The language minority and limited-English-proficient students attending American schools in increasing numbers must be prepared as well as possible for their continued education in the mainstream. This can be begun by implementing mainstreaming procedures that fairly and accurately determine student readiness for learning in the mainstream and making recommendations toward that end, treating the process as a set of placement procedures. These procedures would include defining what the various placement decisions are, determining student needs and other information needed to make those decisions, developing and implementing procedures and instruments for gathering the information, and collecting, analyzing, and interpreting it. The apparent simplicity of the steps masks complexity resulting from the interplay of variables such as program size and structure and the intricacy of individual linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural backgrounds. Small teams of individuals from both bilingual/English-as-a-second-language and mainstream programs could have responsibility for making placement decisions. (MSE)