Gap Cited in Awareness of Students' Home Languages

By Peter Schmidt

WASHINGTON--Teachers often do not know when students come from a home where a language other than English is spoken, a recently released federal study concludes.

The finding casts doubts on the adequacy of research and student-assessment mechanisms that rely heavily on teachers' judgments in examining language minorities, Denise S. Bradby, the report's author, said in an interview last week.

"If the teacher is deciding who is language-minority and who is not, that means a lot of students are being missed if the goal is to put everyone in a given program who has another language spoken in the home,'' said Ms. Bradby, who was contracted to do the study as a research associate at M.P.R....