"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles

This is from Conor Williams at The Century Foundation:

The Elevating Voices of Educators of Newcomers (EVEN) Fellowship is a paid, five-month program for K-12 educators who want to actively push back on negative portrayals of U.S. immigrants. We’re looking for teachers who work directly with newcomers, children of immigrants, and/or English learners—and who want to tell the world the many ways these children make our schools and communities better.

EVEN fellows will:

participate in monthly media trainings and policy discussions;

publish stories and multimedia content about their work with immigrant students and families; and

engage with the media to help shift public discourse about immigrants.

Applications for the fellowship are due Jan. 4. The program will run from early Feb. to late June 2026, and selected applicants will receive $1,500 for their participation.

Here’s more info about it.

It’s sponsored by The Century Foundation’s National Newcomer Network, which does excellent work nationally supporting English Language Learners.

Here in California, Efraín Tovar founded a state-wide organization doing similar work, the California Newcomer Network.

On a related note,  most ELL Newcomer teachers across the country have seen a decrease in their student numbers.  You can read my thoughts about that situation at What Should Schools Do As The Numbers Of ELL Newcomers Decrease?

You might also be interested in The Best Resources On Recent Trump Administration Moves On ELL Policies and The Best Posts & Articles Reacting To Trump’s Executive Order Making English The U.S. Official Language.

     

OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay

December 12th is a Mexican National Holiday, and an important day for many Mexican-Americans — The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe.

You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning & Teaching About The Day Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe.

     

When I teach World History to ELLs, we study the Epic of Gilgamesh, and students summarize the different portions of the story and create illustrated books.

You can see resources I use for that activity here.

TED-Ed has created a video about the epic in Spanish, which will come in quite handy for that lesson:

 

     

angrybirds7 /Pixabay

The first trailer for Toy Story 5 definitely spoke to the tech challenges facing education, and this newest one brings the point home even more clearly:

 

     

waldryano / Pixabay

The so-called “Mississippi Miracle,” indicated that the reading skills of elementary students in that state made extraordinary reading gains, has received a lot of attention.

Now, however, an ambitious reexamination of the data suggests that the gains may have been a statistical illusion – that the increased fourth-grade reading scores were inflated by a new law requiring that “poor performing” third-graders be retained.

You can read all about it at How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias? (be sure to also review the many comments left on that post – another researcher in one of them suggested that that state’s vastly increased identification of learning disabled students who didn’t have to take the test was another cause of the increased scores).

As that post also points out, there have been many “miracles” touted in education (see The Best Posts About Attrition Rates At So-Called “Miracle” Schools).

Perhaps we should stop hoping for miracles and be satisfied with small, incremental progress, which is what most teachers know?

What works in education, when it works, and under what circumstances is a complicated issue.  Perhaps we should all acknowledge that complicated issues don’t easily lend themselves to simple answers, as Michael Pershan pointed out in I Don’t Know What to Think About America’s Declining Test Scores and Neither Should You.