As a “regular-level” English teacher in a very diverse high school, I made a point to refer any student to honors classes who demonstrated the desire and basic ability to pursue a more challenging class. I would, to my colleagues’ dismay, recommend students to honors who still wrote and spoke in dialect (instead of “standard” English) as long as they were strong readers, interested in literature and discussion, and wanted a challenge. Kids are in school to learn, so they could continue their pursuit of code-switching in an honors class, as far as I was concerned.

The sad fact is, that most of our schools are already segregated *economically* (and thus often racially) before class placement decisions are made. It’s rare in metro Atlanta to find a public school with true diversity; most are predominately white or black. Many private schools’ demographics are the same.

I taught in a North Fulton high school where student often came from private middle schools. More than one parent said they chose that high school because they wanted their children “to experience the diversity of people they would encounter in their daily adult lives.” They were wrong on two counts: one, these former private school kids experienced most of this “diversity” during the five minutes between classes; two, most adults have friends and colleagues who share similar backgrounds, so they seldom find diversity there either.

I used to invite discussions of racial issues with my students, who tended to be black and Latino more often than white. We certainly didn’t solve the world’s problems, but students recognized the problems and began thinking about and discussing solutions.