Recently, I had the opportunity to visit P.S. 25, a bilingual elementary and middle school in the Bronx. I observed a classroom in which students were conducting an experiment classifying rocks. As I watched them excitedly scratch the rocks with their pencils, measure them with rulers, and then dutifully record their results and identifications in the charts and tables on their science worksheets, I thought about the ways in which they themselves were classified according to school, state, and federal systems.

P.S. 25 is eighty-nine percent Latino, with twenty-eight percent of the students classified as "Limited English Proficient" as opposed to the statewide seven percent. Both English-only and bilingual classrooms exist at the school. The bilingual classrooms at P.S. 25 are self-contained, and practice dual-language instruction in English and Spanish - one of many ways that a bilingual classroom can be run.

In recent years, however, schools like P.S. 25 have become more limited in the ways that they can teach English language learners. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the federal government changed the twenty-seven-year-old Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA) to the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). Students were no longer English Language Learners, but Limited English Proficient. These name changes were indicative of the attitudinal shift regarding bilingual education. Whereas OBEMLA offered bilingual education grants for states, schools, and teachers to improve their specific programs, OELA standardized the system and reoriented the focus from bilingual education to English language instruction, often at the expense of content area instruction. As a result, many students learn English without context, and actually have more trouble acquiring proficiency in English and difficulty in applying English language skills to other areas of their lives.

In the same way that test-based curriculum standards can constrict views of what constitutes a true assessment of comprehension, the hegemony of certain modes of communication in our society can blind us to the rich and varied perspectives that other languages and systems of expression have to offer. Knowledge of "Standard English" is vital to functioning in our society, but we must not succumb to the fallacy of assuming that "Standard English" is the inherently "correct" mode of communication. The myopic view of language that contributes to classrooms where students' home languages and cultures are completely ignored or undermined marginalizes those students and instills both in them and their educators a sense that their culture is something embarrassing or inferior, something that needs to be "fixed."

Educational theorist Lisa Delpit discusses language and narrative modes in terms of cultural relativism, through her observation of black students whose episodic narratives met with criticism from white teachers for their "incoherence" and praise from black teachers for their "details and descriptions." The children were adapting the texts presented to them to the narrative modes of their cultural backgrounds, Delpit concludes, and it was the cultural gap that contributed to the opposing assessments. Their teachers' dismissal of their stories as underdeveloped exhibited a limited definition of "proper" communication and expression, a view that precluded them from seeing the value in the children's narratives. Sociologist Angela Valenzuela attributes deterioration of teacher-student relations to this myopia. She observes teachers at Segun High School in Houston, Texas, which has a nearly all-Mexican student body. Just as the teachers in Delpit's study focused on pronunciation skills to the detriment of real reading comprehension, the teachers at Segun made superficial judgments about their students based on their way of dressing and speaking, rather than focusing on the real factors of motivation (and de-motivation) at the school. The assumptions led to a self-perpetuating animosity between teachers and students. Valenzuela attributes this prejudice to a pedagogical emphasis on "aesthetic caring," that is, an image of student interest that depends more on students' self-drive than the teacher's involvement. She offers the alternative of "authentic caring" that depends on the teacher's true interest in the students' welfares.

As the child of immigrants, my parents, under the implicit pressure of a society in many ways set against non-native English speakers, encouraged me to speak exclusively in English as soon as I started school. While their concern for my ability to succeed in a monolingual classroom contributed to my fluency in English, I have often wished that I had not lost the bilingualism that I had had before I started school. The idea of a two-way bilingual classroom, in which native English speakers and speakers of minority languages learn each others' languages in the same classroom, thus has a real resonance for me. I still wonder about the limitations of such a classroom: how can schools attract enough bilingual teachers to make this idea sustainable? And will students who are English language learners, but the only speakers of their language at the school, be marginalized even in a bilingual classroom?

However, perhaps any efforts to move away from a model in which students are classified as "limited" would be a step in the right direction. In an increasingly globalized world, it becomes necessary for both teachers and students to know that there are many ways of expression and to recognize that diversity in a positive manner. Cultural literacy goes both ways.