Brown Bag Seminar: ELLs and the Common Core Standards

Since 2010 states have been engaged in a concerted effort to develop the Common Core State Standards. These standards—adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia so far—are a broad set of curriculum guidelines on what American students need to know before entering college or the workplace.

Some researchers are focusing on how the needs of English Language Learners (ELLs) will be considered in the creation of new assessments aligned with the Common Core standards. This is a concern of substance as ELLs are the fastest-growing group of students in American public schools as well as one of the lowest achieving. Among researchers focusing on this issue is Stanford University Professor Kenji Hakuta, who is co-chairing a national initiative to ensure that standards and assessments are attuned to the language needs that students require to succeed. Hakuta will discuss the current challenges and opportunities created by the Common Core initiative in the context of the history of efforts to include ELLs in educational reform efforts originating in civil rights laws.

Biography

Kenji Hakuta is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford and a SCOPE affiliated scholar. An experimental psycholinguist by training, he is best known for his work in the areas of bilingualism and the acquisition of English in immigrant students. He has been at Stanford since 1989, except for three years (2003–2006) when he helped launch the University of California, Merced, as its Founding Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. He is the author of numerous research papers and books, including Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism (Basic Books, 1986) and In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition (Basic Books, 1994). He chaired a National Academy of Sciences report Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children (National Academy Press), and co-edited a book on affirmative action in higher education, Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education (Stanford University Press). Full bio.