ELL News Headlines

With a pandemic pressing tens of thousands of the nation's school districts into extended closures, special education administrators across the nation are wrestling with a weighty dilemma: how to provide services to students with disabilities.

Virtual calming corners for students. Online staff hangouts instead of in-person team meetings. Student advisory groups on Zoom. Video morning greetings for students. This is what the principal's job is looking like right now in the age of coronavirus.

City educators say they're bracing for herculean challenges in adjusting to teaching students remotely and are racing to adapt their lessons as the city rolled out additional guidelines for principals and teachers Wednesday.

The threat of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus, is forcing educators across the country to think about what they’ll do if they have to close their schools for weeks or even months at a time. State and federal agencies have advised schools to create online learning plans to minimize the disruption to student learning. For some schools, that’s a small leap. Their students have internet connections at home, laptops they can work from, teachers who know how to design online lessons and a strong foundation of in-school blended learning experience.

But the fact is, these schools are rare. Most schools are completely unprepared – or, at best, woefully underprepared – for coronavirus and virtual learning.  Unequal internet access is just the tip of the iceberg of a massive equity crisis facing U.S. schools should coronavirus force education online.

As the nation shifts to online learning during the novel coronavirus outbreak, language and access barriers may shut many of the nation's nearly English-learner students out of the learning process. A December 2019 report from the U.S. Department of Education found that few teachers reported assigning English-learners to use digital learning resources outside of class, in part because of concerns about students' lack of access to technology at home.

The last month has been especially brutal in Idlib province, with a Syrian government offensive producing a humanitarian crisis almost unparalleled during nearly a decade of war in Syria. As the government seeks to recapture rebel-held Idlib, where children make up a majority of the population, the fighting has chased about 1 million people from their homes.

Schools need to prepare for a nationwide surge in cases of the coronavirus that's currently wreaking global havoc and could disrupt daily life in some communities, federal officials warned Tuesday. "You should ask your children's schools about their plans for school dismissals or school closures," Nancy Messonnier, a director at the Centers for Disease Control, said during a press briefing on Tuesday. "Ask about plans for teleschool."

Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) has introduced the Biliteracy Education Seal and Teaching (BEST) Act(S. 3328) into the U.S. senate. The act broadens the definition of "second language" to include Native American languages, and Classical Languages.

If Bryan Johnson wanted to illustrate quickly why he built a new system of career pathways in his school district, he could just point to Waltkia Clay. Waltkia is a 10th grade student in the health sciences "Future Ready Institute" at The Howard School in Chattanooga, Tenn., one of 28 career-oriented "school-within-a-school" programs that the Hamilton County district launched in high schools nearly two years ago. She studies core subjects through a healthcare lens, and gets real-world opportunities to practice what she's learning.

Babies from bilingual families are better at switching their attention from one task to another compared with infants from homes where only one language is spoken, according to new research.