Closing the Language Gap: ELLs and the Common Core Standards

Kenji Hakuta is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford and a SCOPE affiliated scholar. He is an experimental psycholinguist by training, best known for his work in the areas of bilingualism and the acquisition of English in immigrant students. He is active in the policy applications of his research and has testified to Congress and other public bodies on a variety of topics, including language policy, the education of language minority students, affirmative action in higher education, and improvement of quality in educational research. He has served as an expert witness in education cases involving language minority students.

He has been at Stanford as Professor of Education since 1989, except for three years (2003–2006) when he helped start the University of California at Merced as its Founding Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. He is the author of numerous research papers and books, including Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism (Basic Books, 1986) and In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition (Basic Books, 1994).  He chaired a National Academy of Sciences report Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children (National Academy Press), and co-edited a book on affirmative action in higher education, Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education (Stanford University Press).

The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) was founded in 2008 to foster research, policy, and practice to advance high quality, high equity education systems in the United States and internationally.

SCOPE engages faculty from across Stanford and from other universities to work on a shared agenda of research, policy analysis, educational practice, and dissemination of ideas and is an affiliate of the Stanford University School of Education and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at Stanford. SCOPE sponsors the work of two other centers: the School Redesign Network and the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity.