ELL News Headlines

After years of forcing students who aren't proficient in English into four-hour blocks of intensive English immersion that research shows is ineffective, Arizona lawmakers are considering alternatives. Legislation to allow English-language learners to enroll in dual language courses unanimously cleared an Arizona Senate Education Committee Thursday, moving the state one step closer toward ending what some educators call more than a decade of educational "malpractice."

Ana Maria Rodriguez, a social worker from Phoenix, was born and raised in Arizona. But she didn’t start learning how to speak, read and write in English until she began taking bilingual classes in elementary school. That’s because Rodriguez’s parents, who immigrated from Mexico before she was born, spoke only Spanish. So when her elementary school — the only means she had to learn English — traded in its bilingual classes for state-mandated English-only immersion programs, she felt stumped. She said the English-only policies, required by the 2003 ballot initiative Proposition 203, caused her to feel ashamed of not speaking English fluently. That, in turn, caused her to resent her own identity. "I hated, hated, hated, hated being Hispanic, or being Mexican, and speaking that language because I felt like other people didn't like me," Rodriguez said. "I’ve always had that insecurity." Rodriguez isn’t alone. Many millennial-aged Latinos say the state's push for English-only education affected the way they viewed their transnational identities and cultures.

The debut author talks about the novel's many iterations, why it's important to talk about mental health in YA, and what she's working on next.

A few years ago, Cleveland Public Schools found that more than half of their students were chronically absent, missing at least 10 percent of school. While they've made steady progress to address the problem, like may school districts around the country, they still have a ways to go. Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza of Education Week reports.

With the nation's school-age population becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse, early-childhood educators should do more to embrace the differences that the nation's youngest English-learners bring to the classroom, a new report from the Migration Policy Institute concludes.

At a time when federal, state and institutional policies are backing away from helping low-income, first-generation and ethnic and racial minority students, a few colleges are spending significant amounts of time and money on providing such help, using a model piloted by City University of New York, or CUNY. Some of these schools are trying to buck the trends that are making it even harder than it was before for these students to get to and through college. But they're also looking out for their own self-interest. Public university and college budgets are increasingly dependent on how many students graduate. And all institutions, including private ones, are struggling with enrollment declines. The students in the greatest supply are precisely those who need the most help.

They had come so far together, almost 3,000 miles across three countries and three borders: a mother with three children, fleeing a gang in El Salvador that had tried to kill her teenage son. But now, in a frigid Border Patrol facility in Arizona where they were seeking asylum, Silvana Bermudez was told she had to say goodbye. Her kids were being taken from her.

On Mondays during the school year, we post a photograph that appeared elsewhere in The New York Times, remove its caption and ask students “What’s Going On in This Picture?” Teachers across grade levels and subjects have told us again and again how powerful of a learning tool such a simple activity can be. In this post Claudia Leon and Margaret Montemagno, two English as a New Language (E.N.L.) teachers explain how they use the feature to help students improve their writing.

Gregg Behr is a co-chair of the Remake Learning Network and the executive director of The Grable Foundation, a Pittsburgh-based philanthropic organization, which funds a number of programs that support public education. In this commentary, he writes, "The census keeps kids housed, fed, rested, and safe. In order for students to come to school ready to learn in 2020 and the decade beyond, an accurate count is crucial. It won't, however, be easy."

When Astou asked her seventh grade students to write personal essays, she modeled the assignment with a personal story of her own. Astou came to the U.S. from Senegal when she was seven and grew up 10 blocks away from where she teaches. Now, the 25-year-old is one of nearly 9,000 teachers with DACA across the country — without the program, many of them would be barred from professional work.