ELL News Headlines

On a school lawn in Denver Friday, four young Black women told the story of how they pushed an institution to make its curriculum more inclusive of Black, Latino, and Indigenous history. It started last October, when a group of students from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College traveled to Washington, D.C., to visit the national African American history museum.

Most of the nation's nearly five million English-language learners are returning to classes, whether virtual or in-person, after a months-long stretch of distance learning where they were separated from the educators who are key to their academic success. How those students and their teachers rebound from the struggles tied to the school shutdowns of the spring could depend on guidance from their states and school districts about how to recover from learning loss and reconnect with families. To help educators and state leaders take a look at what others are doing around the country, Amaya Garcia, the deputy director for English-learner education with the education policy program at New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, compiled a national database of state guidance and resources for English-learner education.

Amy Leipziger is a senior staff attorney in the Queens office of Legal Services NYC, the nation’s largest provider of free civil legal services to low-income communities across New York City. In this column, she writes, "In a study conducted by the Global Strategy Group, only 33% of NYC public school parents reported that they received technical assistance to prepare for distance learning, leaving countless families in the lurch. This failure has an outsized impact on LEP parents who cannot readily access information online. For example, the DOE's survey to parents to request computers or iPads was initially only sent to families in English, leaving many LEP parents without access to remote learning tools in those first two months of remote learning."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer in the women's rights movement and the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, died Friday at age 87 due to complications of pancreatic cancer. On education issues arising during her 27 years on the court, Ginsburg was a stalwart vote for sex equity in schools, expansive desegregation remedies, strict separation of church and state, and, in a memorable dissent, against broader drug testing of students.

When President Donald Trump took office in 2017, immigration advocates and school officials braced for the prospect that he would undertake unprecedented immigration enforcement measures that could upend the lives of millions. Nearly four years later, the nation's Latino schoolchildren are bearing the mental and psychological brunt of the president's campaign to curtail immigration: A majority of Latino high school students in two states fear that someone close to them could be arrested and deported, a new Migration Policy Institute study reveals.

Single mom Shashona Holmon couldn’t stop smiling as she dropped off her daughter Brooklynn at the Merced Heights Playground on Monday morning. For the first time in six months, Brooklynn Holmon, 9 — and 800 other San Francisco students — got dressed, pulled on a backpack and left home to learn.

Six months after schools closed amid the coronavirus crisis and with online learning in full swing, tens of thousand of students remain without adequate digital access and school districts in Los Angeles County report they still need nearly 50,000 computers and Wi-Fi hot spots.

After months of distance learning, students around the world are returning to the classroom -- even though many countries are bracing themselves for a second wave of coronavirus infections. What does the pandemic mean for children, parents and teachers this academic year? We take a global look, with special correspondents Olly Barratt, Lucy Hough, Patrick Hok and Michael Baleke reporting.

The coronavirus has shattered the familiar routines of life and school for students and teachers across the country, and subjected millions to the stresses of illness, lost jobs, and isolation. But in 10 Western states, thousands of children and the adults who educate them are reeling from yet another layer of trauma: wildfires.