ELL News Headlines

It wasn't long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley's parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley's elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction. The psychologist Richard Freed, who wrote a book about the dangers of screen-time for kids and how to connect them back to real world experiences, divides his time between speaking before packed rooms in Silicon Valley and his clinical practice with low-income families in the far East Bay, where he is often the first one to tell parents that limiting screen-time might help with attention and behavior issues.

For districts slammed by natural disasters, getting schools ready to reopen is a mammoth undertaking, filled with a series of seemingly minute decisions and steps that can make all the difference between a seamless reopening and one filled with recriminations, finger-pointing, and regrets. There’s the risk of moving too fast, of opening before all the conditions are ideal. New Orleans' schools faced that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when officials in that city opened some buildings with too few teachers and staff and served students partially frozen sandwiches for lunch. But the act of children waking up in the morning and going to school is one of the most fundamental things in life, and restoring that routine is essential to regaining a sense of normalcy in communities struck by disaster. That’s why reopening schools is one of the first jobs officials tackle after disasters. But very few people leading school districts have had the experience of doing just that.

School systems across the country should do more to ensure that current and former English-language learners have access to STEM education, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds.

The U.S. Department of Education has released a how-to guide for educators who use educational technology to work with English-language learners. The toolkit, titled "Using Educational Technology--21st Century Supports for English-Learners," offers basic advice on what educators should know and ask when using and searching for tech tools to support students who are learning the language.

It's no secret that American workplaces are becoming more reliant on technology. But what may surprise the country's K-12 educators and policymakers is how work at nearly every rung of the employment ladder is becoming more digitized. Often, the skills needed to succeed have less to do with computer programming than what experts call "digital literacy"—the ability to interpret, create, and strategically use digital information.

English learners who are struggling readers too often lack the instruction and supports they need, even as they are tasked with absorbing skills and content in English while they’re learning the language. They might be misdiagnosed with a disability, or a disability might go undiagnosed entirely. Both sets of experiences reveal a gap in our understanding of how best to identify and serve English learners with reading disabilities — a gap that researchers from the Harvard Brain. Experience. Education. Lab (B.E.E.) are trying to fill.

Larry Ferlazzo's new question-of-the-week is: “What are the best ways to build relationships with students?" Larry has collected responses from dozens of contributors. Education consultant Tara Brown writes, “For some kids, the classroom may be the only 'family' they ever really experience. It certainly will be the best chunk of many students' entire days. Investing in time to build positive relationships through team-building exercises to quickly learn names and facts about each other, partner work, sharing student profiles, embracing different nationalities, and more, will all shape the tone and feel of daily peer and teacher interactions. Many teachers still feel as though 'they don't time to build relationships with kids'. Research is very clear that we don't have time not to build relationships because you can't get to Bloom without going through Maslow."

Thousands of Central American migrants are walking, taking buses and wading through rivers in a cross-continent effort to reach the United States. As of Monday, the United Nations said the caravan has grown to about 7,200 migrants. The trek has entered the political debate ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. Here is what we know and what's next.

Four Rivers Community School has been identified as having a high-achieving dual language immersion program, and will be further studied for the next few years to determine the whys and hows of that success. The Center for Applied Linguistics is performing the study project, titled "Features of Dual Language Immersion in High Achieving Programs." The nonprofit organization is based in Washington D.C., and it focuses on the fields of bilingual and dual language education, and English as a second language, among a host of other fields.

Kara Bobroff is the founding principal of Native American Community Academy, a pioneering school in Albuquerque that grew from an entire community speaking up about what kind of school it wanted. Now in its 13th year, NACA is expanding within New Mexico and nationally as the "NACA Inspired" Schools Network. Ashoka’s Simon Stumpf caught up with Bobroff to learn more about what makes this model unique and effective for Indigenous students and what it can teach us all.