ELL News Headlines

The nine o'clock hour in Samantha Poe’s classroom means one thing to her students. It’s time to write. "Let's find our spots!" she said energetically to her class as they filed into her room. "Can we start writing our letters, please?" Poe teaches English language learners, or ELL students, at Montebello Elementary in west Phoenix and her class is pretty diverse, with kids from nine different language backgrounds.

Schools across the United States often provide substandard instruction and social-emotional support to the nation's English-language learners—and fail to properly train the educators who teach them, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds.

As anxiety increases within the immigrant community over stepped-up enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border, one small bi-national community in New Mexico is working hard to keep families connected through education and schooling. Special correspondent Simon Thompson reports from public media's Fronteras Desk and PBS station KRWG.

Texas schools have added more than 300,000 bilingual students in the past decade and have budgeted for 6,000 fewer full-time employee equivalents certified to teach them, according to the most recent data from the Texas Education Agency captured in The Texas Tribune's Texas Public Schools Explorer. 

In order to combat some of the challenges in keeping English language learners engaged, educators at San Francisco International High School (SFIHS) are trying a different approach. SFIHS teachers have found that their students are more motivated to engage with content — and practice English — when they work in groups that include speakers of many different first languages on authentic discussions or problems.

Boston Public Schools has launched a website to inform its immigrant students and their families of their rights in an "effort to reaffirm support for immigrants and embrace students of all cultural backgrounds." The website offers information in 15 languages on a range of immigration issues. Students and families can learn of their rights and find scholarship information for unauthorized immigrant students, a hate-crime hot line, support for Muslim families, and educational tools for teachers on how to engage in civics conversations in the classroom.

When Walt Griffin took the helm as superintendent of Seminole County schools in Florida, he took a close look at the data. While the school system’s more affluent elementary schools could boast of dozens of students who were identified as gifted, the gifted enrollment at some of Seminole's poorer schools could be counted on one hand, with fingers left over.  Less than a year later, the school system launched an initiative to scout more broadly and bring more diversity to its gifted student population. To lead the effort, he tapped Jeanette Lukens, a district school psychologist with her own passion for identifying talent in underserved populations.

Bank Street College of Education writes, "At Bank Street, we see in education the opportunity to make great strides in this effort. Learning about identity—including race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and more—is key to our curricula. We strongly believe that educators and librarians have a heightened responsibility to create safe and meaningful learning environments that nurture thoughtful, empathetic, and productive citizens of tomorrow.  The following booklists—which include contributions from the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee, the Bank Street College Library, and School Library Journal—are intended to be a starting place (not a comprehensive list) to help educators and librarians create a supportive space to explore these issues and help promote an inclusive, democratic, and just society."

Nearly all of the Chicago school district's Latino Advisory Committee quit on Wednesday to protest budget cuts they said fall disproportionately on schools with predominantly Latino students, according to media reports. On Friday, the school district announced that in response to concerns from the Latino and African American communities it was returning $15 million in previously frozen discretionary funds to go to high-poverty schools

During Jim Rollins' tenure as superintendent, the Springdale, Ark., district has undergone an incredible season of growth and demographic change. Once largely filled with white students, schools now educate thousands of Hispanic immigrants, many of them recent arrivals to the United States. Springdale has also become home to one of the largest populations of Marshallese people outside the Marshall Islands, a Micronesian country that was the site of U.S. nuclear tests during the Cold War.  After decades of growth and rapid school construction, the Springdale district has developed a reputation among state and national education leaders as a model for steering schools through change while meeting the needs of emerging student populations. And Rollins, who punctuates nearly every public address with his “teach them all” motto, has deftly helmed the ship.