ELL News Headlines

In this Q&A series, SLJ poses five questions and a request for a book recommendation to a debut YA author. Angelica Cheng discusses The Fast Track in this latest installment.

In the past two school years, districts across the country have adapted to heightened immigration enforcement in multiple ways. They’ve hired more mental health counselors to address increased student anxiety and fear. They’ve partnered with community volunteers to safely transport students to and from school. They’ve updated school protocols for what to do if immigration officials arrive at a school requesting access to a building or student information.

Under the current Trump administration, nearly 700 children in California have been detained and more than 400 deported, according to an EdSource analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley. One 9 year-old’s deportation triggered a wave of grief and anger among her classmates at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, in West Contra Costa Unified School District.

State education agency leaders whose work focuses on English learners have increasingly found themselves balancing the need to uphold these students’ federal civil rights while also navigating anti-DEI policies and politics. That tension is reshaping how states design, describe, and defend programs serving the nation’s more than 5 million multilingual learners.

As the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of its founding, America 250: a nation in progress invites students to explore the events and ideas that have shaped the nation over the past two and a half centuries. Through highlighting stories that celebrate America's achievements while examining its ongoing challenges, this student-led series encourages thoughtful reflection on the country's history, values, and future.

For the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, English learners’ average English-language proficiency test scores did not decline. Instead, they held steady or ticked up in most grades. And while average scores from the 2024-25 school year remain below pre-pandemic levels, long-term growth shows students are starting to rebound.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island, the National Education Association (on behalf of its members), and researchers have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education over the discontinuation of 28 grants intended to train teachers working with English learners.

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.