¿Qué es lo que hace que una rama del gobierno no se vuelva demasiado poderosa? If you know the answer to this question, congratulations! If you don’t, why not? Is it because you don’t understand the checks and balances built into the U.S. system of government, or because you don’t understand Spanish? Every year, some 5 million public school students who are still mastering English take assessments to determine how much they know, how much progress they’ve made, and where they need support. Unfortunately, the results of these tests are far from valid because many of these students are not sufficiently proficient in English to demonstrate their knowledge and abilities on assessments designed for native English-speakers. It is akin to asking someone to fill out a job application in a language he or she doesn’t understand even though that person can potentially do every aspect of the job. Just as the prospective employer wants to know what the candidate can actually do, we need accurate information about English-language learners’ knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, the assessments that we administer in schools fail to fully uncover what we need to know. This problem affects one of the fastest-growing groups of students in our nation’s public schools. English-language learners, or ELLs, are nearly 11 percent of the K-12 population, and about 80 percent of these students speak Spanish, with the rest speaking a wide variety of other languages. In California, more than half the children now entering public schools come from households where the first language is not English. Further, ELLs in the United States are not a monolithic group—they vary widely in proficiency in both their primary languages and in English. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers Consortium, or PARCC, and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC, are the two U.S. Department of Education-funded consortia charged with developing a new generation of state assessments aligned to the common-core state standards. Developing fair and accurate assessments for English-language learners must be a focus of their work from the very beginning as well as at every stage in the development of these new assessment systems. This must be an integral, rather than peripheral, part of any assessment system that’s expected to serve all students well.