Chicago students today begin a battery of exams known as the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, a tool the federal government uses to measure whether schools are succeeding. This year, for the first time, students still in the process of learning English are taking the ISAT alongside native speakers. That’s got Chicago Public Schools officials worried that scores may drop. And it’s got staff members and students at many schools concerned what it will mean for them.

This morning Olivia Mulcahy will start giving her 6th-graders the ISAT.

MULCAHY: I have about 4 or 5 that really struggle with the English. And I don’t think there’s one of them where English is their first language.

Mulcahy teaches language arts and social studies at Telpochcalli Elementary. That’s a dual-language school in the heavily Mexican neighborhood of Little Village.

For weeks, Mulcahy has been preparing her class for the ISAT’s multiple-choice and essay formats. It’s complicated because most of the students don’t fully understand English yet.

MULCAHY: I give them tricks for how to go through the text and highlight cognates, and I have a few tricks about taking notes in that situation so that they at least can give themselves some language to later use in their extended response.

Mulcahy says many of her students have been getting frustrated.

MULCAHY: I tell all of them, I say, ‘This test doesn’t tell me who you are. This tells what you wrote on that test on that day.’ Because a lot of them really take that to heart, if they’re not going to score well on this, ‘What’s that going to do?’ It creates a lot of anxiety.

Some of the anxiety may be unwarranted. Last year the state of New York found itself in the same position as Illinois. The federal government’s No Child Left Behind law forced New York to give its standards test to most English language learners. The number of ELL students taking the exam doubled, but the ELL results dipped only slightly.

But that doesn’t make Telpochcalli Principal Tamara Witzl feel much better.

WITZL: A school like ours, which has a 50 percent increase in the kids taking ISAT, and all of those kids are ELLs, we’re not going to have very good results unless kids are able to guess well and have a lot of luck.

Witzl says her school has steadily improved its ISAT scores over the years. With English language learners taking the exam this year, she’s bracing for a setback. Witzl says lower ISAT scores could hurt the school.

WITZL: You’re obliged to report to the public that the school is not meeting AYP.

That’s Adequate Yearly Progress, a standard of the No Child Left Behind law.

WITZL: A letter is sent out from the district office indicating to parents that the school that their child attends has not made AYP and that they have the opportunity to transfer to another school that is meeting AYP.

Failing to meet the standard for several years makes a school vulnerable to takeover by the district.

Chicago Schools chief Arne Duncan has lobbied state and federal officials to keep the ISAT scores of English language learners from counting against their schools.

DUNCAN: We worry about the impact on children. We worry about the impact on parents and teachers and schools and communities that are heavily impacted here.

But Duncan isn’t making any promises.

DUNCAN: The state has to negotiate that with the U.S. Department of Education. So we’re going to weigh in very, very, very heavily on that.

The entire district has a lot at stake. Last year just over 60 percent of Chicago students met the ISAT benchmark for reading. This year, the standards are higher. And the district’s results will include scores from some 22,000 English language learners — about 12 percent of the Chicago students taking the test.

But the biggest worry of many immigrant parents remains the testing’s immediate effect on their children. Restaurant worker Jorge Peñalosa has 3rd- and 5th-graders in the district.

PEÑALOSA: Me preocupa bastante porque lo que no quiero es que mis hijos pierdan el interés en la escuela.

Peñalosa says all the testing in English could sap his kids’ enthusiasm for school.