The Rome Commons Ballroom at UConn’s Storrs campus was filled on Saturday evening with Neag School of Education Alumni Board members; Neag School faculty, staff, and administrators; friends of the University; and guests honoring seven distinguished Neag School alumni at the School’s annual Alumni Awards Celebration.

Fellow faculty members, students, alumni, family, and friends last month joined Joseph N. Cooper, assistant professor of sport management in the Neag School, to celebrate his newly released book, From Exploitation Back to Empowerment: Black Male Holistic (Under)Development Through Sport and (Mis)Education (Peter Lang, 2019), inspired by his research on the intersection between sport, education, race, and culture and the impact of sport involvement on the holistic development of Black male athletes.

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.

This April, the American Educational Research Association (AERA)’s Annual Meeting will be collaborating with the Canadian Society for the Study of Education and the World Education Research Association to travel to Toronto, Canada. There, education research work by 60 faculty researchers, graduate students, and alumni from UConn’s Neag School of Education will be featured.

Through a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation, University of Connecticut assistant professor of educational leadership Jennie Weiner will investigate how microaggressions and discrimination affect the experiences of 25 black, female principals. Neag professor Laura Burton is the co-investigator on this project.

Charter schools should only have a place in our public education landscape if they further the public policy goal of advancing educational equity, according to a new report from professors at the University of Connecticut and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Education Week (Ann Traynor is quoted about getting a first teaching job)

“Charter schools can and should play a role in improving equal educational opportunity,” says Preston Green, a professor of educational leadership and law at UConn’s Neag School of Education, who co-authored the report with Julie F. Mead, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In order for that role to be realized, policymakers need to be dedicated to ensuring educational equity at all levels and throughout each stage of charter school authorization, with particular focus paid to planning, oversight, and complaint procedures.”

Segregation in schools was abolished in 1954 in the Supreme Court’s historical decision in Brown v. Board of Education. But this decree from the court did not magically wipe segregation or racial prejudices and tensions away.

There are a variety of models schools around the country used to deal with student behavior problems, and while they have been successful in many cases, these models fail to account for specific issues caused by race-related behavioral problems.

In a collaborative grant from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities for the University of Connecticut and the University of Alabama, assistant professor of the school psychology program in the UConn Neag School of Education Tamika La Salle and Sara McDaniel, associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama will work to look at ways to address this gap.

The five-year $2.4 million grant will work with 20 middle schools in Alabama with both homogenous and heterogeneous student populations in terms of race and poverty levels.

“We are including only middle schools in this project because of the importance of adolescence as a critical timepoint for intervention to prevent violent behavior,” McDaniel and La Salle say.