There is no equity
of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities,
textbooks, teacher and curriculum; for students who do not
understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful
Lau vs. Nichols , US Supreme Court
414 U.S. 563 (1997) (USSC+).
The Language Minority Assessment Project is a Lesley University
Initiative in collaboration with the Lowell Public Schools
and funded with a grant from the US Department of Education.
The primary focus of this action research project is on the
development of a process to explore the influence of linguistic
and cultural factors in classroom reading assessment for grades
one and two. The languages selected for this project are Khmer,
Portuguese and Spanish,
because these are the three most spoken languages by the students
in the Lowell Public Schools in Massachusetts.