Congratulations to our Neag School alumni, faculty, staff, and students on their continued accomplishments inside and outside the classroom.

Standing in the middle of Hall High School’s gymnasium Tuesday morning, English teacher Anna Capobianco thought she was keeping an eye on students during an assembly highlighting the school’s human rights day programs.

Recently, two educational psychology projects in the Neag School of Education have received grants totaling almost $5 million to perform research in different areas of education for gifted and talented students. The grant, which was funded by the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, is helping provide money to two different professors and their research team.

CT-N (Neag School’s Joseph Cooper organized and moderated a panel of student athletes on the topic of activism)

Sports activism has become an increasingly controversial topic in news media, with many people both for and against the peaceful protests done by NFL players. In response to this, UConn Athletics, Sport Management Program and Collective Uplift co-sponsored the Race, Sport and Activism Panel. The purpose of this panel, moderated by Dr. Joseph Cooper, was to give student athletes a chance to discuss the subjects of race, sport and activism.

In much later years I came across the writings of Joseph Renzulli, professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. Renzulli proposes three criteria for the identification of genuine “giftedness”: intelligence, creativity and perseverance.

As faculty director of the new learning community ScHOLA²RS House, Erik Hines hopes to gain a deeper understanding of the variables that influence positive academic and career outcomes for black males, the subject at the heart of both his day-to-day counseling work and his academic research. (ScHOLA²RS stands for Scholastic House of Leaders in Support of African-American Researchers & Scholars)

The author of the study, Shaun Dougherty, obtained detailed data on student applications to three regional vocational and technical high school. By comparing the educational outcomes of students who scored just above the admissions threshold (and thus were very likely to attend) and just below the admissions threshold (who mostly did not attend), Dougherty is able to account for the selection bias that has plagued prior career and technical education research.

Neag School of Education professor emeritus Vincent Rogers has announced a planned bequest to the Neag School, designating a legacy gift of $125,000 to expand the Rogers Educational Innovation Fund in support of innovative projects carried out by teachers in Connecticut. Through his gift, elementary and middle-school teachers across the state will be able to apply annually for a $5,000 gift for use in the classroom.

Preston Green III, a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut, agrees with the Institute for Justice’s analysis where the federal Constitution is concerned. A successful challenge over ESAs funneling money to religious schools there, he said, is “probably off the table.”