Anisa Jibrell – General Assignment Reporter
Southern holds a long-standing reputation for being one of Connecticut’s top producers of teachers, but status did not seem to dissuade members of the State Board of Education from closing in on a unanimous, 8-0 vote decision to cast a 3-year long, probationary shadow over the university’s popular education program.
“The areas of improvement have nothing to do with courses or experience,” said Dr. Bette Bergeron, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs. “It’s primarily how the school of education is collecting data about students.”
With this decision, the Board of Education is challenging the School of Education’s ability to assess and monitor the success of graduate students after leaving the program, assessments which invariably determine the effectiveness of a program. The Board has afforded the School of Education an opportunity to correct deficiencies before the next on-site review in 2017.
“We prefer to see these as areas of improvement, it wasn’t that we were doing things wrong, or making a mistake,” said Dr. Stephen Hegedus, the Dean of the School of Education. “It’s that we could do things better.”
The Board’s decision shifted the sands a bit by sparking confusion among education majors like senior, Erica Murray.
“At first I thought the program was going to lose its accreditation,” said Murray. “But our professors reassured us that it wouldn’t.”
Despite not meeting the state’s standards, Southern did how however, meet the 6 standards for accreditation.
The university’s external accreditor, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, approved the program on all of its six standards following its joint, on-site visit with the State Department of Education that took place in March 2014. The juxtaposition of both federal and state decisions has shed some doubt among faculty and students on whether the severity of this decision was necessary.
There are four approval levels for educator program preparation including, approval, provisional approval, probationary approval, and denial. A probationary approval action is taken in the event that, “significant and far-reaching non-compliance with current standards is identified.” In this case, areas for improvement in data-collection methods were identified.
Hegedus stresses that although a provisionary approval would’ve been more applicable, the decision has been made and he is working on addressing what needs to be done for the future.
“We’re in a status of probationary approval, and ‘approval’ is the important word,” said Hegedus.
Bergeron believes that some of the areas of improvement overlap with one another, and that some of them technically mean the same thing.
She is confident that the School of Education will resolve these issues in a timely manner, and that they’ll have a much stronger program as a result. “The new dean of students is already way on top of it,” said Bergeron.
“We’re going to work on addressing it and we were already addressing it even before the announcement because these are things that are straightforward, things that we can do in a year,” said Hegedus.
In the midst of the School of Education’s efforts to refine data collection systems, the education department is working on providing education majors a window of opportunities with new programs underway.
Dr. J. Gregory McVerry, Assistant Professor of Education confirms that Dr. Laura Bower-Phipps, Associate Professor of Education, and Dr. Helen Marx, Assistant Professor of Education, have a new urban fellows program in the works, “For those that want to have a strong focus on urban education, kind of a critical lense towards education policy,” said McVerry.
The department is also working on creating unique, educational options for undergraduate and graduate students. “We’ve already developed a digital teaching and learning classroom specialist certificate,” said McVerry. “It’s a 6-year certificate, and we’re working on a digital teaching and learning master’s degree.”
“Between the digital teaching and the urban fellows program, I think we’re really going to help move the university forward,” said McVerry.
