ELL News Headlines

Violent crime and unemployment rates are nearly twice the national average in Baltimore. Educators say factors like these add significant stress to children, causing emotional and behavioral problems, so several public schools are working to reduce that stress with mindfulness and meditation. Hari Sreenivasan reports.

For more than two decades, San Antonio’s Latino literary community has advocated, sometimes with little support, for a public space that celebrates the city's deep Latino literary traditions. Now they will have that space at the Central Library's new Latino Collection and Resource Center.

In January, New York City's schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, sent a letter home to students' families, reassuring them that the city was not keeping records of their immigration status and that immigration agents would not be roaming schools unfettered. But that has not kept the questions from coming, said Maite Junco, a senior adviser at the city's Education Department.

In this essay for Education Week, Justin Minkel writes, "I became a teacher 15 years ago. Subtracting the years I was a stay-at-home dad, I have taught over 2,000 days. Not one of them was perfect. There were moments of magic, joy, laughter, and plenty of love. But there were always imperfections…The mistakes are part of the joy. The sloppiness is part of the humanity. A classroom should be a messy, vibrant place where the unexpected is woven into the fabric of each day, where slips, stumbles, and blunders abound—along with moments of grace and the unpredictable brilliance of children."

In the second year of an effort to provide students of color greater access to Denver Public Schools' magnet programs for highly gifted students, white and Asian students continue to be over-identified and Hispanic and black students continue to be under-identified. The district did see a small bump in the percentage of black students identified as highly gifted after testing this year. But the percentage of Hispanic students identified — after a sizable jump in the first year of universal testing — stayed flat.

Like many school districts across the country, Providence, Rhode Island Public Schools have a rapidly growing population of English language learners and programs to help them learn their new language. The problem is the state doesn’t have enough teachers certified to teach these students.

The children in Hillary Erlich's expanded transitional kindergarten class at Grand View Boulevard Elementary School in Mar Vista are almost all 4 years old. They are the youngest in the Los Angeles Unified School District to be enrolled in a dual-language program. The district plans to open six or seven more dual-language programs for its youngest students in the fall, said Hilda Maldonado, executive director of L.A. Unified's multilingual and multicultural education department. They'll be taught half in Spanish, half in English.

One in four children in Syria are at risk of developing mental health disorders, according to a new report released by the nonprofit group Save the Children on Monday. Save the Children staff and their local partners interviewed 458 children and adults, and consulted mental health specialists, on the toll Syria's six-year war is having on children. The report, titled "Invisible Wounds," chronicles the day-to-day traumas children there face.

A team of researchers has developed a new tool to help educators evaluate the effectiveness of the surveys that schools use to identify English-language learners. The Regional Educational Laboratory's English Language Learners Alliance has created the Home Language Survey Data Quality Self-Assessment to aid state education departments and school districts improve the quality of data collected through home-language surveys—questionnaires used to identify students eligible for special help in learning English—and learn more about how the surveys are administered.

When former first lady Michelle Obama walked into a D.C. high school classroom, the stunned students erupted in tears. Obama, who still lives in Washington, made a surprise visit Tuesday to Ballou STAY High School, an alternative public high school, to speak with 14 students for two hours. Upon arriving, she hugged each of them before taking her seat in the circle. The students ranged in age from 16 to 23. Four have children, some live in shelters, and others had been expelled from previous schools. "I think she really just wanted a school and a group of students who are typically counted out to know that they themselves are amazing and wonderful and have the talents that they need to be successful," Principal Cara Fuller said.