Toni Cook 1944–

Policy director, program administrator

Toni Cook has spent much of her career working in the public sector. The daughter of a dentist and a linguist with the National Security Agency, she was born in Denver, Colorado. Cook spent her early childhood in Oklahoma City before moving to Washington, D.C. during high school. She began college in North Carolina, but only attended for one year. Five years later, married and with two daughters, Cook resumed her education at UCLA. Despite the challenges of combining parenting and schooling, she graduated with honors in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in history. She continued her studies at UCLA as a graduate student in urban planning, and graduated with distinction in 1973.

Recruited to Work in DC

Because of her excellent academic record, Cook was nominated for the White House Fellowship program. She was named a finalist, and her application attracted the attention of officials at the Department of Human Resources, who recruited her as a senior program planner. Cook moved back to the East Coast and took a job working on the initial Medicaid plan for the District of Columbia. Her job required her to coordinate efforts among many agencies, both public and private.

Cook’s next major position as a program director was also in the District of Columbia. She worked for Mayor Marion Berry’s office, and was responsible for implementing a public safety plan. The plan required Cook to establish liaisons among public sector agencies, community organizations, and private and academic agencies.

Worked as Presidential Advance

At the same time that Cook was working in the public sector as a policy director, she became involved in electoral politics. In 1976, she went to work for Jimmy Carter’s election campaign as his presidential advance. Cook was the first African American woman to act as national advance for a presidential candidate. Several years later, she worked as presidential advance during Jessie Jackson’s campaign for the presidency.

By this point in her career, Cook was recognized as a

At a Glance…

Born in Denver, Colorado in 1944; divorced; children: Leslie, Arlene. Education: University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), BA in history (cum laude), 1970, MA in urban planning (with distinction), 1973.

Career: Executive assistant, Office of Planning, District of Columbia, 1976-79; deputy director, Office of Criminal Justice Plans and Analysis, District of Columbia, 1979-81; associate dean, School of Architecture and Planning, Howard University, 1981-84; chief of staff, Councilman Robert C. Farrell, Los Angeles City Council, 1984-05; executive director, Bay Area Black Unified Fund, 1985-89; senior policy advisor, Mayor Elihu M. Harris, City of Oakland, 1989-90; senior policy consultant, Prescott Revitalization Project, 1990-93; political/legislative director, SEIU Local 250, Health Care Worker’s Union, 1993-95; principal education consultant, Sobrante Park Consortium, 1994-95; director, HOPE VI, San Francisco Housing Authority, 1995-97; member, Oakland Board of Education, 1990-98; project manager for African American Literacy and Culture Research Project, 1999-.

Awards: National Finalist, White House Fellows Program, 1973; Sojourner Truth Leadership Award, Oakland Alliance of Black School Educators, 1997; Outstanding Leadership, Congressional Black Caucus, 1998; Resolution of Commendation, Oakland Board of Education, 1998.

Addresses: Home—Oakland, CA.

person who could manage programs and coordinate projects that involved a variety of agencies. Her next major appointment was not in the public sector, but in education. She became associate dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1981. Cook began to develop a new talent as a successful writer of grants. One of the grants she secured for Howard was a $50,000 planning grant that led to the development of Howard’s Center for the Study of Urban Policy.

Cook’s next position took her back to California, where she worked as Robert C. Farrell’s chief of staff for the Los Angeles City Council in 1984. After that, her career took a strong turn towards community-based programs. The projects she worked on during this period had a common theme, developing structures to integrate all the services offered to members of a community. These included educational, family, and health services.

While Cook was working on a project to provide neighborhood-based services for the West Oakland neighborhood of Prescott, the mayor of Oakland asked her to run for the school board of Oakland from her district. She did, and was elected to the school board in 1990. In 1993, Cook was elected president of the school board and, one year later, was reelected to a second term.

