The Pew Hispanic Center will release a report on Thursday that examines the role of schools in the achievement gap of the nation's four million English language learner public school students. Analyzing newly available standardized test data, the report finds that students designated as English language learners (ELL) tend to go to public schools with low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students. These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of characteristics associated generally with poor standardized test performance-such as high student-teacher ratios, high student enrollments and high levels of students who live in poverty or near poverty. When ELL students are not isolated in these low-achieving schools, their gap in test score results is considerably narrower.

Copies of the report will be available at 9:00 a.m.Thursday on the Center's website: www.pewhispanic.org.

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