ELL News Headlines

State preschool funding has returned to pre-Recession levels, and slightly more students are enrolling, but the quality of these programs continues to vary widely, concludes the latest analysis by the National Institute for Early Education Research.

The Riverhead school district hired its new superintendent last night, Dr. Aurelia L. Henriquez. Henriquez, whose parents are from Puerto Rico, said she has devoted much of her career working with immigrants and children of immigrants. Brentwood is Long Island's largest school district, with nearly 20,000 students. More than 80 percent of its student body is Latino. Riverhead's Latino student population jumped from 15 percent of the student body in 2005-2006 to 41 percent in 2015-2016.

The U.S. Education Department has long been responsible for evaluating how well states were meeting the mandates spelled out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. But when it comes to standards connected to how well students are doing academically — test scores and graduation rates, to name two — the performance of students with disabilities has been stagnant.

The way bilingual people read is conditioned by the languages they speak, according to researchers at Spain's Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language (BCBL), who found that the languages spoken by bilingual people (when they learned to read in two languages at the same time) affect their reading strategies and even the cognitive foundations that form the basis for the capacity to read.

During a months-long trial last year in a lawsuit that explored whether Connecticut is spending enough to educate students in its most impoverished districts, several educators shared stories about the education being provided to their foreign-speaking students. One New London teacher testified she didn’t have textbooks. A teacher from Windham said students often were identified as special education students just to get them the extra supports federal law requires. In 2015, legislative researchers, noting a state requirement for an annual report on ELL programs, asked the education department for more analysis and evaluation of the quality and success of local programs. The education department finally produced an annual report in February of this year, but the five-page report lumped together students who were being taught using completely different methods – making it impossible to distinguish which was producing better results.

With graduation season in full swing, Maryland's largest school system, Montgomery County, is bestowing the Seal of Biliteracy honor on 770 students this year. As many as 1,000 others could also be eligible after graduation as a result of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) test scores that will come out this summer.

Gene Luen Yang, U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, kicked off SLJ’s Day of Dialog on June 1 in New York City with a witty, dynamic presentation about superhero comics, computers, reading, and his life as a nerd. The multiple award-winning author of American Born Chinese, Boxers & Saints, (both First Second; 2006, 2013) and the "Secret Coders" series (First Second), illustrated by Mike Holmes, fired up the crowd and touched on "Reading Without Walls," his chosen theme as Ambassador.

Washington has one of the nation's highest-quality preschool programs, experts say. It's also one of the most segregated. In the 2013-14 school year, 86 percent of the city's black pre-K students attended what experts call "racially isolated" schools where fewer than 10 percent of students are white. But a new generation of parents, including young middle- and upper-class families descending on the city, could herald an end to the city's entrenched segregation.

These refugee and immigrant narratives teach readers about language, culture, history, geography, and politics while providing insight into the human experience. The books reviewed in this column follow the journeys of young people and their families as they leave different parts of the world in pursuit of happiness and security.

Angel Vazquez is 9 years old, has hearing loss in both ears, has trouble speaking and struggles to concentrate in class. He's a year behind in school, just learned how to read and is still learning English. For nearly two years, his mom, Angeles Garcia, tried to get him evaluated for special education at his elementary school in Houston. A major investigation by The Houston Chronicle recently revealed that districts in Texas were pressured by the state to provide fewer students with special education services, which can be expensive.