ELL News Headlines

Read Across America (RAA) and Dr. Seuss have always been linked. RAA events typically involve children in red-and-white striped hats, listening to a Dr. Seuss classic. In past years at the premier event in Washington, DC, local elementary students have heard Michelle Obama read The Cat in the Hat and the National Education Association (NEA) president recite Green Eggs and Ham. This year, however, they will listen to author Jesse Holland read an excerpt from his novel Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther? The 2018 Read Across America theme is "Celebrating a Nation of Diverse Readers" and the NEA press release notes that the hundreds of fourth graders in attendance on Thursday March 1 will be wearing "a rainbow of colors."

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is seeking public comment on a plan to delay the implementation of an Obama-era rule that is intended to prevent schools from unnecessarily pushing minority students into special education. The Education Department published a note in the Federal Register on Tuesday that says it wants to delay for two years the rule that was intended to be implemented starting in the 2018-2019 school year.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit over the future of DACA, which protects 690,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation and grants them work permits. The High Court's decision represents a temporary victory for the young adults brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents or guardians under the program established by President Barack Obama in 2012: It ensures DACA will remain in effect for recipients after the March 5 deadline originally set by President Donald Trump. DACA-protected immigrants whose permits lapsed, or those with permits that will expire soon, may continue to apply for renewals for the time being. However, eligible undocumented immigrants who turned 15 after that date still won't be able to apply, and neither will immigrants who would have qualified for DACA but never applied.

See related coverage from The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, PBS NewsHour, and USA Today.

Public policy, research, and teaching methods have not adjusted to accommodate the nation's increasingly diverse English-language-learner population—and the problem begins well before children enter K-12 classrooms, a new report from the Migration Policy Institute finds.

"Valentine's Day was a day of love, passion and friendships as Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School celebrated February 14, 2018 ..." That's how the student journalists writing for the Eagle Eye, the newspaper at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, started their story about one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history. Student journalists often face a challenge balancing their roles as students and objective reporters. In the past year, intrepid high school journalists have made headlines for their coverage. But writing about your school becomes even harder when everyone else is writing about it, too.

Long known as unflashy arbiters of budgets and boundaries, some city and suburban school boards are shedding their stodgy reputation and staking out ardent positions on political and social issues. Skeptics question the utility or appropriateness of those declarations, but some boards view decrying gender and racial inequity as part of their professional duty.

"Dual Immersion" is a phrase you hear more-and-more in education circles.  This column from Larry Ferlazzo will explore what it means in practice with Elizabeth B. Beltran, Barbara Gottschalk, Dr. Conor P. Williams, Carol Salva, Margarita Calderón, Ph.D., Shawn Slakk, and Leslie Davison.

It was supposed to be a day like any other for Amanda Alexander. The District’s chief of elementary schools ran 3½ miles on the treadmill and arrived at work with plans to visit two schools and meet with some of her ­deputies. But then Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) summoned Alexander in the morning with a startling question: Would she be willing to run the entire D.C. Public Schools system? Chancellor Antwan Wilson was being forced to resign, and Bowser needed someone immediately to take charge for the rest of the school year. Alexander accepted and, by late Tuesday afternoon, became interim chancellor of a system engulfed in two scandals, one involving graduation policy and the other the school lottery.

In a new report, Latino teachers say they have unique strengths that benefit their students and the whole school—but that sometimes hamper their own professional success. The report, released by The Education Trust, tells the stories of Latino teachers who say they want to advocate for their students, which might mean incorporating the Spanish language or Latino culture into their classrooms or accepting the added responsibilities of being a translator. But when they do this work, they say, they are viewed as being inferior teachers or only good for Latino students—and that they are overlooked for advancement opportunities.

Alt.Latino shares some great new music in celebration of Black History Month: songs with a musical or cultural connection to Africa and Latin America — which is not hard to do given the dark historical shadow of the slave trade in the Americas. This week, we pull some tracks aside that reflect the connection in ways that would surprise.