beyond the pail

[Mai Kuha]

Today a student in my class mentioned that her children lose points on
schoolwork because one vocabulary item that keeps coming up on tests and in
other teaching materials is "pail", and the word the children know,
"bucket", is marked as wrong. Of course we are all aware that it's been
established that the educational system's reaction to nonstandard linguistic
features sometimes doesn't fit the stated goals of testing, but this is the
first time I've heard of discrimination on the basis of *regional* features.
Does this happen often? If so, should we (or someone else) try to do
something about it?

-Mai (in Muncie, IN)