ELL News Headlines

Award-winning teacher Justin Minkel writes, "There are plenty of hard things about school for all kids. Too many tests, too much sitting, too little recess. But for English learners, there is an added layer of difficulty. The constant effort to understand and make yourself understood can be exhausting. All 25 of my students speak either Spanish or Marshallese at home. Here are five ways I've found to make school a little easier for them."

Penguin Young Readers has announced the launch of a new imprint, called Kokila, that will focus on diverse books for children and young adults. According to Penguin, the imprint's mission is to "add depth and nuance to the way children and young adults see the world and their place in it."

Karen Reyes spends her days teaching a group of deaf toddlers at Lucy Read Pre-Kindergarten School in Austin, Tex., how to understand a world they cannot hear. For the first time in her four-year teaching career, Ms. Reyes, 29, is at a loss. One of nearly 9,000 educators protected under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, Ms. Reyes has struggled to explain to her students, through sign language and pictures, the uncertainty of her future.

Parents today struggle to set screen time guidelines. One big reason is a lack of role models. Grandma doesn't have any tried-and-true sayings about iPad time. This stuff is just too new. But many experts on kids and media are also parents themselves. So when I was interviewing dozens of them for my book The Art of Screen Time, I asked them how they made screen time rules at home. None of them held themselves up as paragons, but it was interesting to see how the priorities they focused on in their own research corresponded with the priorities they set at home.

St. Mary Parish knew change was needed. By the mid-2000s, the state of Louisiana had placed several of its schools in “academic assistance,” a designation for schools that fail to improve sufficiently. Some had remained there for nearly 10 years. Meanwhile, the rural district’s test scores lagged behind the state average. By 2016, the high-poverty school district had turned around. The key to St. Mary’s success was to place students at the forefront of all decision-making. Often that involved thinking differently about how, when and where teaching and learning actually occur.

A new documentary from the New York Times looks into how one suicide prevention center in Puerto Rico is coping with more phone calls from people who are still trying to recuperate from the effects of Hurricane María.

With districts facing a shortage of bilingual teachers, paraprofessionals present a rich source of candidates. They often have strong ties to the community and already know students and parents, says Santiago Wood, executive director of the National Association for Bilingual Education.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Delaware filed a lawsuit against the state, arguing that it underfunds education services for its disadvantaged student populations. Backed by Delawareans for Educational Opportunity and the Delaware NAACP, the ACLU claims that the state's financing policies violate the state constitution, which charges Delaware to provide a "general and efficient system of free public schools" for all children. The case has important implications, in particular, for the state's fast-growing population of K-12 English learner (EL) students. Over the past twenty years, the number of Delaware ELs has surged, increasing by 428 percent.

The Northeast chapter of REFORMA (National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking) had their second annual Spanish-language Book Buzz on Friday, January 12, at the Penguin Random House offices in New York City. A group of approximately 50 librarians from the tri-state area were treated to a preview of upcoming and recently released Spanish-language, bilingual, and Latinx-focused books for the library market.

Atia Abawi is used to looking at war through the eyes of a journalist. She's made a career in news covering Iraq and Afghanistan — the latter being the country her own family fled in the early 1980s. Increasingly though, Abawi has turned to fiction. The people struggling in her novels are young — she writes for teens. And the story behind her latest book, A Land Of Permanent Goodbyes, is drawn from a global crisis that's been dominating headlines the last few years: Refugees fleeing the war in Syria. Abawi researches her fiction like a journalist, interviewing real people, traveling to refugee camps and poring over shocking photographs.