ELL News Headlines

Nearly 30 students enrolled in English as a Second Language writing classes at New Highland Elementary School are publishing an anthology of poems adapted from Kentucky educator George Ella Lyon's "Where I Am From" project that promotes a positive understanding of diversity.

Right now, students studying to be teachers in New York are required to spend six semester hours learning about language acquisition and literacy. Last month, state education policymakers proposed requiring teacher preparation programs to dedicate three of those hours to how English language learners learn and acquire language.

The Boston School Committee has voted to confirm Brenda Cassellius — a career educator who rose from paraprofessional to state commissioner, mostly in Minnesota — as the next superintendent of Boston Public Schools.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without his parents fell ill while in federal custody and died Tuesday after spending several days in intensive care at a hospital in Texas, U.S. Health and Human Services said Wednesday.

Food shortages, damaged homes, fear of death, loved ones leaving. The cumulative stresses of Hurricane Maria contributed to thousands of schoolchildren developing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, in Puerto Rico, according to a study published Friday.

For the first time, this fiscal year the California Department of Education awarded $5 million through the Dual Language Learners Professional Development Grant to six organizations to train preschool teachers who work with dual-language learners.

The nation's federal K-12 law may be penalizing older English-language learners and the schools that educate them, a new report from the Migration Policy Institute argues. By making four-year graduation rates such a prominent part of school accountability plans, the Every Student Succeeds Act could lead administrators in traditional high schools to turn away older English-learner students who may need additional time to earn their high school diplomas, posits Julie Sugarman, a senior policy analyst with the institute and the report's author.

Nearly 4 million college students are student parents — that's about a fifth of all undergraduates. "These are the people we need to be investing in," says Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, who studies student parents at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "They're really facing the odds, working hard to provide for their families and that's what this country is built on." And the data shows that investing in these students is a good bet. Student parents have better GPAs and grades than their classmates without kids. But, they are less likely to graduate. "It's these other factors, these life factors that get in the way," says Reichlin Cruse.

ESL teachers at a high school in Hawaii believed a poetry project would help their language learners express themselves. The school has now self-published the collection of poems.

The percentage of English-language learners who graduated from Rhode Island's public high schools on time fell to 71.7 percent for the class of 2018, the third straight year that the state's fastest-growing student population has seen a decline in its graduation rate, the state announced Friday. The downward trend in outcomes for English learners — their graduation rate was 77 percent in 2015 — comes as policymakers continue to craft a long-term plan to improve performance metrics in Rhode Island schools.