ELL News Headlines

All summer, when his students in Northern Virginia are supposed to be enjoying time away from the classroom, Principal Clint Mitchell worries about whether the children who rely on free lunches during the school year are getting enough to eat. This week, the county school system launched an expanded effort to address that need through an old-fashioned method: community barbecues. All children, regardless of whether they are eligible for free meals during the school year, eat free, while adults pay $2. The lunches will be served every weekday until Aug. 26, except for Monday and the following day, the Fourth of July.

After she realized there weren't enough girl superheroes in the world, Cynthia Leonor Garza created one. She talks with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro about her new book, Lucia the Luchadora.

The public television series "POV" opened its 30th season this week with an education-themed documentary that could not be more timely. The first show airing is "Dalya's Other Country," a 75-minute film about a schoolgirl and her family who fled the violence of Syria in 2012 and settled in Los Angeles. 

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.