Sparked Ebonics Controversy

As a school board member, one issue that concerned Cook was the distressing status of African American students in the Oakland school system. The Oakland school system in 1996 was slightly more than 50 percent African American. However, the performance of African American students in the school system was below par. Sixty-four percent of the students who were held back at the end of a school year were African American. Approximately one out of five African American seniors did not graduate, and the grade point average for African American students was the lowest for any ethnic group. Furthermore, African American students comprised only 37 percent of the students enrolled in classes for the gifted. Conversely, 71 percent of the students in special education programs were African American.

Deeply concerned by these statistics, Cook asked the superintendent of the school district to form a task force to look at the performance of African American students in Oakland, and make recommendations for educational programs that would boost their achievement. A community-based task force met for approximately eight months to look at the issue and suggest possible remedies. The task force presented its recommendations to the school board in December of 1996. The task force recommendations were for the expansion of a program called the Standard English Proficiency (SEP) program. This program involves instructing teachers about the characteristics of African American dialect (called “Ebonics” in the resolution, a word that combines the words ebony and phonics to make a coined word that means “black sounds”). The program also promotes strategies that teach students standard English without attacking or belittling their home dialect.

The SEP program was not a new phenomenon. It had been available in California and used in the Oakland school district since 1981. Teachers could participate in the program on a voluntary basis. The program uses an approach that is common in countries where a large population speaks a non-standard dialect. Students are led to analyze both their home dialect and the more accepted standard language, and study the situations in which each is appropriate. Such programs are designed to help persons who speak non-standard dialects to read, write and speak a standard dialect more quickly and effectively. The task force resolution stated its aim clearly. The first of its nine recommendations stated, “African American students shall develop English language proficiency as the foundation for their achievements in all core competency areas.”

Within hours of the proposal having passed, it became national news. News headlines across the country screamed that the Oakland Unified School District was planning to teach Ebonics to its students, that the school district was planning to apply for federal funds for bilingual education for its African American students, and that the Oakland school district had declared that Ebonics was a separate language. Cook was shocked by the media backlash. The resolution had been a small agenda item at a meeting that was mostly concerned with that year’s budget. Cook arrived home from the meeting at 2:00 AM, and was planning to take a day off from her job at the San Francisco Housing Authority. However, the mayor of Oakland called and told her that irate citizens were accusing him of planning to teach Ebonics to school children.

For the next several weeks, Ebonics was debated on radio talk shows, in the columns of newspapers and news magazines, and on television. Cook and other board members found themselves repeating over and over what the proposal had really said. Cook was quoted in Newsweek as saying, “African-American students come to school with a home language other than English. We’re going to bridge that gap and make sure our children learn.”

Despite the fact that the resolution said nothing about teaching Ebonics to students, most media outlets continued to report that this was the case. The superintendent of the Oakland school district and other board members issued statements trying to correct this misinformation, but to no avail. Some of the controversy, to be sure, was fueled by unclear wording in the initial resolution. However, other factors were more subtle and divisive. In a speech at the Third National Conference on Urban Issues in Florida three months after the Ebonics story became public, Cook presented the view that the huge reaction was a reflection of American fears of cultural diversity. She was quoted in the Miami Herald as saying, “The Ebonics controversy was a horrible face-to-face reminder that we have a long way to go on the issue of race and African Americans in this country.”

In 1999, Cook undertook management of a project that was a direct result of the Ebonics controversy. She agreed to manage the African American Literacy and Culture Research Project, a two-year investigation into the relationship between African American language and culture and the development of the ability to read and write. This study is designed to devise strategies that promote the achievement of African American students, and may provide a positive outcome to the Ebonics debate.

Sources

Periodicals

Black Issues in Higher Education, January 23, 1997, p. 18.

Jet, January 27, 1997, p. 12.

The Miami Herald, Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, March 26, 1997.

Newsweek, Jan 13, 1997, p.78.

San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 1997.

Other

Additional information for this profile was obtained from the Oakland Unified School District website at http://bex.ousd.k12.ca.us, a press release posted online at the same website, and an interview with CBB on September 27, 1999.

—Rory Donnelly