Original sentence: Despite the clear linguistic evidence, the American public and policymakers remain divided over whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate dialect of English, perhaps due to beliefs that AAVE is a degradation of English.Supporters of the resolution later claimed that "genetically" was not a racial or biological term but a linguistic one (53).Teachers were encouraged to accept the idea that the errors in Standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, and indeed were not errors at all but instead were features of a grammatically distinct form of English (53).The underlying belief is that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers were to accept that AAVE is not a substandard version of standard American English but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciation norms
Edited sentence: Despite the clear linguistic evidence, the American public and policymakers remain divided over whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate dialect of English, perhaps due to unfounded beliefs that AAVE is a degradation of English.Supporters of the resolution later clarified that "genetically" was not a racial or biological term but a linguistic one (53).Teachers were encouraged to recognize that the "errors" in Standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, and indeed were not errors at all but instead were features of a grammatically distinct form of English (53).The underlying belief is that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers acknowledged that AAVE was not a substandard version of standard American English but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciation norms