ELL News Headlines

This comic from NPR visual journalist LA Johnson tells the story of Merari, a first-grader enrolled in a dual-language program.

Ten Republican state attorneys general on Thursday urged federal authorities to rescind DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a policy set by former U.S. President Barack Obama that protects from deportation nearly 600,000 immigrants brought into the country illegally by their parents, known as "Dreamers." In a letter on Thursday, the Republican attorneys general asked that DHS abolish the DACA program going forward, while noting that the government did not have to rescind permits that had already been issued.  If the federal government does not withdraw DACA, the attorneys general said they would file a legal challenge to the program in federal court in Texas.

On Thursday evening, after the last day of classes at the Onondaga Nation School here, students and families plan to gather at the Tsha’ Thoñ’nhes, or sports pavilion, to celebrate the eighth graders. There will be singing and dancing. Parents will give the eighth graders beaded necklaces signifying their clans and the younger students will give them presents. While it will not be an official graduation ceremony, the families in the nation, south of Syracuse, hope to make it as festive as possible, to put an exclamation mark on the end of a year that is otherwise ending in uncertainty and discord. Since June 16, most parents have kept their children home from school. They are protesting what they see as disrespectful actions by the local school board, which manages the school under a contract with the state but has no Onondaga representatives. The families say that they and the nation's leadership have been excluded from decisions about hiring and budgeting.

The District of Columbia and 26 states, including Maryland and Virginia, offer school districts the option of adding the Seal of Biliteracy certification to diplomas — and students who grew up speaking English are eagerly seeking it out in their studies of languages from Spanish to Mandarin to American Sign Language. The rest of the country would do well to follow these states' lead. Bilingualism and biliteracy make individual students more competitive in the college application process and job market. Along the way, dual-language immersion helps students become better learners and thinkers generally and can help close the achievement gap not just for non-native English speakers but also for African American students and poor students. Cities and smaller communities also benefit from a biliterate population as they build business sectors with global reach.

School superintendents across the country are raising alarms about the possibility that Republican health care legislation would curtail billions of dollars in annual funding they count on to help students with disabilities and poor children. For the past three decades, Medicaid has helped pay for services and equipment that schools provide to special-education students, as well as school-based health screening and treatment for children from low-income families. Now, educators from rural red states to the blue coasts are warning that the GOP push to shrink Medicaid spending will strip schools of what a national superintendents association estimates at up to $4 billion per year.

What does it mean to lose your land, your language, and your heritage? For Alaska Natives, these are existential threats. On a trip to Southeast Alaska, NPR’s Melissa Block traveled to one village that is finding new ways to survive: Klukwan, ancestral home of the Tlingit tribe.

When President Trump announced in the winter that he would ban people from six mostly Muslim countries from entering the United States to protect national security, university leaders were some of the most outspoken opponents of the measure, warning it would hinder research and recruitment of the best talent in the world. On Monday, some university leaders welcomed a Supreme Court ruling that Trump also claimed as a victory. “While we are still reviewing the Court’s decision, the Court has rightly recognized that students, faculty, and lecturers from the designated countries have a bona fide relationship with an American entity and should not be barred from entering the United States,” Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the Association of American Universities, said in a statement Monday afternoon.

Students in two Wisconsin school districts recently became the first to receive a new badge of honor in Wisconsin. Roughly 100 students from Waukesha and Madison graduated in June with the state’s new Seal of Biliteracy, which recognizes students who have achieved proficiency in English and another language.

Seventy-five years ago this month, a 13 year old girl in Amsterdam sat down and wrote the first entry in a red-checkered diary. Over the next two years, hundreds more pages followed as Anne Frank told about life in the "secret annex" where her family was hiding from the Nazis. For educators, the diary provides a rare chance for students to learn about the Holocaust from someone their own age.

The Girl Scouts of the USA will soon offer badges in cybersecurity for girls in grades K-12 as part of a growing national effort to bring technological skill and digital savvy to America's school children. "We recognize that in our increasingly tech-driven world, future generations must possess the skills to navigate the complexities and inherent challenges of the cyber realm," Girl Scouts chief executive officer Sylvia Acevedo said in a statement.