ELL News Headlines

As movie audiences celebrate "Hidden Figures," the story of black women who overcame legally sanctioned discrimination to perform critical calculations in the race to put a man on the moon, educators say that new, subtler obstacles to higher-level math education have arisen. These have had an outsize influence on racial prejudice, they contend, because math prowess factors so heavily in the popular conception of intelligence — a concern that recently provoked the creation of "Mathematically Gifted and Black" and "Latin@s and Hispanics in Mathematical Sciences," websites featuring math professionals from underrepresented backgrounds.

With 12 million registered users and counting, ed-tech startup Newsela is a major vehicle for connecting K-12 students to the news. Each day, classrooms using the platform receive a curated selection of articles from outlets like the Washington Post and The Guardian, edited to multiple reading levels. So how is the New York City-based company experiencing the sudden proliferation of so-called "fake news?"

Mung Thai read aloud in Cantonese as he sat next to his son Nick in Jennifer Burkey's second-grade class Friday morning. The idea to bring parents into the classroom and share their native language and culture started as a conversation between Melchor, fellow ESOL teacher Jeff Bette and Webster Hill principal Jeffrey Wallowitz. Webster Hill, this year, includes students who speak 22 different languages, Melchor said, and this program is a way to embrace that. "We send a clear message that we value [native languages] and we ask you to come in and share that with the school," Wallowitz said. "We want families to read to their children in their native languages as much as they can and it's just a way to celebrate that and say, 'Hey, it's important to still maintain your culture and maintain your language,' and by doing this we highlight it, we celebrate it and we value it."

Nearly 100 undocumented Teach For America members who have work permits through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, are currently teaching nearly 6,000 students across 11 states. Amid the uncertainty about DACA’s future, TFA is offering free legal assistance to its members and its 46 alums who are also DACA protected.  In the meantime, TFA has already accepted close to 40 undocumented corps members for next school year. But if DACA is repealed without a replacement, the organization will have to put off assigning them to work in a school. Corps members need valid work permits and the ability to work at least two full school years, spokeswoman Kathryn Phillips said.

Many community colleges across the country have seen growing populations of Latino and Hispanic residents in their regions. But that growth often hasn’t translated to increases in Hispanic enrollment on their campuses, especially as overall enrollments decline in a largely recovered economy. Like Southcentral Kentucky, some colleges are learning that the key to reaching out to Latino students, in particular, requires more personal effort than just college fairs or new advertising.

Shelley Diaz at School Library Journal has compiled titles that celebrate Afro-Latinx literature for kids, middle grades, and teens.

The Sesame Workshop hopes the friendly faces of Sesame Street characters will help refugee children navigate the complex social and emotional effects of trauma and displacement. The organization is teaming with the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian organization, to "deliver transformative early learning and social-emotional support to millions of refugee children in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria," it said in a news release Thursday.

Anna Dearlove, a 2nd grade teacher at Glen Park Elementary School in San Francisco, introduces academic language to prepare English-language learners for their science investigations. Students work in pairs and make claims about variations in plants and animals.

Despite pleas for kids to attend school, Grand Rapids Public Schools said around 4,200 students weren't in class due to a "Day Without Immigrants" protest. It looked likely that district wouldn’t reach its threshold of 75% student attendance and the day would count as a snow day.

As schools work to implement the Next Generation Science Standards, practicing scientists are also rethinking how they work with schools to advance understanding of their field. The National Board on Science Education, part of the National Academies of Science, brought together science educators and members of professional science groups like the American Chemical Society last month to discuss guidance for developing partnerships between scientists and teachers.