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Assessing English Language Learners

January 2, 2007

By the year 2010, over 30 percent of all school-age children will come from homes in which the primary language is not English. NCLB requires states to identify and test all English Language Learners in K-12 public schools. Although most states assess students’ English language proficiency and their placement into ESL or bilingual services, most commercially available tests do not meet the stringent requirements of NCLB. WCER’s World-class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) Consortium designs and implements standards and educational opportunities for English language learners. The WIDA Standards encompass five English language proficiency standards and more than 800 accompanying model performance indicators. The consortium includes 15 partner states accounting for about 400,000 ELLs in K-12 in about 2800 school districts. More information is available here.