ELL News Headlines

In this column, Mary Mélon from The Foundation for Oklahoma City Public Schools writes, "The fact that Oklahoma City Public Schools now has the opportunity to keep participants in The Foundation for Oklahoma City Public Schools' Bilingual Teacher Pipeline Project receiving pay and benefits is very good news and worthy of celebration. This program (BTPP) launched in January 2016, with the mission of providing financial support to bilingual paraprofessionals working in the district as they work to earn their degree and become certified teachers. There is an understanding that, barring any personnel issues, they will be hired by OKCPS as bilingual teachers and will take over a classroom of their own. Building this pipeline of bilingual teachers is vital for the district, which has a student population of 52 percent Hispanic students."

About 25 teachers lay on their backs, put their arms by their sides with their palms down, planted the soles of their feet into the floor—and then screamed as loud as they could.  They were doing a 'tantrum' yoga pose to release energy and stress in a professional-development session.  Donna Harrington, a yoga and wellness teacher at Innovation Academy Charter School in Tyngsboro, Mass., helped organize the five-week professional-development course, which was meant to teach self-care to teachers through yoga, meditation, and mindfulness.

The Trump administration has ended an Obama-era policy that protected undocumented immigrants with children who are United States citizens or permanent residents (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, or DAPA), but will, at least for now, keep the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which offers protection for children brought to the country illegally. Nevertheless, the future of DACA remains uncertain. "The fact that DACA was not rescinded by the same memo should not be interpreted as bearing any relevance on the longterm future of that program," department spokeswoman Jenny Burke wrote in a statement to Education Week.

Parents and educators have long documented and witnessed firsthand the psychological and academic toll of a child having to move to a new school midyear. But how students, families, and schools rebound from the moves is still a sort of black box for researchers. Because data on these hard-to-track students have been so hard to come by, researchers and advocates in the past have been stumped answering some very basic questions about student mobility: What exactly is it about moving to a different school that's most damaging, and how can schools best support mobile students?

Tracy K. Smith knows many readers are intimidated by line breaks. She knows people don't like identifying consonance, assonance or alliteration. But Smith — the newly announced 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States — wants to help America push past that anxiety.

Maria Rodriguez is president and cofounder of Vanguard Communications. In this op-ed, she writes, "As a first-generation American, I know how difficult it is for Latino students to pursue unpaid internships. Some of these students are the first in their families to go to school; they do not have a network of mentors advising them on academics or introducing them to people in influential positions. The notion of unpaid work leading to a career with upward mobility can be foreign to a Latino father or mother who regards work as a series of paid jobs that help ends meet. Their perspective may be that getting by today is more important than preparing to get by in the future."

Over the past decade, the "digital divide" in America's public schools has shifted. Classrooms in nearly every corner of the country have been flooded with devices and software. High-speed internet connectivity has expanded dramatically. Yet teachers in high-poverty schools are consistently less likely than their counterparts to say they've received technology-integration training, the Education Week Research Center analysis found. The gap isn't getting any smaller.

Santa Cruz City Schools was not prepared for the influx of Salvadoran children it faced this year, officials say. Beginning in the fall, the school districts saw an unexpected surge in Salvadoran students arrive at its doors, trailing traumatic experiences like heavy luggage. Nereida Robles, a social worker for the middle and high school district, said she sees Salvadorans as the most vulnerable among the newcomer population, who have spent less than a year in U.S. schools. In addition to changes in culture, language and education systems, many of the Salvadoran students have faced additional difficulties such as a gap in their schooling and a history with gang-related violence.

Charleston County's Spanish-speaking families are gleaning multiple benefits from Abrazos, the free literacy program housed in a local elementary school providing children with preschool activities while educating their parents in English as a second language.

Dianna Wentzell, Connecticut's education commissioner, speaks four languages – English, French, Russian and Spanish – and oversaw English learner programs in a number of Connecticut school districts before coming to the state Department of Education. She was never in an English-learning program herself, but her decades of experience as an administrator, curriculum director and teacher have helped shape her feelings about what needs to be done to close Connecticut’s yawning achievement gap between English learners and their peers.