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Recently a nationwide debate was ignited when the Oakland, California School Board recognized Ebonics as a language. We begin our coverage with this report from Spencer Michels.

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A RealAudio version of this NewsHour segment is available.

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JIM LEHRER: Ebonics of black English is first tonight. Recently a nationwide debate was ignited when the Oakland, California School Board recognized Ebonics as a language. We begin our coverage with this report from Spencer Michels.

TEACHER: Ebonics is very simply an African language system on top of English lexicon.

SPENCER MICHELS: Oakland public schools, which are 53 percent African American, have a pilot program already in place to teach standard English proficiency to children who often talk a different language among themselves. That dialect or language system is sometimes called black English or Ebonics, a term coined by linguists in 1973 from the words "ebony" and "phonics." Ebonics uses different grammar, syntax, pronunciation, and slang.

CARRIE SECRET, Oakland Teacher: The verb "to be" does not really exist. So I be, you be, that stays, and many times it's not even in the sentence. Where your mama? She home. Those are strong features of the language I think that are misunderstood and considered ignorant speech when it is a very, very structured, structured language.

SPENCER MICHELS: Some Oakland teachers use Ebonics as a base from which to teach standard English.

TEACHER: Is slang bad?

STUDENTS: No.

SPENCER MICHELS: The school board wants to expand this program. So last month members passed a resolution they hoped would facilitate acquisition and mastery of English language skills. But they went further. They said African language systems are genetically based and not a dialect of English. They officially recognized the existence of Ebonics. And they called for a program for imparting instruction to African-American students in their primary language.

TEACHER: Is your teacher teaching you Ebonics in this classroom?

STUDENT: No. She's teaching us English because we already knew Ebonics when we first came here.

TEACHER: Oh.

SPENCER MICHELS: The resolution touched off a round of ridicule and criticism of the board for legitimizing and in some eyes actually teaching black English. Delaine Eastin is California schools chief.

DELAINE EASTIN, California Schools Superintendent: We think there are other proven approaches that Oakland should have studied first--cross-age tutoring, after school education programs for kids.

SPENCER MICHELS: Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson voiced his concerns on "Meet the Press."

REV. JESSE JACKSON: I understand the attempt to reach out to those children, but this is an unacceptable surrender borderlining on disgrace.

SPENCER MICHELS: Jackson's criticism stunned the Oakland School Board. They invited him to a meeting in the district, and they tried to clarify the resolution by adding to it, "We are not teaching Ebonics." School board President Toni Cook explained the policy.

TONI COOK, President, Oakland School Board: That we must ensure that our children master the English language, both reading, writing, and the speaking; and that our children already come to school with a language form, and since I'm not a linguist, it--some want to call it Ebonics; some want to call it African language system--my grandmother will probably just call it bad English. But it doesn't matter; that the kids come to us with this, and if we're going to bridge the gap from where the kids are to where we want them to go, that what we have to do is to make sure that our teachers have the right kind of training and the teaching strategies not to devalue the child.

SPENCER MICHELS: But there were differences between the board's intent and what it actually wrote which attracted all the attention. The resolution was confusing to some people because it appeared to legitimize Ebonics as a separate language.

SPENCER MICHELS: No language?

TONI COOK: No, we did not say that. The resolution does not say that. The--we did not say that as a board, it was not said at the press conference, and it was not said at the school board meeting.

SPENCER MICHELS: But that seemed to be what caused the trouble.

TONI COOK: Like I say, maybe we all got a few problems with standard English.

SPENCER MICHELS: As the furor over Ebonics continued, Jackson came to Oakland to mend fences. He and the board used the controversy and the attention it received to focus on the plight of black youth--one half born in poverty attending under-funded schools, making average grades of C-. The controversy over language remained.

REV. JESSE JACKSON: I think the essential confusion is a black language pattern when it gets elevating the pattern to a language. A language pattern is not a language. And the intent of the resolution is not to elevate a pattern to a language. Their intent, they say, is to detect, direct, and teach standard, competitive English.

SPENCER MICHELS: Did you essentially change your mind? Did you have a change of heart?

REV. JESSE JACKSON: I have not changed anything. The board clarified its intent. It's to teach standard American English; to qualify youth to go to school; to qualify them to make job applications. That's different than the first message--was that they're going to teach black English, which was a kind of a surrender, which was objectionable. It was like teaching down to our children, so people rejected that.

SPENCER MICHELS: On ABC's "Nightline" another black leader, Kweisi Mfume, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, admitted he too was confused by Oakland's original statement.

KWEISI MFUME, NAACP President: I must say that I am heartened to know that the school system in Oakland does not plan to teach Ebonics to young people because then I think it would be a cruel joke. There is within the larger African-American community and in other communities, there is dialect. So they are not languages. They are dialects, and they have always been there and probably will always be there. We have to find ways to bridge out of that into proper English, proper communicated skills, but we should not be prepared to call it a second language, or even a primary language. I think it is essentially a dialect.

SPENCER MICHELS: But the debate over dialect or separate language has gone far beyond that, according to University of California linguistics professor Robin Lakoff. She says whoever controls language has the power.

ROBIN LAKOFF, Linguistics Professor: The reason why this has stirred up the hornets' nest it has is that it's language being directly political; that it's language working as a political instrument, language allocating power. And one of the things that is an undercurrent here, being argued over, is whether speakers of black English have the right to use that language, whether their language has a legitimacy equal to that of standard white English.

SPENCER MICHELS: The Linguists Society of America meeting last Friday in Chicago agreed that the debate over language and dialect is being fought on social and political, rather than linguistic grounds. And while they supported the Oakland School Board position, 1,000 linguists called for more resources to be made available to teach standard English, a consensus position that seems to have emerged nationally out of this controversy.

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