ELL News Headlines

California’s effort to provide all 4-year-olds in the state with one year of transitional kindergarten, or TK, by 2025 is historic and one of the largest investments state policymakers are making in our youngest learners that will pay dividends for decades to come.

The University of Arizona announced Monday that Native American students no longer would have to pay tuition or fees at its main campus in Tucson. The university hopes the new program better serves the state's large Native population.

Latinos students have made academic progress over the last two to three decades—including rising high school graduation rates and enrollment in post-secondary education. But policymakers must now work to address setbacks to this progress caused by the pandemic.

Transfer is “the ability to directly apply one’s previous learning to a new setting or problem” (Schwartz and Bransford, 1998, p. 68). We see everyday examples of transfer when we learn what a stop sign is and recognize it in another country where we can’t actually read the word stop itself. We see transfer in the way we still know what a chair is regardless of the material used to make it. Yet, for emergent bilinguals and dual language (DL) students developing biliteracy, transfer serves a more important role. Research has confirmed that when we use cross-linguistic transfer, it not only enhances but accelerates reading ability.

Since reclaiming power of Afghanistan nearly one year ago, the Taliban have significantly rolled back rights for women and girls. The extremist government has also barred hundreds of thousands of girls from attending school. Pashtana Durrani, the executive director of LEARN Afghanistan and a visiting fellow at Wellesley College's Centers for Women, joins Amna Nawaz to discuss.

Ada Limón, the new U.S. poet laureate, speaks with Tess Taylor about the moment she got the call and what it means to hold the position.

We take a sneak peek at a new PBS program, "America Outdoors.". The six-part series is hosted by bestselling author and outdoor enthusiast Baratunde Thurston. Student Reporting Labs podcast host Zion Williams spoke with Thurston to learn more.

On the ground floor of a 23-story apartment building in Uptown, Carol Dunbar and Tammie Dennis make sure 30 sets of little hands are washed. The meals served at the summer program inside the apartment building come from the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a 40-year-old food bank that’s partnering with more than 150 local organizations this summer to distribute lunches to children who rely on free or reduced lunch during the school year. 

The Excellence Project was developed by the after-school provider New York Edge. With a recent $3 million federal grant, the nonprofit will soon expand into six more schools, hoping to become a model for bringing gifted programming to students who are underrepresented in the city’s own starkly segregated gifted classrooms.

People across the country are searching for ways to support many of America’s children and young adults, who say they’re facing stress, anxiety, and depression. Remote school, shuttered activities, and family job losses during the pandemic often changed their lives – and their sense of well-being.