ELL News Headlines

On a muggy fall morning, pre-K teacher Ruth Shows inspected the work of students in her classroom, stepping over a cluster of little learners sprawled on the carpet. She watched a 4-year-old thrust her tiny hands into a plastic tub of rainbow-colored rice, scooping up handfuls of magnetic letters and numbers. Another began sorting the bounty, putting numbers into one tray and letters in another. What started as a treasure hunt had become a logic game in this state-funded pre-K classroom, a free early learning experience that’s only recently become available to a small number of students in Mississippi.

Middle school students in a handful of cities are getting a powerful and rare boost: a team of adult advisers who help them win acceptance to college-preparatory high school programs, an accomplishment that can pave their pathways to college.

In 1980, when Patricia Cantu started kindergarten in Houston, there wasn't much bilingual education at her school. "I walked in and it was only English —  that’s all it was," Cantu said. "I remember specifically singing the ABC’s and not having a clue what they were talking about. I remember just feeling lost and how helpless that feeling was as a four or five-year-old." Today, that makes Cantu uniquely qualified for her job. She leads the second language department in Alief ISD, southwest of Houston.

While no one book list can adequately explore all the variations in culture and traditions embodied within the broad category of the "Asian/Pacific American Experience," readers who identify as Asian American and/or Pacific American—especially as first-generation Americans—will find reflections of their own stories in these novels. Others will glean insight into lives that may seem unfamiliar at first glance.

Julia Keleher's relationship with Puerto Rico's education department has shifted for this second time this week. Two days after stepping down as the island's education secretary and shifting into the role of paid department adviser, Keleher is no longer advising the department.

President Trump, in his most recent rebuke of Central American nations for what he says is their failure to address the issue of migration, announced plans to cut off aid to three nations — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — known as the Northern Triangle. Critics of the cuts say they will target programs aimed at preventing violence, curbing extreme poverty and hunger, and strengthening the justice system — the very problems residents of those countries give for leaving home and pursuing a more stable future elsewhere. Here are some examples of programs financed by American dollars in the three countries targeted by President Trump.

Using Google to translate Spanish text into English is a trick used by high school students to avoid doing their Spanish homework — not something you'd expect to see from candidates for the highest office in the land. Yet several Democratic White House hopefuls appear to be doing precisely that.

This month, one of the big news stories is about parents who bribed and cheated to get their kids into prestigious universities. And then there's the college admissions story of John Awiel Chol Diing. Diing, 25, is a former refugee from South Sudan and grew up in U.N.-supported camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. His family couldn't even afford high school fees, let alone college tuition. But today, thanks to an unlikely series of events, he is a student at Earth University in Costa Rica, finishing up his fourth year studying agricultural science.

Parkland, Fla., is experiencing a fresh wave of grief after the recent suicides of two students who survived the mass school shooting there last year. A swell of coverage of those deaths—and of an apparent suicide of the father of a child who died in the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn.—are driving questions about suicide contagion, trauma, survivor's guilt, and student mental health to the forefront. And those questions are relevant to educators around the country, even if their students haven't survived a collective trauma that dominated headlines.

The experience of walking under thickly polluted skies on a trip to China in middle school remains vivid years later in Catherine ­Xiang’s memory. Now 17, she has become an environmental advocate. The Oakton High School student is far from alone in her fears about the planet’s future. Millennials and members of Generation Z acknowledge in greater numbers than their forebears that humans contribute to climate change. In recent years, high school students across Fairfax County, Va., have lobbied local officials to install solar panels at schools — a movement that struck success when the Fairfax County School Board approved plans in January to install the panels at three schools.