Teaching to Diversity

Education, politics and society have all entered into the classroom and the effects of this can not only affect the way we teach our students but how students learn.
When we look over the history of education and how greatly it has been affected by issues such as society and politics, we can rationalize how our current education is affected by outside forces.
Currently are classrooms are teaching towards ACTs and No Child Left Behind, but these are really just teaching our students how to take tests. What lifelong skills are we empowering our students with? How to determine what is the best multiple choice answer. More importantly, the way in which we are teaching our students is taking away from all cultural beauty instilled in them from birth.
Our students enter into the educational system with an education from the family. They have an understanding of wrong from right, relationships, and most importantly, family is who taught them their language thus far. Once in the school system, it is crucial to determine whether we are completely crushing everything they have learned so far or are we building on it?
Take for instance the current debate over Black English entering the classroom of Standard English. English teachers spend years and years teaching us the “correct” way to read, write and the correct way must be used to achieve great things in life. No student ever got an A+ on a paper written in slang and you will never get the job talking that way either. We must learn the grammatical rules to achieve a great grade and then we must take our new language into the world. What are these teachers really teaching us? Our way in learning in the home is completely wrong and we must enter the educational way of Standard English to succeed. Maybe the important question is not whether what they are teaching us is really necessary, but rather how they are teaching us.
The use of Black English in completely unacceptable in the classroom. Many teachers will follow these guidelines until the day they die but maybe what is more practical is guiding students on how to learn and use a multitude of dialects. Many of us, whether black, white or green, have a home language, one used with friends and one used in the classroom. If we were to spend more time embracing the education we are taught in the household, building on it and empowering students to use all of their dialects, we would truly be building lifelong skills.