ELL News Headlines

Nearly 60 percent of Lahaina students haven’t enrolled in classes after the deadly fire, and families are yearning to rebuild their school network for educational and emotional support.

As scores of asylum-seeking families continue arriving in New York City, the city’s efforts to quickly enroll their children in public schools are often failing to keep pace, according to families, advocates, and education department staffers.

West Virginia University would keep some face-to-face Spanish and Chinese classes but eliminate majors in those subjects and numerous other foreign language and linguistics classes under a revised budget-cutting plan announced Tuesday. There would also be no more master’s degrees in linguistics or in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL).

School enrollment for the nation’s youngest learners nosedived during the pandemic — and has yet to fully recover. Instability in early childhood education could cause long-term problems, not only for public school enrollment more generally, but for schools’ ability to recover academically from the years of pandemic disruption.

For book lovers, the library is the best place in town. For young children who have never entered that space, the shelves seem endless, the stacks are tall, and they have no idea where to begin. These eight books comprise a love letter to libraries to help newcomers get their bearings. They're only a start.

How many people are pursuing careers as teachers? A new analysis looks at nearly 15 years of teacher-preparation program enrollment data to find out. The data reveals a significant national decline in enrollment that now seems to be leveling out. Still, the number of education students in the United States declined by about a quarter of a million between 2008 and 2020.

Record-high chronic absentee rates in California show little sign of returning to pre-pandemic levels anytime soon, and data shows that’s especially true for kindergarten students.

The surge in book challenges nationwide is having a chilling effect on school librarians, who are more likely to avoid buying books or to remove titles from collections because of their content than they were last year, according to SLJ’s 2023 Controversial Books Survey.

After missing four days of classes last fall at Gompers Elementary-Middle School, Jay’Sean Hull was called into the cafeteria with 100 other students with similar attendance records. The group was introduced to attendance agent Effie Harris, a key figure in the school’s efforts to improve on a dismal statistic. The previous school year, a staggering 82% of students in the northwest Detroit school were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days. Harris explained that the students had been selected for a relatively new program pairing students at risk of becoming chronically absent with 20 adult mentors in the building. 

Just before 7 a.m. Monday, the first day of school in Denver Public Schools, 7-year-old Sara sat on her family’s couch, velcroing brand-new sneakers so glittery that when she ran her hand over the outside, sparkles clung to her fingertips. Sara was excited despite a big change. Her old school, Fairview Elementary, was one of three schools closed by DPS this past spring because of low enrollment — a persistent problem caused by lower birth rates and high housing prices that have pushed families out of the city.