The provision of quality-differentiated instruction requisite for educational success is dependent on the implementation of timely differentiated placement procedures. Studies indicate that despite a plethora of ¿research based¿ educational tools and substantial funding, ¿language minority¿ (LM) students who fail to successfully exit enrichment programs for ELLs within three to four years are growing in number and have the highest dropout rates and lowest reading test scores. These Long Term LM students have oral fluency, but serious motivational and ¿literacy issues¿. Conversely, ELLs who are more recent arrivals require work focused on ¿linguistic issues¿, i.e. basic vocabulary building and the development of oral language skills. In order to provide meaningful differentiated instruction, we need greater quality control and differentiation in the placement process. Our research aims to identify placement practices of representative high schools and link them to resulting classroom constituencies and instructional practices/curriculum through the use of available data, surveys, and interviews with teachers and local administrative personnel. We will then review literature that promotes best practices for identifiable ELL subgroups with a view to isolate some of the classroom issues that arise from the undifferentiated grouping together of students with distinct instructional needs.
