ELL News Headlines

Assessments in K-12 schools have traditionally been designed with a monolingual English-speaking student in mind. But the English learner population, speaking a variety of home languages, continues to grow across the country. How effective, then, are traditional assessments in measuring what multilingual learners know in a given subject if they are limited to testing in English while they are still learning that language?

The Supreme Court on Thursday held that admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that relied in part on racial considerations violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a historic ruling that will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.

Georgianna McKenny's award-winning podcast begins, fittingly, with a blaring alarm. McKenny is the newly-announced high-school winner of NPR's fifth-annual Student Podcast Challenge. In a year with more than 3,300 entries – from middle- and high-schoolers in 48 states as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico – McKenny and her winning entry tell the story of the toll Jackson's water crisis has taken on the city's students.

Parents are under a lot of pressure these days: They need to support children’s emotional development after a traumatic few years of the pandemic, address learning loss and prepare children to be productive, successful members of society. The good news is, research shows there's a simple way to help kids do well academically and socially — and that involves simply giving them opportunities to play. But not all parents know how to support play or what kind of play benefits children the most, according to the forthcoming results of a recent survey by researchers at Temple University and the LEGO Foundation, which also funded the research.

These sweet selections in Spanish and English will inform as well as delight readers and their young listeners. 

From dog walkers to delivery drivers, from landscapers to farm laborers, many workers whose jobs require time in the outdoors have plowed on this week, even as smoke from wildfires raging in Canada has created abysmal air quality up and down the East Coast. Their predicament reveals how outdoor laborers, more than any other segment of the workforce, remain vulnerable when it comes to climate change.

The nation is in the midst of a teacher shortage, and at the end of another school year, burnout is causing many more teachers to call it quits. Micaela DeSimone is a 6th-grade English teacher in a charter school in Queens, New York. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on teacher burnout and explains how the past few years have changed her views on what was once her dream job.

Billowing smoke and particulate matter spreading south from the wildfires scorching Canada are creating dangerous air quality across the eastern United States. An estimated 98 million Americans from New Hampshire to South Carolina were under air quality alerts Wednesday, and health experts urge caution in the days ahead.

Newark Public Schools and central office will be closed on Thursday as the smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to impact New Jersey and the surrounding areas. The district made the announcement on its Facebook page just after midnight on Thursday. Unhealthy air quality conditions are expected to continue Thursday, and as of 7 a.m., Newark and nearly the rest of the state were under a purple alert, marking very unhealthy air quality conditions for residents. 

Summertime is when we teachers can de-clutter our minds and decompress from the school year. It can also be a time for us to reflect on the bigger questions facing our profession. Today’s post is the latest in a series exploring what some of those questions might be.