Breaking the “Standard English” Barrier: Impacts

Perhaps one of the most dangerous forms in which discrimination manifests is in an unconscious manner not considered discrimination at all. In education particularly, one of the most alienating - and yet commonplace forms of inaccessibility is an ever-commonly underlooked factor that has all the same grown to become a major disparity - the effective classroom requirement of “standard English.”

From an analytical standpoint, children develop linguistic abilities most rapidly during their toddler and preschool years, in which they form the foundations for acquiring a full vocabulary. According to a 2020 NIH study, such things are most primarily dependent on context - where a child is born is crucial in this first stage, as languages acquired early on from the environment around them shape the direction of their very learning capacities onwards. A child speaking English will, clearly, be able to access typical American schooling with much more intuition than one brought up around, for example, Spanish or Mandarin. 

After this core stage of initial development, learning languages becomes a much more difficult task alongside taking in broader curriculums. As students already develop knowledge regarding other topics all founded on a baseline of English, non-English speakers still going through the stage of understanding the language itself will often underperform due to simply lacking constant exposure to it. The further a student gets without consistent submersion in English, such as switching into a monolingual American learning environment after years of being taught in a different language, the more difficult it will get for them to effectively take in information. All of this, furthermore, is ignoring potential ethical concerns that may simultaneously arise: the dangers of attempted cultural assimilation, for one, the threat of potentially othering those who do not conform linguistically, and plenty of other moral flaws.

Simply put, an educational approach that primarily promotes standard English suffers from central systemic flaws. With growth in increasingly more cultural diversity across the United States, and many children not learning English as a first option, maintaining curriculums entirely based around one language becomes not just simply discriminating but furthermore completely impractical. As such an issue grows from being sidelined to receiving mainstream coverage, teachers - and all those seeking to support students, including nonprofits like WritetoRight, must understand and prepare to work beyond the narrow confines of standard English alone.