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This article presents the author's critique of "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL), a resolution affirming the legitimacy of dialect from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). "Students' Right to Their Own Language" remains the official position statement of the guild of college compositionists on dialect difference, lionized to this day as a first principle of "liberatory" English teaching. The sound, kind impulse behind SRTOL was to support the aspirations of poor, nonwhite, and culturally marginalized students. The document itself, however, offered underachievement and provincialism to the students it purported to serve. Even its advocates concede that SRTOL reads as committee prose with the different hands not smoothly blended, but no one has said firmly enough, or demonstrated patiently enough, how little sense SRTOL makes. The author's critique develops six points, all with wide-ranging importance for English education, and more generally for U.S. education, today. STROL (1) never begins to examine a "right" to one's own language; (2) offers no consistent view on the importance of dialect; (3) wildly overrates its "sophisticated" knowledge in sociology and linguistics; (4) both draws on and feeds into a reactionary politics of ethnic-cultural chauvinism; (5) clumps people into homogeneous, internally undifferentiated groups, missing individuals (in particular, individual student-writers) entirely; and (6) tries to shame English teachers for professional work of which one should be proud. Here, the author shows that SRTOL is a shameful piece of work whose ongoing endorsement warps and stains language education in the United States.

Discusses the ethics and pragmatics of the practice of schools in the United States of denying students a diploma unless they pass high-stakes testing in up to five academic areas. Arguments for educational standards reform and high-stakes student assessments; Impact of the practice on students and children of color; Arguments against high-stakes testing.

Focuses on the National Council of Teachers English/International Reading Association's (NCTE/IRA) Standards for the English Language Arts. Importance of formal standard English to education; Necessity of having a working knowledge of the systems and structures of languages; Attempts to reinvent English teaching; How the standards will benefit students.

Comments on the Reading Report Card released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress on September 1993. Imitation of the clumsy packaging of the Educational Testing Service; Masking of cognitively dissimilar performances; Registration of poor scores by minority and socially-disadvantaged groups.