For example, the recently-implemented Common Core Standards state that students need to “appreciate that the twenty-first-century classroom and workplace are settings in which people from often widely divergent cultures and who represent diverse experiences and perspectives must learn and work together…[and be] able to communicate effectively with people of varied backgrounds.”

All too often, what happens is something like this story I heard from a math teacher in a first grade classroom, “One of the kids, an African American kid, was playing a game and he said, ‘I don’t got no dice.’ He didn’t have the materials he needed. And the teacher said, ‘You know, Joshua, we speak English in this class.’ Really harshly. And I just thought, oh gosh. There must be a better way to respond.”

It’s even in our media: As the linguist Rosina Lippi-Green points out, the way that cartoon characters speak, like the Lion King’s hyenas or Shrek’s donkey, reinforces our racial and linguistic stereotypes, encouraging kids to think of their classmates who sound like Simba or Shrek as “good guys,” people who sound like the hyenas as “bad guys,” and people who sound like Donkey as buffoons.

First of all, let’s lay to rest this idea that English—or any language—has one dialect that’s just right and a whole bunch of others that are wrong.

what the linguist William Labov calls linguistic insecurity—would make it disheartening to try and learn higher skills like math and reading when you’re told you’re wrong as soon as you even open your mouth.

Even by the end of kindergarten, many students have absorbed messages that their language is wrong, incorrect, dumb, or stigmatized.