.

John Rickford, a Stanford University linguistics professor, writing in "Using the Vernacular to Teach the Standard," said, "The undeniable fact ... is that most African-American children come to school fluent in the vernacular. It will emerge in the classroom, and how teachers respond to it can crucially affect how the students learn to read, and how well they master standard English," he wrote. "Ignoring or condemning the vernacular is not a particularly successful strategy ... as suggested by the massive educational failure associated with this approach nationwide."

Rickford, who could not be reached for comment, also wrote about instances from across the country -- Tennessee, Chicago, Georgia -- and in the Caribbean and in Europe, where the vernacular was taken into account in the teaching of the standard language.

read full article here

a more fiscal frame...

it's cheaper to have boys in the classroom, than have boys in jail...

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn

link to video

"AX OR ASK?"

If there is one idea that most agree on, it is that if a person speaks AAVE, and only AAVE, then his job opportunities will be limited. Why? Some believe that AAVE itself is holding users of the language back, but isn't it holding them back because it is not valued in wider society and specifically the job market. By blaming it on the language, wider society evades responsibility for creating barriers for speakers of AAVE to attain jobs. They evade the fact that those who use AAVE are looked down upon and judged as unintelligent and uneducated because they do not speak "Standard English" (a term used by all but defined by none).

"it's like trying to teach a dog to be a cat"

Here, KRS-One comments on the structures that exist for African-American youth. If material and curriculum in schools are culturally irrelevant, how do they expect students to be engaged and learn? He recognizes the devaluing of non-white culture in school and declares to schools that if the schools help create a bad environment for a student, he himself becomes bad. He comments on the civil war among the black community. This is an important idea to note because one often sees the media framing an issue such that it appears that the entire black community has this certain opinion as a collective whole, when that is certainly not the case. He also frames the issue in such a way that possibly sees the classroom as a means of curing the lack of appreciation for black culture in wider society.

A Survival Curriculum for Inner-City Kids
By KRS-One
Published: Saturday, September 9, 1989

Young black New Yorkers are raised in a racially polarized society. The murder in Bensonhurst of Yusuf Hawkins is not an isolated incident. The number of racially motivated crimes has escalated since Howard Beach, as the city's mayoral candidates ought to know. And these crimes are only the most obvious form of racism.

Young black kids experience a more subtle form of racism when their heritage and culture are stripped from them early on in their schooling. While no single cause accounts for the problems of inner-city kids, much of what black youth is missing - self-esteem, creative opportunity, outlook, goals - can be traced to what we're not learning in schools.

If more creative effort and dedication is not put toward educating the large, vital and energetic populace that is this city's black youth, the city may soon be consumed by the symptoms of racism, and an already polarized New York may tear itself apart.

In the city's schools, Afro-American kids are taught white American history, while our own heritage is blatantly ignored. Everyone is supposed to learn about being (white) Americans. As I say in my song ''Why is that?'' It's like trying to teach a dog to be a cat.

I was homeless for seven years. My mother, a single parent, was overwhelmed with responsibility. Her uncertainty about the future created unbearable pressure at home. I ran away at the age of 13 to live an even more uncertain life, bouncing from park to subway to shelter. But at least I was in control.

The lessons they were teaching in school - Thomas Jefferson and the Civil War, etc. - left me empty. Aggravated at what I was expected to learn, I was even more aggravated that I wasn't even being taught what I desperately wanted to know.

Most of what I know of myself and my culture, the things I try to bring across in my songs, I picked up either in conversation with enlightened adults or through my own study. I took to the public libraries for shelter, but I came out with much more.

If my story has a happy ending, it is the exception. Most people refuse to understand that black inner-city youth, alienated by their schooling, are left with nothing else to grab onto.

read full article here

"the Dionysian trap for young black men"

Black youth need to rise up and stop being lazy...the American Dream is there's for the taking..."cultural explanations are wholly deterministic, leaving no room for human agency"...they need to stop being in the middle of the "cool-pose culture":

A Poverty of the Mind
By Orlando Patterson
Published: March 26, 2006
Cambridge, Mass.

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author of one of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he feels, is due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math skills at a time when such skills are increasingly required even for blue-collar jobs, and the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to find jobs, he claims, black males turn to illegal activities, especially the drug trade and chronic drug use, and often end up in prison. He also criticizes the practice of withholding child-support payments from the wages of absentee fathers who do find jobs, telling The Times that to these men, such levies "amount to a tax on earnings."

His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B. Mincy of Columbia, the author of a study called "Black Males Left Behind," and Gary Orfield of Harvard, who asserts that America is "pumping out boys with no honest alternative."

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to answer the important questions. Why are young black men doing so poorly in school that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These scholars must know that countless studies by educational experts, going all the way back to the landmark report by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University in 1966, have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.

Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children — several of them — which they have no resources or intention to support? And why, finally, do they murder each other at nine times the rate of white youths?

read full article here