Lau Plans and Rural ML-EL Education: Self-Assessment as a Tool to Support Educational Equity
October 01, 2025

Over the past three decades, the K-12 multilingual English learner (ML-EL) population has grown both numerically and geographically; over three-quarters of public schools now enroll ML-EL students. Districts new to serving ML-ELs often struggle to develop the systems, structures, and policies necessary to comply with federal guidelines governing EL education.
As researchers and practitioners working in a largely rural context, we were motivated to develop a tool to guide our state’s “new-to-EL-education” leaders in developing sound, effective, evidence-based systems and structures for their EL programs.
In this essay, we present a free, openly accessible tool developed to guide district and EL leaders in creating and building the infrastructure necessary to ensure an equitable, effective education for ML-EL students.
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