California is on a mission to ensure English learners receive the support they need to be successful, without testing children too early.
In 2024, the state’s universal pre-K program for 4-year-olds—called transitional kindergarten—administered the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC), the same screener used to formally identify English learners in the K-12 system, to its participants.
But concerns emerged that the ELPAC was not designed for young learners, who may not yet have developed the writing, speaking, and reading skills the test assesses.
“Students were being flagged as English learners at a much higher rate than when they were assessed later,” said Sarah Novicoff, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, during a recent Education Week webinar. “There was a lot of speculation about why, but the most popular explanation was that the test being used was not developmentally appropriate for that age group and had not been validated [or] designed with 4-year-olds in mind.”
Now, the state defers the formal designation of a student as an English learner to kindergarten, and is rolling out two new screening tools to its transitional kindergarten classrooms that focus more on play and storytelling than formal testing.
During the recent webinar, Novicoff, along with Alesha Moreno-Ramirez, the director of the California Department of Education’s multilingual support division, and Thomas Dee, the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, discussed the switch to play-based screeners, how they work, the risks of misidentifying students, and concerns about how the state will monitor implementation and progress.
California switched to play-based screeners to measure age-appropriate skills
This school year, some California transitional kindergarten providers will pilot a more developmentally appropriate assessment to measure language skills, and the state plans to implement screeners more widely by the 2027-28 school year.
The new assessments use games and manipulative toys to help guide one-on-one conversations between a student and a teacher. They don’t test children’s reading or writing skills, and they don’t use paper and pencil or computer screens.
“It really is about that interpersonal engagement, so that educators have the clearest sense of how this child is utilizing language,” Moreno-Ramirez said
In contrast, the screener used for older students, the ELPAC, might ask a student to identify the first letter of a word or write it on a page.
“While that may be reasonable for an English-speaking 5-year-old, that’s a higher expectation for a 4-year-old, regardless of language proficiency,” Novicoff said.
The new screeners do not formally identify children as English learners in transitional kindergarten, but officials hope they will give both early-childhood educators and pre-K teachers insight into children’s language needs heading into K-12, Moreno-Ramirez said.
One screener, IPT Early Childhood, uses a colorful storyboard and interactive pieces to assess children’s understanding through storytelling. An examiner reads a story in small chunks and asks the student periodic questions.
The other, preLAS, uses colorful pictures to engage children. In one section, a teacher points to photos of eyes and ears, then asks the child to point to their own.
Misidentifying students as English learners has consequences
Misidentification can divert instructional time and resources from the students who most need it, limit the misidentified students’ access to rich academic content, affect their honors or advanced-course enrollment, and lower students’ self-esteem because English learner status can be “sticky” and difficult to remove, Novicoff said.
“If a student needs English learner support, then them receiving it is a phenomenal use of time and resources,” she said. “But if a student doesn’t need that support, then them receiving it is making it less likely that they might be receiving other things that they need or would enjoy or would get something out of.”
To be reclassified from English learner status, students often have to meet multiple benchmarks, she noted. Sometimes, those measures can be difficult for a student to reach in general, regardless of their language needs.
Providing English language support services can also be costly to districts, Dee added, so getting identification right ensures schools are spending money effectively.
“Misalignment of service is a misuse of scarce district resources,” he said.
Plans to monitor implementation and efficacy received mixed reviews
The California Department of Education plans to survey districts about which screeners they use and may examine results over time, Moreno-Ramirez said. There are no formal data reporting requirements for districts.
Dee said he would like to also see data collected about how administering the screeners benefits children over time and whether it improves their learning trajectories. That would allow the state to better monitor progress over time and make adjustments, if needed, either to the screeners themselves or to the supportive services students receive.
“Where the rubber really meets the road involves what do teachers do once they get this information, and I think just monitoring what screeners districts are using isn’t going to get us there,” Dee said.
Multilingualism should be treated as an asset, not a deficit
When schools are screening and assessing students’ language needs, regardless of their age, they should reiterate to the child and their family that multilingualism is “an important part of a child’s identity, of their educational trajectory, and an asset,” Moreno-Ramirez said.
Communicating to families that a school values the student’s home or primary language and wants to support its development alongside English can build trust, she added.
Some research has shown that as bilingual students advance through their K-12 education, they often attain higher levels of English proficiency than monolingual peers, report better academic outcomes overall, and benefit from an advantage of linguistic and cognitive competencies.
“We want to carry the languages that students have from their home experience into their education because they can be levers for educational success,” she said.
The full webinar is available to watch on demand here.
Caitlynn Peetz Stephens is a reporter for Education Week who covers special education and school district management.