For Wei ‘Toby’ Xinhai, the road to UConn spanned nearly 8,000 miles, but the distance doesn’t faze him. While he may be separated from his family in Hong Kong, S.A.R. China by a full ocean, the dream of being a teacher has transcended any homesickness he has felt in Storrs. Wei, a pre-teaching freshman in the Neag School of Education, who is working toward a career as a math educator in the school’s five-year Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s Teacher Education Program, keeps his eye on his ultimate goal.

Behind the artistry of today’s Olympic figure skaters lies some serious science. A new book by UConn professor Jaci Van Heest will make the research underlying elite skaters’ training accessible for the first time to coaches and athletes everywhere.

Joshua Hyman, an assistant professor at University of Connecticut, studied the effects of this new policy (required ACT testing) while he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Hyman analyzed the test scores and college attendance of all public, high school students in Michigan, before and after the ACT was made universal.

This is why — as researchers who have focused on absenteeism and better ways to keep students engaged — we found the recent report about students graduating from Ballou High School in Washington, D.C., despite missing large amounts of school so concerning.

To help pass legal muster, parochial schools should adopt a secular curriculum, change their names, and keep a separate accounting system, said Preston Green, a professor at the University of Connecticut who explored the legal questions of churches operating charter schools in a 2001 law review article.

“We find consistent evidence that both implementing high-stakes evaluation reforms and repealing tenure reduced teacher labor supply,” concludes the paper, which controlled for a number of factors that might have affected the pool of teachers.

“The teacher (or some human) still has to find a time to sit down and listen to all the recordings — usually during time set aside for lunch, planning or beyond school hours since they certainly can’t score them when they are teaching,” says Rachael Gabriel, an assistant professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut.

Some worry that career and technical education (CTE) will steer students away from college. But a recent study by Shaun M. Dougherty at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute concluded that CTE courses had no effect on a student’s chances of going to a four-year college. In fact, the study found that students on a CTE track were marginally more likely to attend a two-year college and 21 percent more likely to graduate high school.

Jeffrey Villar is leaving his post as executive director of the Connecticut Council for Education Reform to take a new position with the Southbridge, Mass., school district.

David Erwin, who recently retired from Berlin Public Schools after spending eight years at its full-time superintendent, was appointed to the part-time post as superintendent of Sprague Public Schools.