ELL News Headlines

Imagine a small, developing nation whose education system is severely lacking: schools are poorly funded, students can't afford tuition or books, fewer than half of indigenous girls even attend school — and often drop out to take care of siblings or get married. These are the schools of rural Guatemala. Now meet a firebrand educator who thinks he has a way to reinvent those schools by focusing on the whole child.

Puerto Rico's students and teachers are still grappling with fallout from Hurricane Maria more than a year after the storm struck the island. So what do we know about the extent of trauma in the U.S. territory's schools, and what resources are being brought to bear to help them? 

Like his ancestors, 65-year-old Clayton Long spent his childhood immersed in Navajo culture, greeting fellow clan members with old, breathful Navajo words like "Yá'át'ééh." Then he was sent to an English-only boarding school where his native language, also known as Diné, was banned. "I went into a silent resistance," Long says from his home in Blanding, Utah. He vowed that he would help to preserve it after he left, work he has done for about three decades as a teacher. This week, he’s entering new territory on that mission: the app store. Long is one of the educators working with language-learning startup Duolingo on the company’s latest endeavor: using its popular app to revive threatened languages. On Oct. 8, celebrated in some places as Indigenous People's Day, Duolingo will launch courses in both Navajo and Hawaiian, two of the estimated 3,150 languages that face doubts about their long-term survival.

A new U.S. Department of Education report found that states are struggling to meet their academic targets for English-language learners in mathematics and reading. "The Biennial Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Title III State Formula Grant Program" found that just five states met their goals for helping English-language learners make progress in learning the language and reaching academic targets in mathematics and reading during the 2013-14 school year, the most recent year for which data was submitted.

On September 28, a powerful earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, followed by a tsunami with waves up to 20 feet high. One week later, the death toll has risen to 1,581, and that number is expected to increase as more bodies are recovered. More than 66,000 houses have reportedly been damaged and at least 70,000 people are homeless. The situation remains particularly precarious for tens of thousands of child survivors, many of whom have been separated from their families. The longer a child is separated from her or his family, the more difficult it is to locate them and the more at risk a child is to violence, economic and sexual exploitation, abuse and potential trafficking.

In 1932, Eleanor Roosevelt's husband Franklin had just been elected president. In the throes of raising five children, Eleanor thought they should know "what their parents were up to" and "how it all worked," according to her granddaughter Nancy Ireland. "When You Grow Up to Vote: How Our Government Works for You," a civics book Eleanor wrote for young children that year, only came across Ireland's desk a year ago, even though she has spent three decades in charge of her grandmother's literary estate. "I was never given a copy of it by my parents, which amuses me," she told PBS NewsHour about the book's new reissue this month. The book, with revised text by Michelle Markel and illustrations by Grace Lin, explains to readers age 6-12 (and beyond) that we all have a stake in how our democracy is governed.

Despite the growing numbers of English-language learners in U.S. schools, their representation in gifted and talented programs continues to lag behind not only their native English-speaking peers, but also other underserved populations, including black and Hispanic students and children from low-income families.

A new study, published in the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), explores the costs of Dual Language Immersion programs and monolingual English programs in Portland Public Schools (PPS). The study aims to uncover differences in these programs spending over time and analyzes the processes by which these programs are connected with student achievement. Portland Public Schools (PPS) has a long history of supporting DLI and uses a lottery process for student admission into these programs. In 2012, PPS partnered with the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, RAND Corporation, and the American Councils for International Education to conduct a comprehensive study of their DLI programs, including academic impact and implementation.

Yolanda Corbett knows she would have to remain at home with her youngest child if he was not enrolled in preschool. She would lose her job as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit and would have to scramble in the evenings to find friends and relatives to watch her three children while she worked a night shift in retail. Full-priced day care, which can cost thousands of dollars a month, is not an option. But the District's public preschool program has enabled Corbett and thousands of other mothers with young children to enter the workforce, according to a study showing the nearly decade-old universal preschool initiative has benefited more than just the city’s youngest residents.

As the lack of air conditioning in many Baltimore public schools garnered recent media attention and finger-pointing from the governor and others, the school system's other maintenance needs — which affect teachers and students year-round — generate less outrage. There are aging roofs, rusted pipes, cracking steps and broken elevators — all piling up to a massive maintenance backlog that has swollen to nearly $3 billion. That’s more than double the district's annual operating budget.