This site is developed and maintained by Kenji Hakuta and his graduate students at Stanford University School of Education. The main purpose is to serve as the basic knowledge base for the professional development of teachers serving English learners, with a special emphasis on California. The reason for this perspective is that I am in the process of developing Stanford courses that lead to the California CLAD (Crosscultural Language and Academic Development) credential, in collaboration with Teachscape, Inc., whose mission is to provide on-line, on-demand video case-based training to teachers located anywhere with access to a web browser. While full participation in these courses for credit will be on a subscriber basis, this website will make available all text and web-linked information that I am gathering in the process for general use.

This site is named after the landmark 1974 U. S. Supreme Court case, Lau v. Nichols, which ruled on the basis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that schools and districts have a responsibility to respond affirmatively to meet the needs of English learners, and that failure to take action -- sink or swim -- would be in violation of their civil rights. In an unanimous decision, the justices wrote: "there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education."

The structure of this site is guided in part by a further court case, Castañeda v. Pickard (U. S. 5th circuit) that helped interpret what is meant by taking appropriate action in meeting the needs of English learners, known as the Castañeda standards. The ruling set forth three explicit prongs:

1. that the system should be based on "sound educational theory";
2. that the system should be implemented with adequate resources; and
3. that the program should be evaluated after a period of time to determine whether it is effective in meeting the needs of English learners.

An implicit fourth prong is that if the results are not adequate, the implementation or the theory should be re-examined.

The Castañeda principles thus guide the primary structure of this site: THEORY, IMPLEMENTATION and EVALUATION. Now, this may not exactly sound like rocket science but in my opinion, it is a highly rational move by the courts to stay out of the business of prescribing theory, yet still retain the ability to assert that theory, practice, and data about effectiveness are important. I like it because it gives advocates, educators, and researchers a chance to join together in serving the needs of students. We can ask: what's the theory, and just how good is that theory? How are we doing with training and recruiting teachers who can implement the theory? Are we doing a good job of monitoring how the students are doing? And perhaps most importantly (the fourth prong), what are we doing to improve the system? And the legal framework gives it some teeth.

Four major context factors that impact the operation of this system are given their own pages: LAWS/POLICIES, POLITICS, LANGUAGE, and CULTURE. Each of these have arenas has a life of its own but exert strong influence on the implementation of programs for English learners. The pages highlight selective issues in the practice and scholarship within these domains and make explicit their bearing on the main themes of this website.  While these four context factors, as well as the three standards and the sub-categories on this website are very quantifiable and provide a rubric for analysis, in actual practice, theory, standards, instruction and assessment are integrated.  The interaction of their various aspects is very complex and worth our attention.

Finally, another notable bias of this site is in its prominent feature of standards-based reform (SBR) as the main engine of educational reform activity in the United States. The key claim of SBR is in the importance of aligning the education system -- especially the curriculum, teacher professional development, and system accounting and incentives around high standards. For English learners, this system must provide adequate resources and opportunity to learn English as well as the standard content domains. Since the early 90's when I first received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to head a group to make legislative recommendations on the inclusion of English learners in SBR (the group came to be known as the "Stanford Working Group"), I have been trying to place English learners within this general approach to educational improvement. If the movement were not already started and moving with considerable pace and longevity, I may not have gravitated to this. But my gravitation to this is based on the belief that the train is moving, and that English learners need to be placed in the context of that movement if they are to profit from it and avoid unintended harm. All of this is to explain why the concepts like STANDARDS, TEACHER EDUCATION, ASSESSMENT and ACCOUNTABILITY figure prominently.