ELL News Headlines

Current and former English-language learners have made significant progress in the past 15 years on the test dubbed the "Nation's Report Card" — improving faster than English-only students.

More than a third of U.S. states assign letter grades to schools based on various formulas that include to one extent or another standardized test scores. This post is about the effects of this policy on one student, an ELL, and his teacher in North Carolina, where letter grades are given based entirely on testing data. The author is teacher Justin Parmenter, who teaches seventh-grade language arts at Waddell Language Academy in Charlotte. He was a finalist for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Teacher of the Year in 2016.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a plan to overhaul admissions to New York City’s elite public high schools, inviting some praise and even more backlash from students, parents and lawmakers. Admission to New York City’s specialized high schools is complicated under normal circumstances, so here is a guide to the schools, de Blasio’s proposal and the political tensions.

The Clark County, Nev., school district has worked hard for several years to get lessons aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards into teachers' hands. As a result, the district's director of K-12 science, Sheryl Colgan, does not mince words when asked what her teachers thought of a batch of newly published, purportedly aligned high school textbooks.

What does it take to become an American? In 2015, This American Life told the story of a Somali refugee who was finally issued a visa to come and live in the United States. "This big smile was on my face. I've never had such a big smile," Abdi Nor Iftin said at the time. Iftin's long road to the US began when he was only a child in Mogadishu, watching American movies and teaching himself English, while brutality and war raged around him. In his new memoir, Call Me American, he tells his story from the beginning: with his nomadic parents and their now-unimaginably peaceful, pastoral life.

If you're a child living in Afghanistan, there's a better than 40 percent chance you're not in school. That's one of the damning items from a report that paints a bleak picture of the state of education in the war-torn country. According to the report, released Saturday by UNICEF, USAID, the think tank Samuel Hall and the Afghan government, 43.7 percent of Afghan children between the ages of 7 and 17 — 3.7 million kids — are not receiving schooling, despite education being a constitutional right in Afghanistan.

Norberta González and Martha Xuncax were dissolving into giggles, recalling the day a few months earlier that Xuncax was helping González with her English and grilling her in advance of her U.S. citizenship examination. Each year, Xuncax and scores of other students volunteer through UCLA's Project SPELL — for Students for Progress in Employee Language Learning — to teach English as a second language to UCLA employees. About 80 UCLA employees, many of whom work as custodians, housekeepers, groundskeepers or painters, are enrolled in the free, one-on-one tutoring.

In Denver, there is a high school where more than one-third of the students were born outside the United States and where "being 'different' is an asset, and inclusion is the norm." That is part of the piece below that profiles Denver South High School, a winner in the 2017 "Schools of Opportunity" project, which recognizes public high schools that work to close opportunity gaps by creating learning environments that reach every student.

Books For Africa has sent more than 41 million books over the last 30 years to 53 different countries, where students say the variety of titles have made them enthusiastic readers. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

"Amal is an inquisitive young girl living with her family in a Punjabi village in rural Pakistan. Inspired by her favorite teacher, Amal dreams of becoming an educator. However, the tween has to stay home to run the household while her mother recovers from postpartum depression. Her ambitions fade away completely, though, after an accident involving the car of the wealthy Jawad Sahib, and she becomes a servant in Sahib's house to pay off her family's debts. Amal discovers the strength to overcome her harrowing circumstances, while making new friends and finding comfort in books and learning. What follows is Amal’s social awakening…A strong choice for all middle grade shelves, especially where readers are seeking stories about young girls in non-Western countries overcoming adversity."