Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared on UConn Today, the University’s official news website. As of 2013, only 20 percent of school administrators were people of color and only 50 percent were women, despite women representing almost 80 percent of teachers. The number of black female principals is even harder to assess, though research suggests […]

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.

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.”

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.

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.

“We tend, as adults, to overplan and overstructure young people’s experiences,” Ron Beghetto says. While structure is important, he said, so is “letting kids determine their own problems to solve, their own ways to solve them.”

Education Week (George Sugai is quoted regarding testimony at a U.S. House of Representatives committee meeting on the use of restraints and seclusion in schools)

While critics charge that charter schools are siphoning money away from public schools, a more fundamental issue frequently flies under the radar: the questionable business practices that allow people who own and run charter schools to make large profits.

Charter school supporters are reluctant to acknowledge, much less stop, these practices.