At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the This study demonstrates how, in the light of the deficit/difference debate, linguists and educators still face the same issue: although non-standard English (and in this case African American English) varieties appear to be linguistically adequate for scholastic performance, there remains a primacy of middle-class linguistic structures and language behaviors, supported by the No Child Left Behind education policy in the United States, devaluing non-standard home language varieties and maintaining a cycle of educational failure for working-class children.