Oakland School Superintendent Leaves Post

The school superintendent whose district prompted a national debate over ebonics announced her resignation Wednesday.

In a tearful news conference, Carolyn Getridge said she is leaving for a better job in the private sector, not because of past controversies.

“I have not regretted one day,” she said.

Getridge vaulted to the forefront of a national education debate last December when the Oakland school board passed a resolution recognizing “ebonics,” or black English, as a separate language.

The action drew the scorn of critics who declared that black English was slang and that recognizing it as anything more meant lowering standards for black students. But school officials said they were just looking for ways to reach black students, who make up about half of the district’s 52,000 enrollees and at the time of the resolution had a collective grade-point average of 1.8 on a scale of 4.

Much of the fury over Oakland’s original resolution focused on passages that declared black English to be genetically based and implied that it would be taught in schools.

In January, the board appeased some critics with revisions that dropped those two points. But it stuck to its contention that ebonics (a word formed from “ebony” and “phonics”) was “not merely” a dialect of English.

By May, the controversy was further defused by a final report that did not mention ebonics, focusing instead on such practical applications as expanding the state’s Standard English Program.

At the height of the ebonics debate, Getridge had been criticized by some for not foreseeing the furor that would break out. But she said Wednesday that the debate had its positive side.

“For the first time in years it really put on the radar screen discussions about what we need to do to address the needs of kids,” she said.

A 30-year veteran of the Oakland Unified School District, Getridge had been superintendent for three years. She is resigning Sept. 12 to become president for the Northern California region of Dallas-based Voyager Expanded Learning, a curriculum development company.

Getridge, who earned $130,000 a year, said her new job means being able to put quality lesson plans “into the hands of children across the country.”