ELL News Headlines

Advocates who say dozens of Iraqi Christians were targeted in immigration sweeps Sunday – outside churches and restaurants in metro Detroit – fear they'll be killed if returned to their home country.  "These people have been declared victims of genocide by both the Obama administration and the current administration," said Nathan Kalasho, who runs a Madison Heights charter school with 70% of students from immigrant families and is helping to connect people affected by the raids with legal services, interpreters and aid.

California public schools are facing a shortage of teachers — specifically, a shortage of teachers qualified to teach math, science, bilingual or special education. So state lawmakers are considering making an offer to prospective teachers: commit to teach in these high-need subjects and we'll take a bite out of your tuition costs. Members of the California Assembly recently approved the creation of a grant program that would offer $20,000 scholarships to prospective teachers who promise to teach science, technology, engineering, math, bilingual education or special education in a public school for four years.

Two civil rights groups want a New Mexico judge to rule that the state's education system is failing to meet its constitutional responsibilities for groups of students, including English-language learners, Native Americans, economically disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities. A nine-week trial begins Monday—and lawyers for the plaintiffs say the case could have ramifications well beyond the state's borders.  That's because the lawyers for the parents and school districts says the state not only underfunds public schools, but essentially ignores the state's "longstanding bilingual and multicultural history."

Dual-language programs place English learners and native-English speakers together in the same classroom and offers instruction in each group's language for part of the school day. School districts across the country that have committed to reaping the benefits of dual-language instruction have found ways to make big gains in the face of obstacles, both perceived and real.  As Jacqueline Rabe Thomas finishes her series on Connecticut's English language learners, she looks at some other dual-language programs around the country and examines the opportunities and challenges for expanding dual-language programming in Connecticut.

Kathleen Rauth found out she was the Indianapolis Public Schools teacher of the year Monday when IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee and a members of the press rambled into the Center for Inquiry School 27’s media center. Rauth, an educator for 30 years, has been with IPS for the past three years. She’s made multicultural literacy and diversity the focus of her work. Rauth says throughout her careers, she's learned to ask questions and listen to students about their experiences and lives. "There is a lot of fear around what you don't know," she says about how other educators can feel. "I think I can be a model for (changing that feeling) and be that kind of resource to the whole district."

State preschool funding has returned to pre-Recession levels, and slightly more students are enrolling, but the quality of these programs continues to vary widely, concludes the latest analysis by the National Institute for Early Education Research.

The Riverhead school district hired its new superintendent last night, Dr. Aurelia L. Henriquez. Henriquez, whose parents are from Puerto Rico, said she has devoted much of her career working with immigrants and children of immigrants. Brentwood is Long Island's largest school district, with nearly 20,000 students. More than 80 percent of its student body is Latino. Riverhead's Latino student population jumped from 15 percent of the student body in 2005-2006 to 41 percent in 2015-2016.

The U.S. Education Department has long been responsible for evaluating how well states were meeting the mandates spelled out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. But when it comes to standards connected to how well students are doing academically — test scores and graduation rates, to name two — the performance of students with disabilities has been stagnant.

The way bilingual people read is conditioned by the languages they speak, according to researchers at Spain's Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language (BCBL), who found that the languages spoken by bilingual people (when they learned to read in two languages at the same time) affect their reading strategies and even the cognitive foundations that form the basis for the capacity to read.

During a months-long trial last year in a lawsuit that explored whether Connecticut is spending enough to educate students in its most impoverished districts, several educators shared stories about the education being provided to their foreign-speaking students. One New London teacher testified she didn’t have textbooks. A teacher from Windham said students often were identified as special education students just to get them the extra supports federal law requires. In 2015, legislative researchers, noting a state requirement for an annual report on ELL programs, asked the education department for more analysis and evaluation of the quality and success of local programs. The education department finally produced an annual report in February of this year, but the five-page report lumped together students who were being taught using completely different methods – making it impossible to distinguish which was producing better results.