NB Herald editorial praises CCSU enrollment and Teacher Education success. 9-12

Sunday, September 12, 2010 10:48 PM EDT Connecticut State University recently announced that nearly 1,000 students, 93 percent of them Connecticut residents, transferred to Central Connecticut State University last year. And the trend isn’t new. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of Connecticut residents transferring to CCSU grew 20 percent.According to CSU, the factors driving these moves include cost, new academic programs, support services, and the ease of transfer from Connecticut community colleges.We might add ‘quality of education,’ especially in one of the areas in which CCSU is known to excel.Recently, we learned that the the school led the way among students taking a teacher licensing exam in which, statewide, three in 10 failed. The test looks at the knowledge of prospective elementary and pre-school teachers on the science of teaching reading. On the latest test, 73 percent of CCSU students passed and that includes some test-takers not enrolled in the Education Department’s training classes. Among those who have completed the preparation program, 89 percent passed. One reason for the school’s success rate is that educators looked at new information about how children learned to read and adjusted their approach to one that emphasizes skills such as phonics, vocabulary, spelling, fluency and comprehension. Many of those methods were recommended a decade ago by a National Reading Panel report and in Connecticut’s Blueprint for Reading Achievement, but some educators and children’s advocates conten...