ELL News Headlines

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.

This year the Philadelphia school district is starting the school year later than normal. A decision that Oz Hill, the district's Chief Operating Officer, said was made to "reduce the likelihood that extreme temperatures would impact our ability to provide in-person instruction." As in many districts, school leaders in Philadelphia know that inadequate AC is a problem, but finding solutions can be complicated. Hitchner's school, for example, was supposed to get AC years ago.

Since the pandemic, nearly 16,000 early childhood programs have shuttered. Between January 2020 and January 2022, around 120,000 child care workers left the industry, many for higher paying jobs, leading to immense staffing shortages and soaring waiting lists for parents who were unable to return to work full-time due to a lack of care. Educators and experts say the federal relief aid prevented the situation from getting worse. Those funds helped keep more than 200,000 early childhood programs open and more than 1 million early childhood educators employed, thus allowing more than 9.5 million children to receive care. When the federal stabilization funds run out at the end of September and child care providers can no longer rely on this much-needed funding, experts say the consequences could be immense. A recent report by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, found an estimated 3.2 million children will eventually lose child care if those federal funds are not replaced.

Puerto Rico has seen a string of natural disasters in the past few years – hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and landslides. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, things got even worse.