The way some African American children speak when they show up in American schools is so different from standard English that teachers often can't understand what they are saying. These children perform poorly in school and typically fail to acquire the ways of speaking that they'll need in order to succeed in the world outside their neighborhoods. Schools have traditionally treated the speech of these children as bad English, "street slang" and "poor grammar". But,on December 18, 1996, the Oakland Unified School District Board of Education adopted a policy on Standard American English dev…
