ELL News Headlines

When children become immersed in a book series on their own, in particular, it can help them develop connections with characters they grow to know, love or scorn. They inhabit a character who isn’t them. They sit with an idea long enough to understand why someone acts the way they do. Feeling emotionally invested in a character’s decisions can also influence how young readers decide how to engage with others and treat people with civility and kindness in real life. This skill doesn’t arrive automatically with age. It is built through practice, and recreational reading in childhood is the main training ground for it.

The Trump administration is advancing a sweeping set of regulatory changes that, if implemented, could permanently destabilize how schools and educators receive and spend federal dollars. The proposed revisions to what’s known as the federal government’s “uniform grants guidance,” managed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, have garnered widespread blowback, including from lawmakers, researchers, and education advocates. So far, the Trump administration hasn’t changed course—but it remains to be seen how quickly these rules can take effect and whether political pressure to mollify widespread outrage will continue to mount.

California’s audacious goal of having half of all K-12 students enrolled in bilingual education programs by 2030 has encountered one big stumbling block — there aren’t enough qualified bilingual teachers. To help remedy that, a $10 million grant tucked in the state budget aims to help school districts recruit high school students as future bilingual teachers.

Most Iowa school districts have quietly agreed to exclude undocumented high school students from certain federally funded career and technical education programming, according to records obtained by Chalkbeat.

Since most teachers do not have the time to read long research studies on apps or spend hours researching a new app, we developed a quick, 15-minute guide that helps teachers to screen apps for distraction risks, using research-informed practices.

These picks include new entries from middle grade favorites, such as Tae Keller, Gordon Korman, and Erin Entrada Kelly.

On Thursday, Fred Rogers Productions started a channel dedicated to the beloved children’s host. Eventually it will be a repository for full episodes, behind-the-scenes footage and compilations.

The numbers of English-learner newcomer students are down across the country. What should schools do about this enrollment decline? Larry Ferlazzo suggests that schools should recognize that this trend is likely to change in the next few years and that they take this opportunity to support their many long-term English learners, who are often given short shrift.

In Winooski, Vermont, where more than a third of children are English learners, a school superintendent has invested in protecting immigrant students even as one of his own was detained.

Officials say the tech can help ensure names are pronounced correctly and speed up ceremonies, but some parents and students are pushing back.