ELL News Headlines

Throughout the week, Colorín Colorado gathers news headlines related to English language learners from around the country. The ELL Headlines are posted Monday through Friday and are available for free!

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A Look Back at How Undocumented Children Won the Right to Attend U.S. Schools

Education Week
The fight over the rights of undocumented students has its origins in Tyler, a northeast Texas city where municipal leaders feared their school system would be overrun with immigrant families and students. In 1977, to curb school enrollment, the school board demanded that undocumented students pay $1,000 per year in tuition because were not "legally admitted" to the U.S. The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the district, arguing that the policy essentially barred immigrant students from school, because few of their families could afford the fee. As director of education litigation at MALDEF, attorney Peter Roos filed a motion to block the district from denying enrollment to the children as the Plyler case winded through years of appeals before reaching the Supreme Court. Roos talked with Education Week recently about his recollections about Plyler v. Doe and the relevance of the case today.

English-Language Learners Need More Support During Remote Learning

Education Week
Young children who are learning English require special consideration during virtual instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 1 in 6 children in kindergarten and 1st grade in the United States are learning English as a second (or third) language. As teachers grapple with the monumental task of providing remote instruction to English-language learners, it’s important that state and district leaders provide extensive support and clear guidelines for engaging their ELLs. As state and district leaders consider outreach through email, phone calls, and physical copies of instructional resources for providing equitable access to possible remote instruction when schools reopen, we offer the following evidence-informed suggestions for consideration.

Tiny Cities Run by Children Inside Texas Schools Are Teaching Social-Emotional and Project-Based Learning

The 74
"I can help the next in line,” says Azalea Arredondo, leaning forward on her elbows and craning her neck to make eye contact with the next customer. He’s busy chatting with the person in line behind him. Arredondo signals again, more urgently, “Next in line!” Arrendondo, the all-business “IRS agent,” is in first grade. Her shoulders barely clear the top of the desk, and a giant rainbow-colored bow bounces on top of her head as she swings her legs. Her customers are third-graders queuing up to pay their taxes in Jaguar Valley dollars (JVD), the currency of Jaguar Valley, a Minitropolis site inside Gloria Hicks Elementary School in Corpus Christi, Texas. It’s one of the newest chapters of a program started in 1996 as an attendance incentive at Sam Houston Elementary School in McAllen, Texas. More than two decades later, Minitropolises have boomed to more than 30 communities throughout Texas and Oklahoma, driven by partnerships with the International Bank of Commerce and other local businesses. During that time, their mission has grown from providing old-fashioned encouragement to show up at school to teaching cutting-edge social-emotional and project-based learning skills.

Race in America: The Legacy of Juneteenth with Lonnie G. Bunch III

The Washington Post

Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie G. Bunch III is the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bunch joins Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart for a one-on-one conversation on the legacy of Juneteenth, the commemoration of the ending of slavery in the U.S. They discuss race, recent protests against police brutality, and his role as the first-ever African American Secretary of the Smithsonian.

Trump Can’t Immediately End DACA, Supreme Court Rules

The New York Times

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration may not immediately proceed with its plan to end a program protecting about 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion, joined by the court’s four more liberal members in upholding the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The DACA program was announced by President Barack Obama in 2012. It allows young people brought to the United States as children to apply for a temporary status that shields them from deportation and allows them to work. The status lasts for two years and is renewable, but it does not provide a path to citizenship. The court’s ruling means the Trump administration officials will have to provide a lower court with a more robust justification for ending the program.

How Will Schools Measure English-Learners' 'COVID-Slide' Learning Loss?

Education Week

The so-called coronavirus- or "COVID slide" may be especially troublesome for English-language learners, the 5 million students still learning English in the nation's K-12 schools. Many of them could fall farther behind because of a confluence of factors, including limited access to the internet and the language support services they often receive in school. Along with their native English-speaking peers, English-learners likely will face a battery of tests when school resumes to gauge what they've learned and lost during the extended school closures—but those assessments may not fully reflect what they know and can do in academic subjects, especially if they cannot demonstrate their knowledge in English. A new policy brief from the Migration Policy Institute explores the policy and practical questions for states considering implementing native-language assessments, tests that may be better suited to gauge what students know and what subjects they need support in apart from their English-language instruction.

Pandemic High: How one of Chicago’s largest schools rebuilt itself for cyberspace

Chalkbeat Chicago
For Curie Metropolitan High School, in the predominantly Latino immigrant neighborhood of Archer Heights on Chicago’s Southwest Side, a lot rides on a bid to reel in its scattered students. Chicago, like school districts around the country, pushed hard to get computers to students who needed them. But Principal Allison Tingwall and her staff of 280 quickly realized that this spring’s steeper challenge was to sustain the vital bonds between teachers and students — relationships tested in a city hard hit by the pandemic, with the racial and income fault lines it exposed. Especially in economically stressed communities, it is often these personal relationships that propel learning, leading students not only to log on, but to stay fully plugged in. If Curie failed to sustain these ties, some of its students — 90% of whom live in poverty — might never come back. Tingwall worries about losing kids to the impersonal void of cyberspace. But she takes pride in knowing 1,800 of them by name, and she is undaunted

Educators look for ways to help students disengaged from distance learning

PBS NewsHour
Nearly a third of Principal Tayarisha Batchelor's students at Rawson Elementary School in Hartford, Connecticut, have been unplugged from distance learning. On a Friday afternoon, as she visited some of their homes, she saw many of the reasons why: Internet service is unreliable. Parents are away at work. Some are uncomfortable with the technology. Still others think their children are doing fine when they are actually using the devices for other things. As the academic year nears an end, districts around the country have been racing to get large numbers of no-show students back on track. Students who were struggling before the pandemic are the ones falling farthest behind. Across the Hartford school system, roughly 80% of students are at least partially active in distance learning. Among students considered most at risk because of issues including past absenteeism, disciplinary problems and poor academic performance, less than half are participating at all.

Ideas to power next school year in NYC: How to confront trauma and foster healing

Chalkbeat New York
Trauma: the word will hang over school communities when teachers and students return next school year, whether to campus, to remote classrooms, or to some hybrid of the two. Trauma-informed approaches will be a major focus of restart plans, according to a letter Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza sent to principals this week. Chalkbeat spoke with educators, students, and other experts about how schools can help their communities begin to process what they’ve lost and begin to heal. Recurring themes include the need to help teachers understand trauma and the importance of prioritizing student well-being over academic benchmarks.

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