Spontaneous speech performance of ethnically diverse children was investigated by linguistic measures and teacher evaluations. Interview data was collected from 144 elementary school children, comprising equal white, Chicano, and black subsamples evenly divided among lower and higher grades. Speech evaluators were 60 white teachers. Analyses focused on whether minority children were, or were perceived as, linguistically deficient compared with white age mates. Measures indicate that minority speech performance equalled or excelled white performance, but teachers heard it as significantly inferior. Two points are noted: (1) teachers did not hear Chicano-black speech differences which appeared in the objective measures, suggesting that their inability to discriminate properties of unfamiliar speech styles partially accounts for differences between objective and subjective outcomes. (2) The very regular patterning of minority evaluation and the reversal of age trends from objective to subjective measures, suggest that ethnic stereotyping was also at work in the results. The extent to which teacher unresponsiveness to minority ability in the younger grades is related to absence of objective performance gains in the older grades is not assessed here. However, it is held that there are many links between speech performance style and school success. (Author/AM)