ELL News Headlines

The Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy has put together a framework to evaluate states' Every Student Succeeds Act plans to determine if they meet the law's requirements for English-language-learner students. Outlining 33 key questions, the brief guides readers through sections in state plans that should address English-learner accountability and offers guidance on how to evaluate the effectiveness of policies that states plan to adopt.

More than 160,000 students headed back to school Tuesday in Montgomery County as the sprawling suburban district outside Washington projected another year of record enrollment and deepened its focus on foreign languages and career education. Montgomery is increasingly diverse — roughly 30 percent Hispanic, 29 percent white, 22 percent black and 14 percent Asian — with more English-language learners and economically disadvantaged students in recent years.

School districts across a wide swath of the southeastern U.S. remained shuttered on Monday as Hurricane Irma pounded Florida with ferocious winds and heavy rains and continued its march north. As of late Sunday, more than 2.3 million people in Florida remained without power. And with the effects from the storm — downgraded late Sunday to a Category 2 hurricane — expected to linger into the coming week, school officials from various Florida districts said it will take some time to decide when to reopen.

With more than 600,000 Houston-area students set to return to the classroom Monday, teachers and school officials wonder how many will show up - and if they'll be ready to learn. And at some schools, business as usual will be a distant memory.

After Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that DACA would be rescinded, Latino USA asked listeners to share their reactions. They opened our phone lines and asked listeners how Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals had changed their opportunities for higher education and work.

In Highline Public Schools, district officials have set an ambitious goal of graduating all students as bilingual by 2026. There’s at least one big hurdle to making that happen: Where do you find enough bilingual educators to teach those students in multiple languages?

In the age of standardized testing, screen time and what some see as a generation of excessively coddled children, a new movement of preschools is pushing kids outdoors, come rain or shine, heat or cold, to connect with nature and learn to take measured risks, in addition to math and the ABCs. Jeffrey Brown reports from Midland, Michigan.

Education professor Xia Chao, an education researcher awarded by the American Educational Research Association and the Literacy Research Association, is working on a new project involving ESL students in the Pittsburgh area called Savings Stories. Saving Stories is a collaborative effort by Baldwin-Whitehall teacher Renee Christman and Paul Kelly, librarian at Whitehall Public Library, to turn stories from local refugee families into bilingual picture books.

This gorgeous tale about a father/son fishing trip shows the interconnectedness of family and the inexorable way that generational history impacts the present. The story is told from the boy's perspective, as his father wakes him long before dawn to go fishing… The quiet time together provides opportunities for the man to talk about his past life fishing with his brother in a different pond in Vietnam, long ago before the war and before coming to America. After they return home, triumphant, with a bucket of fish, the boy contemplates his role as the youngest in the family — no longer a baby — and even though he is sad that both his parents have to work, he knows there will be a happy, love-filled family dinner later that night.

The Trump administration ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects nearly 800,000 undocumented youth from deportation. The announcement places a new pressure on Congress to add immigration reform to their fall legislative docket. John Yang reports on the decision and the reaction from so-called “dreamers,” who are taking to the street to protest.