Establishing “Innovation Funds” for community partnerships that enhance learning, creating professional development programs more aligned with federal education expectations, and establishing new frameworks for teacher evaluations are among the ways states awarded Race to the Top (RTT) grants have begun to used their share of the $4 billion given by the federal government in 2011 to improve K-12 school quality and effectiveness.
First-year state progress reports were released by the U.S. Department of Education in January. But according UConn’s Tammy Kolbe, an assistant research professor at the Neag School of Education’s …

The Neag School of Education will host the 10th annual Northeast Media Literacy Conference, “News Literacy in a Digital Media Age” on Friday, March 16 in the Bishop Center from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. This year’s event will emphasize exploring the importance of news literacy, the impact of new technology, the need to help youth develop critical thinking skills to understand and interpret media, and other important digital media issues effecting schools, communities and youth-oriented organizations.
“The Northeast Media Literacy Conference has been recognized for almost a decade as a …

Rich Miller (Physical Therapy ‘95) is head coach of menʼs cross country and associate head coach of menʼs track and field. He has been part of the Huskiesʼ coaching staff for 16 years, and as a student-athlete was named the 1995 UConn Club Outstanding Scholar-Athlete. He was a co-captain of the track and field teams that won back-to-back New England Indoor Championships. He spoke with UCONN Magazine about coaching menʼs cross country.
What should people know first about cross country?
We race over five miles in the woods and in the fields. …

The Neag School welcomes Neag alumnus Dr. Carol Ewing Garber for a presentation on “The Expressway to Health: Essentials of Exercise for (Almost) Everybody and Every Schedule” on Thursday, Feb. 9 from 4-5 pm. at the UConn, Storrs Campus. The presentation, hosted by the Neag School’s Department of Kinesiology, is free and open to the public and will be held at the Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE), room 122.
Dr. Carol Ewing Garber is chair of the American College of Sports Medicine’s (ACSM) position stand on principles of exercise prescription for …

Few observers doubt that Teach For America (TFA) has high aspirations. Established in 1990, TFA strives to close persistent racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps in U.S. public education by recruiting high-achieving college graduates to teach for two years in low-income urban and rural schools. In recent years, applications to TFA have soared, especially at highly selective colleges. In 2009-10, for example, 18 percent of Harvard University’s seniors applied to the program. Proposing to expand its teaching corps from 7,300 to 13,000 over the next five years, TFA recently won $50 …