By Edna De Pina
In neighborhoods across Boston, from Dorchester to Roxbury to Hyde Park, families are raising bright, curious toddlers who grow up hearing and speaking more than one language. These children laugh, play, and learn in homes filled with Cape Verdean Creole, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and dozens of other languages that make up the heartbeat of Massachusetts.
But when it comes time for these little ones to be evaluated for Early Intervention (EI), the state program that helps those with developmental delays, their voices are often lost in translation. The tests used to decide who gets help were created decades ago for English-speaking, monolingual children. For multilingual families, these outdated tools often tell a false story.
Imagine a two-year-old child in Hyde Park being asked to follow directions in English when they’ve only been speaking Spanish at home. Or a Cape Verdean child in Roxbury who’s labeled “delayed” because a test doesn’t recognize the way children in their community play, sing, or solve problems. Imagine either child sitting across from an evaluator who speaks only English. The questions come on rapid fire, filled with words and ideas that don’t match what the child hears at home.
The system says “standardized,” but for these children, it’s anything but fair.
This is more than a technical issue; it’s an injustice that blocks multilingual children from getting the services they deserve. And when children are mislabeled or overlooked, families lose trust, providers lose time, and the community loses potential.
Standardized assessments are often viewed as neutral, but they reflect one language and one cultural lens. Many questions don’t fit the everyday realities of multilingual homes. A child may know how to count in Portuguese but not yet in English – and still be developing beautifully. But the test scores don’t always see that.
Research shows how deep this bias runs. Barrueco et al. (2012) and Bedore & Peña (2008) found that assessments designed for English-only speakers can misrepresent bilingual children’s true abilities by sometimes labeling them “behind,” at other times missing real developmental needs. These errors ripple through families and schools, reinforcing inequities that multilingual communities already face.
Massachusetts has made progress in multilingual education for school-aged children, but Early Intervention, where support matters most, hasn’t kept up. When assessments fail to capture a child’s full potential, those missed opportunities echo through communities for generations.
To change this, we need action and leadership now to:
•Invest in bilingual and culturally responsive assessment tools that reflect the language and experiences of our communities.
•Train providers to interpret results with cultural awareness and humility.
•Include parents and families from multilingual backgrounds in developing and/or revising testing new assessments because families know their children best, and they must have a voice in the process.
Some may argue that “standardized” tests make things fair, or that changing them costs too much. But how fair is a test that fails an entire group of children just for being multilingual? The real cost comes later when children who didn’t qualify for help early on struggle in school, needing more services and support that could have been provided years before.
Massachusetts can’t claim equity while using tools that silence the voices of its youngest learners. True fairness requires us to see our children very clearly; in every language they speak.
It’s time to rewrite the story for multilingual children. And communities, our communities, must speak up.
Talk to your local Early Intervention programs. Ask how they assess multilingual children. Share your family’s experience. Change begins when we stop accepting that “standard” means “English-only,” or “Western-view only.”
Every child deserves to be seen for who they are, not for what a test can’t measure. Massachusetts has the opportunity and the moral obligation to make Early Intervention a place where all children can thrive, from the very start.
Edna De Pina is a lifelong Dorchester resident, a first-generation Cape Verdean American, and a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Boston studying Early Education Leadership and Policy. She has worked in Early Intervention (EI) for more than 18 years.
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