ELL News Headlines

In November 2017, nearly two months after Hurricanes Irma and Maria successively devastated the island of Puerto Rico, officials at New York University offered a small group of Puerto Rican students admittance to the world-renowned institution for one semester, granting each of the 57 evacuees escape from the unbearable trauma of devastated life back on the island. One semester later, students who say that their stay at NYU has opened up a world of opportunity both personally and professionally, face returning to a multitude of insecure and troubling circumstances in Puerto Rico. Appeals to NYU leadership for a temporary program extension have proven unsuccessful.

Education and immigration advocates are pushing back against a Trump administration plan that would consolidate the federal office that helps guide education for millions of English-language-learner and immigrant students. Under the proposal, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos would fold her department's office of English-language acquisition into the broader office for elementary and secondary education, according to advocacy groups briefed this week on the department's potential plan.

"Alva, along with coauthor Mills, narrates his experiences as a young child crossing the Mexican and U.S. border with his father…. Alva and Mills make this bilingual autobiographical story readily accessible through well-written and vivid text."

At age 5, Laura Jimenez left everything in her home country of Columbia behind to come to the United States with her mother. Thirteen years later she's using what she experienced as a child to help Venezuelan refugee students adjust to life away from their home country.

New bilingual programs teaching Chinese, Spanish and other languages will be launched at 14 Queens schools this fall, Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza announced Thursday. The Schools Chancellor said that the city plans to spend approximately $1.2 million to open 48 new Transitional Bilingual Education and Dual Language programs at schools this fall.

When she was young, Nicole M'Carthy felt trapped between two cultures. Born in Ghana and raised in Canada, she endured racial bullying and almost lost sight of herself.  But her negative experiences helped set the stage for a youth mentorship program she founded called Girl Talk, aimed at girls from immigrant families.

The White House is asking Congress to cut $7 billion from the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which Congress recently renewed, as part of an effort to cut $15 billion from the federal government's bottom line, mostly from unspent funds, senior administration officials said Monday. 

Once a month, students from the political left and right at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School in Nashville, TN, discuss weighty, and often emotionally-fraught, political issues over pizza. This is not a debate, as many would assume bringing Republicans and Democrats together to discuss these issues would be. These are conversations that, in the end, often lead to a compromise of ideas or, at least, better understanding — not victory or defeat.

Finn McLaren was a shy teen who never showed an interest in sports or school clubs. He hadn’t quite found his place or an activity that sparked his interest. But when a group from the University of Michigan conducted a maker workshop at his local library in the summer of 2016, his mother saw "a total transformation."

A group of fourth graders were piling magazines atop paper pillars of different shapes: triangles, circles, squares and pentagons. The young scientists and engineers guessed which would hold the most, and tested their theories until each pillar came crashing down, prompting shrieks of surprise. In this skyscraper lesson, the students at Throggs Neck, a subsidized housing development in the Bronx, used the scientific method to test their theories, said Carlos Montoya, a teacher with the Salvadori Center for the past three years. Children can see buildings all over New York, but until they try using different materials themselves, they might not understand what holds them up.