Education

After a slow start, State Board of Education Chairman Allan Taylor said the extended deadline to apply for the state’s top education job has paid off and a wave of people have since applied. “I kinda lost track of how many people applied,” he said Friday. “All I know is I am very happy with the […]

There’s no argument that college graduates have more opportunities and make more money, Daniel Indiviglio says at The Atlantic. And there’s a good case to be made that education is valuable in itself. But should college degrees be as important as they are in today’s economy? Indiviglio says a college degree has become a proxy […]

Although reading and math test scores have improved for Hispanic students and their white, non-Hispanic peers over the last two decades, the achievement gap between them remains substantially unchanged, a new national report says. The study, based on National Assessment of Educational Progress test results from 1990 to 2009, looked at scores of 4th and […]

If you are able to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in U.S. History or why the pilgrims wanted to leave England, then chances are you know more then most U.S. fourth graders. Less then half of the U.S. fourth graders tested in public and non-public schools were able to answer those two […]

Undocumented immigrants that attended high school in the state will begin paying significantly less to attend the state’s public colleges and universities this upcoming school year, as Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has signed a bill into law allowing them to pay in-state tuition rates. The impact of the law is uncertain. Backers estimate about 200 […]

One in five Connecticut legislators does not have a college degree, according to a report released Sunday by The Chronicle of Higher Education. New Hampshire has the least formally educated statehouse, with 43 percent of their 424 legislators having no college degree. Connecticut falls in line with the national average in the percent of legislators […]

State legislators have sent a bill to the governor’s desk that delays the package of school reforms passed last year in the state’s bid to capture federal Race to the Top money. The legislature’s budget office estimates the increased graduation requirements alone would cost up to $29 million to hire the additional teachers needed for the additional required courses […]

A relatively new reform movement known as PreK-3 is aiming to help children sustain educational gains made in pre-kindergarten as they enter their elementary school years, Sarah Garland writes at The Hechinger Report. Although the movement is only about 5 years old, it is rooted in research going back to the 60s showing that while […]

The House has voted to send two bills aimed at helping the state land new federal Race to the Top money for early childhood education to the governor’s desk. The bills provide funding for preschool teachers to earn degrees, begin testing kindergarten students on their reading and education development and require principals to report to the […]

State Representatives have voted to wait for three school years to raise the age to 18 that students must be to dropout of high school. The dropout age for the upcoming school year will be 17, but legislators had been considering increasing that to 18. A bill passed in the House Monday will increase the […]

After pushing back the application deadline because of a less-then-appealing pool of candidates for the state’s top education job, State Board of Education Chairman Allan Taylor said they have since received several more applications. “There are some encouraging signs,” he said Monday, declining to name individual applicants that have him so encouraged. “There is definitely more […]

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has signed a bill that requires substitute teachers to just have a high school diploma to be hired, scrapping the requirement that every teacher have a bachelor’s degree. “We’ve heard from a lot of districts [the requirement is] causing a burden on them,” Rep. Andy Fleischmann, D-West Hartford and co-chairman of […]

The Connecticut Mirror last week reported Higher Education Commissioner Michael Meotti’s belief, seconded by Gov. Dannel Malloy, that Connecticut’s community colleges might need to turn away people who, as Meotti put it, “have no ability to be successful in a college classroom.”  Our campuses are crowded, Commissioner Meotti said, and there is little funding expansion. […]

Legislators in both chambers have approved a bill waiving the certification requirements for many of the teachers and administrators in the state’s charter schools. Charter schools, like regular public schools, are allowed to hire teachers who lack state certification, but the teachers must get certified within two years. Meeting the certification requirement has been a problem at […]

The Senate has sent a bill to the governor’s desk that allows some towns to cut education funding when enrollment declines, reduces the state’s share of the cost of building new schools, merges several of the state’s public colleges and universities into one system and increases funding for urban students to attend surburban schools. The measure reflects most of […]