ELL News Headlines

In South Texas, pediatricians started sounding the alarm weeks ago as migrant shelters began filling up with younger children separated from their parents after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The concerned pediatricians contacted Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and she flew to Texas and visited a shelter for migrant children in the Rio Grande Valley. There, she saw a young girl in tears. "She couldn't have been more than 2 years old," Kraft says. "Just crying and pounding and having a huge, huge temper tantrum. This child was just screaming, and nobody could help her. And we know why she was crying. She didn't have her mother. She didn't have her parent who could soothe her and take care of her."

Note: See more on this story from CNN and Fortune, as well as statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics and former First Lady Laura Bush. 

Latino Americans, the largest and the fastest growing ethnic minority in the United States, are half as likely to hold a college degree as non-Hispanic white adults, an education gap that has been widening since 2000, according to a June 2018 report.

Emcee Jacqueline Woodson set the tone right away for Friday morning’s children's book and author breakfast at BookExpo, explaining, "We're very intentional in the stories we are trying to tell. Through our narratives, we're trying to change this crazy world." The panel included Meg Medina, Dave Eggers, Jacqueline Woodson, Yuyi Morales and Viola Davis.

California schools are using various methods to not only get low-income and diverse high school students interested in STEM subject areas, but to increase the odds they'll actually get a STEM-related degree and wind up working in one of those fields.

With the World Cup starting this week, spectators will be hearing the iconic voice of Andrés Cantor everywhere. He's the lead play-by-play announcer for Spanish-language network Telemundo, which has the Spanish-language broadcast rights in the U.S. for the World Cup. While his voice may be familiar, many don't know Cantor's story. He grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and moved to the United States as a young teen, where he later became one of the country's most well-known sports broadcasters on Spanish-language television.

Post it, pen it, make it public. As New York City​'s three public library systems push for increased funding in the upcoming city budget, the entities have launched a website that allows New Yorkers to leave messages of support for their local library branches.

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.