As the new school year gets underway, millions of multilingual learners (MLLs) are learning in classrooms across the country. They’re among the fastest-growing student populations in the U.S., and 67% of MLLs are in grades K-5. Research shows the importance of giving every student access to grade-level content while integrating language development. This is especially important for young multilingual learners as they build foundational literacy and math skills.

Yet many educators still lack the materials they need. A recent RAND survey found that less than one-third of teachers serving MLLs reported having adequate materials to help these students master state standards and language across subjects, highlighting the urgent need to ensure young MLLs have access to high-quality curriculum and instruction.

EdReports is committed to helping every student fully participate in grade-level learning, and that includes continuing to strengthen how we evaluate supports for multilingual learners as research and classroom practice evolve. That’s why we’re sharing this progress update on two related efforts in the early grades: refining our K-5 mathematics MLL review tools and investigating what K-2 foundational skills MLL review criteria could look like.

This work is also part of a broader shift for EdReports: making our innovations more public and predictable by communicating earlier about what we’re exploring, what we’re learning from research and the field, and what questions remain open.

To honor our dedication to transparency, we will continue releasing our learnings as this process unfolds. 

Listening and Learning from the Field

EdReports has provided information about MLL supports in K-12 instructional materials for several years. As we expand that work in the early grades, we’re drawing on ongoing research and input from the field. We’ve been gathering feedback from educators, researchers, and partner organizations with expertise in multilingual learner supports and either early mathematics or foundational skills.

Their input is helping us enhance the criteria, clarify language, and ensure our tools reflect the needs of the youngest MLLs. 

While we’ve completed Listening and Learning sessions for both subjects, they each have different goals and are at different stages.

Updating Our K-5 Mathematics MLL Review Tool  

Our first reports using dedicated mathematics MLL review tools were published in summer 2025, using separate tools for grades K-8 and high school. As part of our current work, we’re splitting the former into K-5 and 6-8 tools as we make focused updates for younger learners.

As we reviewed research and gathered feedback on how to improve our K-5 mathematics MLL review tools, we found that much of the existing framework remained strong and relevant for early mathematics. One area also stood out for deeper refinement: how the tools evaluate whether young multilingual learners can fully participate in grade-level math. Here, we saw an opportunity to more explicitly identify and assess the specific language supports that research shows are important for young multilingual learners.

While our inaugural K-8 review tools already looked for the presence of language supports, we’ve fine-tuned the K-5 criteria to more clearly identify the specific research-based supports that help young MLLs fully participate in grade-level math. For example, the updated criteria look at opportunities to use and develop mathematical language in different settings, connections between students’ everyday or home language and more precise mathematical language, and multimodal supports, such as visuals or prompts that help students make sense of a math task while continuing to engage with the grade-level content.

We also streamlined this part of the tool, reducing the number of descriptors of quality from 12 to seven and sharpening the focus on the supports that matter most. Early testing showed that the refined criteria could more clearly distinguish differences in how programs support MLLs, providing more useful information for educators and leaders making curriculum decisions. 

Through late summer and early fall 2026, we’ll continue refining the K-5 review tools with field engagement before finalizing the criteria, preparing reviewers, and beginning reviews with the updated tools.

Exploring How to Review Foundational Skills for MLLs

When EdReports introduced our dedicated ELA MLL review tools in 2025, they covered all of K-12 ELA except foundational skills. We intentionally waited to develop foundational skills MLL criteria because research and field practice were still evolving. Since then, the field has made meaningful progress toward greater alignment, even as important questions remain, giving us a stronger foundation to begin exploring what review criteria could look like.

This work remains complex because research points to two important priorities for multilingual learners: explicit, systematic foundational skills instruction and meaningful connections to language, comprehension, and content. For EdReports, the design challenge is how to honor both priorities within our review approach, since our current K-2 ELA tools examine foundational skills separately from knowledge building and comprehension—mirroring how research-aligned literacy frameworks treat these as distinct but interdependent parts of skilled reading.

To begin exploring how best to capture those connections, we drafted foundational skills MLL criteria for targeted field input. Early feedback confirmed that the draft reflects important components of high-quality instruction while bringing this underlying design challenge into sharper focus.

Rather than looking for simple agreement on the draft, we’re continuing to bring together experts with different perspectives to pressure-test our thinking. Their feedback will help us understand where research and field practice are more settled, where important questions remain, and how the criteria can reflect both the evidence and classroom realities. This collaborative process is still early-stage work, and we have more to learn before determining whether or how these draft criteria could ultimately be used in EdReports reviews.

Looking Ahead

As this work continues, we’ll keep sharing what we’re learning as the refined K-5 mathematics tools move into use and as we continue exploring the foundational skills review approach. 

We hope this earlier visibility helps the field understand how our work is evolving in service of clearer, more useful information that supports better curriculum decisions for multilingual learners.

Connect with us here if you are interested in learning more or contributing to this work.