ELL News Headlines

The first call to Deschutes County dispatchers came in at 12:59 p.m. from someone in a vehicle outside Silver Rail Elementary School. Someone was shooting at them with a long gun in the parking lot of a Bend grade school, they said. Three children — ages 5, 8, 11 — died in the shooting, and so did a teacher. A 7-year-old and a 54-year-old teacher were critically hurt and taken to St. Charles Medical Center in Bend.

School districts are under enormous pressure to support English learners, and they’re hungry for strategies that will help them.

Preschool teachers can use these books to create rich learning experiences that engage students in problem-solving.

Susan Barber was shocked at what she was hearing at her district training with English Language Arts (ELA) specialists before this school year began. “They said, ‘We’re not going to teach whole novels; we just want you all teaching excerpts,’” says the English teacher at Midtown High School in Atlanta.  For Barber, who has been a College Board Advisor for AP Literature and on the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Secondary Steering Committee, this fell into a trend she says she has seen over the last couple of years with more districts teaching entirely excerpts. But as with almost any discussion of education, it is difficult to find a consensus. 

Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, found daily student absences rose 22% among more than 100,000 children living in California’s rural Central Valley in the wake of early 2025 immigration raids. Dee is currently working on a new report, this one examining the effects of 2025 U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids on enrollment across the country.

Many of the nation’s more than 5 million English learners enroll in elementary schools with educators hoping the students will reclassify out of language-development services by middle school. But many carry the English-learner label well into middle and high school, when class schedules become more complex and graduation requirements take priority.

This year’s Batchelder Award for children’s literature in translation went to Croco, a picture book by Mexican author and illustrator Azul López, published by Tapioca Stories. This success was compounded for Tapioca’s publishing director Yael Berstein when she realized it was the first Latin American title to win the award in its 58-year history.

English learners who understand an academic concept may still struggle to articulate their understanding, and these scaffolds can help.

Nationally, about 1 in 5 children in the United States speaks a language other than English at home, according to the Century Foundation, a nonprofit organization. Most of those children—about three-quarters—speak Spanish, the nonprofit reported. But tens of thousands of public school students speak other languages at home, including Arabic, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Russian, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In recent years, schools have turned to a variety of AI-powered tools to help translate materials into families’ home languages.

A flurry of immigration enforcement activity in California’s second-largest city has sparked outrage among educators and local officials who have questioned the presence of federal agents several feet from school doorsteps. The ICE surge, they say, has sown fear and panic among families, and kept some students home from school.