Language Provision in NCLB Draft Plan Criticized

Educators and representatives of groups that follow issues involving English-language learners raised practical concerns last week about how a draft plan to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act would affect those students.

Particularly troublesome, they said, is a proposal in the “staff discussion draft” released by the House Education and Labor Committee to require states with more than 10 percent of ELLs who share the same language to create native-language assessments for that language group.

At the least, most states would have to come up with new tests for reading and mathematics in Spanish. Fewer than a dozen states have developed such tests. Such a requirement could also force certain states to come up with assessments in far less common languages—Hmong, in Wisconsin, for example, or...