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Most people-laymen, practitioners and researchers alike-seem to share a fundamental assumption about the effects of education on language proficiency: that in school we learn a superior version of our language, a version which affords greater opportunities for those of us who master it, a language form which increases our cognitive development. In other words, studying standard English in the US not only helps prepare students for higher education and greater access to high status jobs, it enables students to think more clearly, to better analyze, synthesize, evaluate, use logic, and so forth. The basis for this belief undoubtedly lies in the fact that only standard English is widely used in literacy in the US, where literacy is inextricably linked to academic development. Without standard English literacy, children are very much at a disadvantage in the US, not only socially and politically, but, according to this argument, also intellectually, because cognitive development can be fully realized only through the development of the school dialect. This argument has been elaborated by psychologists and other experts in the US and elsewhere for decades, and studies have been conducted to provide evidence to support it.

Hart and Risley (1995), psychologists who specialize in language development in early childhood, conducted a longitudinal study that showed that, prior to kindergarten, poor children are already so far behind in language development that there is no way they can ever catch up. Bereiter and Engelmann (1966), psychologists who have focused on ethnic influences on language development, reported that many African American children …