“My name is Lara Hawley and I am currently serving as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in South Africa for nine months,” says Lara Hawley. “I arrived in January and will be here until October. This first month in South Africa has been a whirlwind, but I have loved every single second of it!”

“Teacher preparedness has been the focus of a great deal of (at times) impassioned debate in the last thirty years,” says Dr. Suzanne Wilson, Neag Endowed Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Connecticut and Chair of Curriculum and Instruction in the Neag School. “The teacher workforce is the largest profession in the U.S.; preparing close to four million teachers to be high quality is challenging.”

The underrepresentation of high-poverty and minority populations in gifted programs has troubled education analysts and reformers for decades. One finding in this winter’s Fordham report on gifted programming gaps was that although high-poverty schools are as likely as low-poverty schools to have gifted programs, students there are less than half as likely to participate in them. This is complemented by a recent University of Connecticut finding that school poverty has a negative relationship with the percentage of students identified as gifted.

Global Ed Leadership (Neag School alumna Kelly Lyman guest writes about her experiences with a UConn leadership partnership program in Jordan)

Now an educator for more than 20 years, Roszena Haskins ’17 Ed.D. was not like her colleagues, who were inspired to become educators at an early age. It was not until her undergraduate college years at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she was studying radio, television, and film, along with English, that she thought about teaching.

“The standards call attention to the positive things that you should be doing. Traditional school rules outline all the things we don’t want to see in schools,” said Brandi Simonsen, the co-director of the University of Connecticut’s Center for Behavioral Education and Research.

Congratulations to our Neag School alumni, faculty, staff, and students on their continued accomplishments inside and outside the classroom. If you have an accolade to share, we want to hear from you! Please send any news items and story ideas to neag-communications@uconn.edu.

My name is Alexandra Mililli, and I am a wealth manager with the Fiorentino Group at UBS Financial Services, Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut. I earned my teaching certificate at UConn in the Neag School of Education. I went for my undergrad and master’s at UConn and then received an MBA at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

Preston Green’s paper (co-authored by Kevin Welner) offers some interesting insights. He offers this summary: The past fifteen years have seen an explosion of private school voucher programs. Half of US states now have some type of program that spends or otherwise subsidies private schooling

“Betsy DeVos’ appointment as the U.S. secretary of education was controversial, but it seems appropriate one year into her tenure to emphasize the opportunities that lie ahead for education,” says Shaun Dougherty, an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Connecticut. “One such opportunity that has bipartisan support and the potential for positive impacts is the reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, first signed into law in 1984 and last reauthorized in 2006.”