ELL News Headlines

Newark students recently shared some of the challenges of attending school remotely during a virtual chat with their mayor, where they discussed the isolation of online learning, the frustration of heavy workloads, and the strain of being a teenager during a global pandemic.

Generous family leave time. Reduced tuition for child care programs. Fewer requirements to receive government support. These are some of the policies other countries have taken to ease the burden on parents or providers during the coronavirus pandemic, some of which come from nations that have long been supportive of children and their families, according to a new brief from the  National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE).

The racial and ethnic makeup of school boards rarely matches that of the students in the schools they are responsible for. Yet a growing body of research suggests having more diverse school boards can make concrete differences in how schools operate. Some studies suggest, in fact, that having just one minority member on a board increases a school district’s financial investment in high-minority schools, and even some measures of student achievement and student climate. But at a time when the student population is growing more diverse, most school boards across the country don’t meet even that low bar, according to a new survey by the EdWeek Research Center.

Less than two years after being appointed superintendent of the school district where she was once a student, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Susana Cordova announced she is leaving the district and her home city to take a job in Texas. She will be the deputy superintendent of leading and learning in the Dallas Independent School District, according to an email sent to district families Friday afternoon.

Georgia Southern University Double Eagle Claudia Martinez (’13, ’16) was recently named the 2020 Teacher of the Year by the Georgia Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). As a former English as a Second Language (ESOL) student, Martinez said the award is invaluable.

Most U.S. school districts are currently using “hybrid learning” — a mix of in-person and online instruction. The precise nature of that mix, though, varies greatly from school to school, based on factors including the local rate of COVID-19 transmission, the availability of funds to support new instructional approaches, and the willingness of students and staff to return to buildings.

Rising COVID cases are derailing plans by school districts across the country to reopen their buildings and pushing some schools that had opened to close once again. Just this week, the Detroit school district suspended all in-person learning until January. Health officials ordered schools in Indianapolis to do the same. Philadelphia put its plans to bring young students back at the end of this month on hold indefinitely. And some of Colorado’s largest districts are reverting to remote learning after quarantine requirements made staffing buildings too challenging. They join schools in Newark, Boston, San Diego, and many smaller districts in scaling back or scrapping their school reopenings — an illustration of how the country’s failure to contain the coronavirus has continued to disrupt the education of millions of students. Some of the school districts now closing buildings completely had already been open only for students with disabilities, English learners, and young students, for whom virtual learning is a particular strain.

For the past six weeks, 24 students from undocumented families have been doing their virtual classwork on computers provided by the public school district at Ann Arbor Community Learning Center, with the support of the center's volunteers and teachers. The center is hosted by the Church of the Good Shepherd, which has a long history of being an ally to local undocumented families. Back in 2017, it declared itself a sanctuary church to house undocumented immigrants facing a threat of deportation.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad is the author of Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. In this post, she shares her thoughts on how educators can shift away from deficit-centered views in their own teaching practices.

The new question-of-the-week is: "What are some of the most common mistakes teachers make when working with ELLs, and what should they do, instead?" In this post, Joe Santiago-Silvestri, Michelle Shory, Irina McGrath, Glenda Cohen, Berta Rosa Berriz, Amanda Claudia Wager, Ph.D., and Vivian Maria Poey offer their reflections.