The face of classrooms and schools across the US is changing with more cultural and linguistic diversity today than ever before (US Department of Education, 2010). The student body in K-12 schools continues to become more linguistically diverse as the number of English learners (ELs) rapidly increases in classrooms in all corners of the nation (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010; Shin & Kominski, 2010). Representing a subgroup of children and adolescents who speak a native language other than English, students labeled as ELs are still in the process of attaining English as measured by standardized tests of language proficiency in speaking, listening, reading and writing (Linquanti & Cook, 2013). In the past decade, the population of ELs enrolled in US public schools has nearly doubled, climbing from 3.5 million to 5.3 million, with approximately 80% of students coming from Spanish-speaking homes and families (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010; National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition [NCELA], 2010). If the growth trend continues, one in every three students will be considered an EL by the year 2043 (Crawford & Krashen, 2007). Nevertheless, ELs are often the most underperforming student population in the US (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010).

The EL achievement gap (Fry, 2007) denotes the current reality that ELs' academic performance remains substantially lower than their mainstream peers in nearly every measure of achievement (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010; Zamora, 2007). Minority students have long been juxtaposed from the mainstream in schools with the common assumption that diminished social resources outside of school leads to underperformance at school (Murrell, 2007). The historical trend of minority students having poor standardized test scores in comparison with mainstream peers' scores has led to the oft-cited phenomena of the achievement gap – inequality of educational outcomes for African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans as compared to European Americans (Meece & Kurtz-Costes, 2001).