Teaching outside one's race: the story of an Oakland teacher

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2004 by Bree Picower

   Against the backdrop of this dismal
   picture of school failure, the
   above average performance of
   African-American students at the
   Prescott Elementary School caught
   the attention of the task force
   members. Prescott Elementary was
   the only school in the Oakland
   school district where the majority
   of its teachers had voluntarily chosen
   to participate in the Standard
   English Proficiency (SEP). This
   statewide initiative, begun in
   1981, acknowledges the systematic,
   rule-governed nature of Black
   English and takes the position that
   this language should be used to
   help children learn to read and
   write in Standard English. (p. xi)

It was Prescott's success with teaching African American children that motivated the district to adopt SEP, igniting the flames of the media across the country. A great deal of research has been done to document the way in which the media misrepresented the District's decision to use SEP to improve the achievement gap. (4) Rickford and Rickford (2000) carefully analyze the events around the school board's adoption of SEP and the media's reaction to it. "The Oakland school board never intended to replace the teaching of Standard or mainstream English with the teaching of Ebonics, or Spoken Soul. But it did intend to take the vernacular into account in helping students achieve mastery of Standard English (reading and writing in this variety in particular)" (p.176). In Rethinking Schools, Carrie Secret explained, "There's a misconception of the program, created by the media blitz of misinformation. Our mission was and continues to be: embrace and respect Ebonics, the home language of many of our students, and use strategies that will move them to a competency level in English. We never had, nor do we now have, any intention of teaching the home language to students. They come to us speaking the language" (p.81).

STAFF DEVELOPMENT AT PRESCOTT

The strategies that Carrie referred to and used were developed under the leadership of Wade Nobles at the Center For Applied Cultural Studies and Educational Achievement (CACSEA) at San Francisco State University. It was through this center that the SEP program adopted by the Oakland Unified School District was created. At a staff meeting early on at my time at Prescott, I received a CACSEA document, "Utilizing Culture in the Achievement of Educational Excellence for African American Students" (Nobles). Referencing research by Boykin, Foster, and Ladson-Billings, CACSEA laid out nine cultural precepts, nine recurring cultural themes, and effective instructional strategies for educating African American students. CACSEA developed a program called "Nsaka Sunsum (Touching the Spirit): Educational Process for Achieving Educational Excellence with African American Students" (Olson, 2001) that was used as the basis for Prescott's professional development throughout my time there. Although the SEP program had officially ended due to the national controversy by the time I started teaching, we were still trained to use SEP strategies because of Prescott's deep belief that this was the right kind of education for our students.