ELL News Headlines

Angel Castillo Pineda immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala five years ago. Navigating a new environment and language at East Boston High School, he thought little of future career ambitions—until he met Wensess Raphael, head of Boston Public Schools’ High School to Teacher Program (HSTT). Raphael encouraged the then-high school junior to apply to the program, which supports participants from high school through college in exploring and completing teaching degrees. Angel graduated this spring with plans to become a teacher and a full tuition scholarship from Regis College’s Diverse Educators Program. “I totally see myself coming back to visit and tell high school students about my experience,” Angel said. Angel’s experience represents one of an increasing number of efforts to recruit and retain a more racially diverse teacher workforce in K-12 schools. While initiatives like the HSTT identify students of color in high school and expose them to teaching careers, others seek out paraprofessionals already working in the public school system to become certified teachers. Still others work to retain existing teachers of color.

Samantha Honani’s son hasn’t completed a school assignment in months. After his high school on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona shut down in March, he finished about three weeks of distance learning via his family’s computer. Then, in April, he stopped hearing from his teachers. Honani’s son attends Hopi Junior Senior High School, which is funded and partially overseen by the Bureau of Indian Education, an agency within the Department of the Interior that manages nearly 200 tribal K-12 schools throughout the country. Implementing distance learning for schools like Hopi High would have been difficult even under the best of circumstances — the school is located on a vast reservation where families often lack access to internet and computers. But evidence suggests that some of the blame for the struggles of BIE schools during Covid-19 lies on the shoulders of the federal government, which consistently bungled its role in helping schools adapt to remote learning and ensure that kids continued to receive an education.

Five educators share suggestions for grading English-language learners in "mainstream" content classes, including emphasizing formative assessments and separating language proficiency from content knowledge.

I teach social studies at Bridge Academy West, a public charter middle school in Detroit that primarily serves the Middle Eastern community in and around Hamtramck and Detroit. Most of my students are first- and second-generation immigrants, mostly from Yemen and Bangladesh. Almost all of our students live in poverty, most come from working class families, and 20-30% of our students are English language learners. Every day, my colleagues and I fight for our students to meet and exceed the academic standards put in front of us. Our students already start 100 meters behind the average student in the race to achieve grade-level standards, and to have three months of an educational abyss to atrophy was absolutely unacceptable. To us, this tragedy became an opportunity to help our students grow while others were struggling.

Three teachers offer their recommendations of high-interest books for students to read, including for English-learners. Susanne Marcus, an ESL educator with over 30 years of K-12 experience, explains why these four books are her favorites to teach and why her ESL students respond to them: Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan (Newberry Award winner); Journey of the Sparrows by Fran Leeper Bus; The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton; and The Arrival by Shaun Tan (wordless picture book)

Distance learning proved a difficult experiment for many students, teachers and parents this year. Its urgent adoption underscored gaps in access and income. Now, school districts are scrambling to figure out how to adjust plans for the fall. We hear from viewers about their own school experiences, and NewsHour talks to Mark Bedell, superintendent of Missouri's Kansas City Public Schools.

Four teachers discuss specific titles, and common elements, in books that students find popular, including the importance of being able to see themselves in the characters.

Around the country, an estimated 20,000 educators protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — teachers, assistant teachers and those in the process of being certified — reacted to the news. María Rocha, a second-grade teacher in San Antonio who came to the U.S. from Mexico at the age of 3, said she felt a surge of gratitude. Enedina Manríquez, an ESL teacher in Omaha, Nebraska, accepted congratulatory texts from her friends. Oscar Hernandez, a fifth-grade teacher in Phoenix, said he felt a sense of agony lift. Denise Panaligan, a middle school special education teacher in Los Angeles, reached out to share the good news with two of her former students, who are now eligible to apply for DACA for the first time.

The fight over the rights of undocumented students has its origins in Tyler, a northeast Texas city where municipal leaders feared their school system would be overrun with immigrant families and students. In 1977, to curb school enrollment, the school board demanded that undocumented students pay $1,000 per year in tuition because were not "legally admitted" to the U.S. The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the district, arguing that the policy essentially barred immigrant students from school, because few of their families could afford the fee. As director of education litigation at MALDEF, attorney Peter Roos filed a motion to block the district from denying enrollment to the children as the Plyler case winded through years of appeals before reaching the Supreme Court. Roos talked with Education Week recently about his recollections about Plyler v. Doe and the relevance of the case today.