ELL News Headlines

Studies show that in more places in the United States, there are now more days hotter than 80 degrees during the school year than there were in 1970. Schools that can’t afford air conditioning are struggling with overheated classrooms, which researchers say pose both academic and health risks. John Yang speaks with Washington Post reporter Anna Phillips, who covers climate change, for more.

Big city districts like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh often have old school buildings that can't handle AC for one reason or another. In many cases, they try to find workarounds for a handful of hot days each year.

Sunisa Nuonsy is a Lao-American educator and scholar based in Brooklyn. She is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a project researcher for the CUNY Initiative on Immigration and Education. In this opinion piece, she writes, "For marginalized students, especially recent immigrants doing the double duty of learning content and a new language, a standardized approach can be exclusive and an inaccurate assessment."

Today’s post is the latest in a series sharing teachers’ favorite lessons for English- language-learner newcomers.

For Lina Zapata, becoming a teacher was an early calling that stemmed from her own struggles learning English in New York schools. A Colombian native, Zapata immigrated to the United States with her mom when she was 12. She remembers the challenges they faced in navigating the public school system, often without needed support. But those experiences have shaped Zapata into the kind of teacher she needed when she was young.

In many K-12 schools across the country, an alarming number of children have been chronically absent – an old problem that COVID-19 made much, much worse.  In California, more than 1 in 3 kindergartners was chronically absent. But the tiny town of Livingston, in California’s sprawling Central Valley, is an outlier – and a powerful lesson in the ways a district can proactively prevent wide-scale absenteeism.

In Lexington, Nebraska, where two-thirds of residents are Hispanic, hundreds of children lack access to high-quality child care from providers who can communicate with their parents. Something had to change.

This collection of reviews from School Library Journal features a wide range of titles, including Spanish-language titles and books about different celebrations.

Teacher John Downes-Angus writes, "I was hired to teach AP English Language to juniors and English to seniors. About a month after I was offered this job, though, my principal asked me if I’d teach a year-long journalism class." It's been huge learning curve for him, but well worth it: "This is not my most organized or efficient class, but figuring out how to teach it for the past two years has been some of the most fun I’ve had in my 10 years working as a teacher here in New York City," he says.

Schools are required to test the progress of their English learners each year to determine whether they still need language instruction services or can exit out of such programs. In close to 40 states, that test is known as the WIDA ACCESS test.