ELL News Headlines

More than half of 2,500 students in the small Russellville, AL city school district identify as Hispanic or Latino, and about a quarter are still learning English —known as EL students. But the district at times has struggled to find the people and money necessary to help EL students achieve. It typically takes five years of intensive, small-group instruction, on top of regular classes, to help a student learn English and perform well in a regular classroom. 

At exactly 1:30:46 p.m. Tuesday, a group of students on Detroit’s east side made radio contact with an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, a notable feat for one of the country’s few high schools to offer an aviation curriculum. 

In Florida, Lee County’s 94 schools and programs, which educate more the 90,000 students, shuttered the day before Ian Hurricane hit, hallways emptying of students and, in some places, filling with evacuees who slept on the tile floors to wait out the hurricane. Out of the classroom, young people were severed from cafeterias — where every child in the district eats breakfast and lunch free — and classrooms and counselors.

Students were not allowed to speak Spanish at school. That was the rule that teachers instituted at a small West Texas schoolhouse near the United States-Mexico border in the 1950s, even though Spanish was the native language for many of the Mexican-American children there. The Blackwell School in tiny Marfa, Texas, was just one of many segregated schools across the southwest where Hispanic children were taught separately from their white peers. Now, the old adobe building is set to become a national historic site that supporters say will explore the often untold story of how school segregation played out in this corner of the U.S. The moment is the culmination of years of work by Blackwell alumni to preserve the school's history and to obtain formal recognitions for the site.

Teaching current events isn’t just for social studies. From exploring how the coronavirus vaccine works to studying how wildfires affect communities, it’s increasingly a focus in science, too.

Tonya Bolden and Eric Velasquez have recently collaborated on Going Places, a nonfiction picture book about the Green Book, a travel guide written and published by a Black postal worker who wanted African Americans to stay safe while traveling around the U.S. during segregation. We asked the duo to discuss the genesis of their new book, the history behind the Green Book, and why it’s still relevant today.

Every day at Concord High School, Emily Francis teaches students how to learn English while connecting to experiences they have lived through. Many of the students she teaches immigrated to the United States at a young age and live with families who don't speak English, creating few opportunities for them to learn the language. That's where Francis comes in as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher to help students learn English to succeed in their future lives. Being in the United States not knowing English is a struggle Francis went through herself.

This is the second post in a three-part series from Larry Ferlazzo. You can see Part One here.

A team of Neag School of Education researchers is developing a new initiative designed to help educators overcome language barriers to identify gifted students among English learners.