ELL News Headlines

When Walt Griffin took the helm as superintendent of Seminole County schools in Florida, he took a close look at the data. While the school system’s more affluent elementary schools could boast of dozens of students who were identified as gifted, the gifted enrollment at some of Seminole's poorer schools could be counted on one hand, with fingers left over.  Less than a year later, the school system launched an initiative to scout more broadly and bring more diversity to its gifted student population. To lead the effort, he tapped Jeanette Lukens, a district school psychologist with her own passion for identifying talent in underserved populations.

Bank Street College of Education writes, "At Bank Street, we see in education the opportunity to make great strides in this effort. Learning about identity—including race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and more—is key to our curricula. We strongly believe that educators and librarians have a heightened responsibility to create safe and meaningful learning environments that nurture thoughtful, empathetic, and productive citizens of tomorrow.  The following booklists—which include contributions from the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee, the Bank Street College Library, and School Library Journal—are intended to be a starting place (not a comprehensive list) to help educators and librarians create a supportive space to explore these issues and help promote an inclusive, democratic, and just society."

Nearly all of the Chicago school district's Latino Advisory Committee quit on Wednesday to protest budget cuts they said fall disproportionately on schools with predominantly Latino students, according to media reports. On Friday, the school district announced that in response to concerns from the Latino and African American communities it was returning $15 million in previously frozen discretionary funds to go to high-poverty schools

During Jim Rollins' tenure as superintendent, the Springdale, Ark., district has undergone an incredible season of growth and demographic change. Once largely filled with white students, schools now educate thousands of Hispanic immigrants, many of them recent arrivals to the United States. Springdale has also become home to one of the largest populations of Marshallese people outside the Marshall Islands, a Micronesian country that was the site of U.S. nuclear tests during the Cold War.  After decades of growth and rapid school construction, the Springdale district has developed a reputation among state and national education leaders as a model for steering schools through change while meeting the needs of emerging student populations. And Rollins, who punctuates nearly every public address with his “teach them all” motto, has deftly helmed the ship.

You know the story of Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl who was almost assassinated for advocating for girls' education, and who later won a Nobel Peace Prize for efforts. But a new book by Vermont writer reminds us there are millions of Malalas in the world, and the barriers to their education are profound. Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition features a conversation with Tanya Lee Stone about her book, Girl Rising: Changing the World One Girl A Time, which explores the impact that girls' education in developing countries has on the health and economic outcomes of girls themselves and their communities. Stone's book is a companion to the 2013 film Girl Rising.

The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, in partnership with the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at The University of Southern Mississippi, has announced the winners of the 31st annual Ezra Jack Keats Book Award. Each year a writer and an illustrator are recognized early in their careers for their outstanding work.  The New Writer award goes to Jeri Watts for her book A Piece of Home, in which a young boy from Korea struggles to adjust to his new life in West Virginia. Francesca Sanna won an honor award for her book The Journey, which recounts a refugee boy’s story as he travels from his war-torn country to a new home.

Sixteen members of a Chicago Public Schools advisory committee for Latino students resigned to protest school budget cuts that have landed hard on schools with largely poor and minority populations, the committee's chairman said Wednesday. "We see this not just as an assault on Latino students, neighborhoods and families, but we see this as a continuation of cuts in the African-American community and now cuts in the Latino community," committee member Jose Rico said while backed by three City Council members and former school board member and interim CPS CEO Jesse Ruiz.

About 1 out of every 10 public school students in the United States right now is learning to speak English. They're called ELLs, for "English Language Learners." There are nearly 5 million of them, and educating them — in English and all the other subjects and skills they'll need — is one of the biggest challenges in U.S. public education today. As part of our reporting project, 5 Million Voices, we set out to gather up all the data and information we could find about who these students are and how they're being taught. Here's our snapshot.

For a child isolated by poverty, reading can be a critical path to escape—a link both to worlds of better possibility and the foundational skills to get there. But in this coastal city where nearly every child in the 17,000-student Oxnard K-8 school district comes from a poor family, ready access to books and other reading materials is a huge barrier. That’s why Superintendent César Morales, 41, has used the Oxnard district’s 1-to-1 tablet initiative as a starting point for a massive bilingual-literacy program, to develop a deep love of reading in English and Spanish among his students and their families.

President Trump's federal hiring freeze is forcing at least two U.S. Army bases to indefinitely suspend prekindergarten and other programs for young children. Although the memorandum includes exemptions for the military as well as public safety and national security, the bases still said they did not have enough personnel to continue the programs.