ELL News Headlines

What it's like to be Vietnamese in America or celebrate Tết — the Vietnamese New Year — are topics of new children's books that Natalie Tran hopes shed light on languages not commonly taught, diverse student populations and early childhood literacy.

After the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Nandi Zavala urged her Instagram followers to sign petitions and attend Black Lives Matter protests. As a Black woman, Zavala felt a personal responsibility to do this. As a Mexican American woman, she was also anxious: Would the Latino side of her family think she was ignoring her other half?

The new question-of-the-week is: "What are the best ways to respond when teachers are told we should keep politics out of the classroom?" Today, Dr. Angela M. Ward, Holly Spinelli, Rocio del Castillo, Ed.D., and Keisha Rembert share their responses. 

Reporter Jeremy Chen takes a closer look at how Nevada's Clark County School District is helping students who are learning English and putting them in a position to succeed.

As the Glass Fire tore through Sonoma and Napa counties uncontained on Tuesday, Guillermo Herrera and five co-workers hauled equipment onto trucks, preparing to pick a batch of grapes from a nearby vineyard. It's the harvest season in wine country. But Herrera, who manages a crew of up to 100 field workers, said jobs like this are scarce, as this season’s wildfires have drastically cut available work in the vineyards.

The new question-of-the-week is: "What are the best ways to respond when teachers are told we should keep politics out of the classroom?" Today, Jen Schwanke, Dr. Carolyn M. Shields, Timothy Hilton, and Bill Ivey contribute their commentaries.

As schools continue to figure out what instuction looks like this year, the 134,000 public-school English learners here in Washington face logistical challenges. Reports suggest that English learners across the U.S. have struggled to connect with their remote classrooms, too.  But this pattern isn’t necessarily fixed in stone. And as the country’s nearly 5 million English learners continue treading in yet another disrupted semester, the factors that helped those school systems and others around the country avoid failing them could teach Washington's school leaders valuable lessons.

Rocklin, a 12,000-student district located east of Sacramento, recently moved to a hybrid plan with staggered days of in-person schooling, per California’s tiered health department guidelines for schools. It is one of what is expected to be thousands of U.S. school districts that are moving a step closer to full in-person instruction this month, as school leaders reassess their responses to the coronavirus pandemic.