{"id":74598,"date":"2013-03-28T08:58:40","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T12:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=74598"},"modified":"2023-08-29T16:38:17","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T20:38:17","slug":"education-law-expert-preston-green-iii-joins-uconn-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/03\/education-law-expert-preston-green-iii-joins-uconn-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"Education Law Expert Preston Green III Joins UConn Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Prof.<\/a>
Prof. Preston Green III, an expert in education law, will join UConn from Penn State in the fall. (Julia Hen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Studying law and education issues side by side might not seem like an obvious combination, and that perception, says Preston C. Green III, can lead to dire consequences for how children are educated.<\/p>\n

Green is a nationally recognized education law expert who will join the University of Connecticut faculty in the fall from Pennsylvania State University. He will be the Carla Klein Endowed Professor of Urban Education in the Neag School of Education. Green will also have a joint appointment with the UConn School of Law. He has devoted his career to studying the sometimes surprising ways in which law and education intersect, with an eye toward helping legislators and others make better decisions when it comes to developing education policies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I\u2019m trying to do is to get people to understand the legal implications of the policies they wish to adopt,\u201d says Green, who has both a JD from the Columbia University School of Law and an Ed.D. from the Teachers College at Columbia. \u201cIn many cases, they just don\u2019t think about those implications.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, Green cites charter schools. While charter schools have become an increasingly polarizing item near the top of the national education reform agenda, all that attention has shed little light on some basic questions about how the schools operate, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really unclear whether for legal purposes, charter schools are what we call \u2018state actors\u2019 in the way that traditional public schools are, meaning that they have to comply with the Constitution,\u201d he says. \u201cIf they\u2019re not, you might have situations where students are being suspended or expelled with no recourse to due process protections, which is something we should all be concerned about \u2013 especially persons of color, since black males in particular have been disciplined at much higher rates than white students in traditional public schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inspired by Brown v. Board of Education<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Although interested in law and education since he first read about the landmark Brown v. Board of Education <\/i>Supreme Court decision as a child, Green came about his specialty through a terrible trauma: While he was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, one of his cousins was murdered by a 16-year-old working on behalf of a drug dealer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember thinking when it happened, just how did this kid take the turns that led him to this?\u201d Green says. \u201cAnd I actually wrote about that in college, when I was applying to law school: I am going to try to use my interest in education and law to help kids like him have other options.\u201d<\/p>\n

First at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and then at Penn State, Green has subsequently been at the forefront of research and policy on a host of crucial education issues, ranging from school vouchers and charter schools to teacher evaluation systems and school finance litigation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know people take sides and get polarized, and I certainly have my own opinions, but what I really want to see is good schools,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

That pragmatic approach has led to projects like the policy paper he co-wrote last year for the National Education Policy Center, \u201cChartering Equity: Using Charter School Legislation and Policy to Advance Equal Educational Opportunity,\u201d which examined ways in which states can create charter schools that reduce the problems of racial inequality in education settings.<\/p>\n

\u201cCharter schools are here, and they\u2019re going to stick around, and so what we pointed out in our brief is there are ways to create mechanisms that will prevent charters from adding to the problem of racially isolated schools,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

A pre-eminent scholar<\/strong><\/p>\n

Green plans to continue his focus on education and law at UConn, saying he hopes to provide training for educators, administrators, and attorneys in a way similar to a summer institute he created at the Penn State Law School that brought attorneys, professors, and education professionals together to learn about legal issues in and out of the classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Preston Green is one of the pre-eminent scholars in the nation in the field of law and urban education as well as in educational policy,\u201d said Neag School of Education Dean Thomas DeFranco. \u201cHis expertise and scholarship in the areas of equity, race, and school reform uniquely qualifies him to advance our efforts in closing the achievement gap in Connecticut and across the nation.<\/p>\n

Another initiative he\u2019d like to explore is creating a joint degree program in education and law, similar to the one he developed at Penn State, to allow students to pursue career paths ranging from think tanks to school administration to law practices, a multidisciplinary approach that basically didn\u2019t exist when he was in graduate school.<\/p>\n

\u201cI became really attracted to UConn because I thought the University would give me the opportunity to develop those ideas,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

UConn stands out nationally, Green says, because of forward-thinking initiatives like President Susan Herbst\u2019s plan to hire roughly 300 additional tenure-track faculty members at a time when many other universities are cutting back or retrenching.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the kind of work I want to do, I need to be at a vibrant institution, one that\u2019s really on the move, really willing to take bold steps and innovate,\u201d Green says. \u201cThose are the kinds of places where great things happen, and I really want to be a part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Green, who will join UConn from Penn State in the fall, will have a joint appointment in the Neag School and the School of Law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":74859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2427,1855],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[131],"class_list":["post-74598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-educational-leadership","category-neag"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-03 12:29:29","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74598"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204121,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74598\/revisions\/204121"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/74859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74598"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=74598"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=74598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}