Members of the Neag School of Education Alumni Board, along with Neag School faculty, staff, and administrators; friends of the university; and guests, gathered this past Saturday on the UConn Storrs campus for the 19th Annual Alumni Awards Celebration. This year’s sold-out event honored six outstanding Neag School graduates in a number of award categories.

In 2001, Enron rocked the financial world by declaring bankruptcy in the wake of a now infamous accounting scandal. Within months, shares in the energy and commodities giant – the seventh-largest corporation in the country at the time – plunged to penny stock levels. Thousands of employees lost their jobs. Investors lost billions. Less than 20 years later, the same type of fraud and mismanagement is happening in the charter school sector, says Preston Green, a professor of educational leadership and law at UConn’s Neag School of Education.

A 2013 Pew report found that 62 percent of people in the U.S. now get their information from social media, and 47 percent of Facebook users go there for news. Today, every person is both a reporter and a consumer of online information. As a result, each of us is potentially the problem — as well as the solution — to the altered landscape of fake news and false information in an online world.

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

Ask any group of high school teachers, and they will report that the most frequently asked question in their classrooms is, “When are we ever gonna use this?” In a traditional college prep program, the honest answer is usually, “Maybe when you get to the university.” But in the real world? Depending on the class, students may not find their learning as useful.

The following PBIS Practitioners Guide — titled National Climate Change: 5 Ways Schools Can Positively and Proactively Support All Students — originally appeared on the OSEP Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports website and is authored by Neag School faculty Brandi Simonsen, George Sugai, Jennifer Freeman, and Tamika La Salle.

As members of the Equity and Social Justice Task Force, we believe that the new social and political context created by the presidential election requires not only that we reiterate these commitments, but also that we, the Equity and Social Justice Task Force, acknowledge and empathize with the many individuals and groups in our community who are experiencing a considerable amount of pain, fear, and concern for their safety.

Brittany (Perotti) Agne ’09 (CLAS), ’11 MA, a former Husky Sport volunteer who earned a master’s degree with a concentration in sport management at the Neag School, today serves as director of children’s education programs at New York Cares, a New York City-based nonprofit focused on volunteer management whose staff plans 1,600 volunteer-led projects every month.

With increasing shifts in racial and ethnic demographics in the United States, the national conversation on diversity and inclusion is ever evolving. Several terms have become commonplace in identifying racial and ethnic groups that are disadvantaged by interlocking, oppressive systems, such as White supremacy, patriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism. Among the most popular phrases currently used to describe groups that have been historically underserved based on their race is “People of Color.” Another common term used to describe these groups is “minorities.” One intention behind using these terms is to emphasize the overlapping or shared experiences with discrimination, marginalization, and oppression on the basis of racial, ethnic, and/or cultural identities.

Social justice and equity remains an area of focus for Neag School researchers, particularly given that the achievement gap between Connecticut’s low-income and minority students and their peers is among the largest in the United States. Here, the Neag School highlights several key avenues of research work in this area.