ANNOUNCEMENT
November 4, 2003

Insider To Lead Schools Agency
Sternberg To Be Named Education Commissioner
By ROBERT A. FRAHM, Hartford Courant Staff Writer

Betty J. Sternberg, an expert on school curriculum and a veteran of the state's education bureaucracy, will be named Connecticut's new education commissioner this week.

Sternberg will become the first woman to hold the state's top education job, replacing Theodore S. Sergi, who resigned earlier this year.

The State Board of Education is expected to select Sternberg on Wednesday when it votes on Sergi's replacement, sources close to the search said.

After conducting a six-month search and screening a national field of 29 applicants, the board is turning to an insider who has been at the center of some of the state's major school reforms in the past two decades.

Neither Sternberg nor state board Chairman Craig Toensing would confirm Sternberg's selection, but sources said she was the choice over two other finalists - Jacqueline Jacoby, the superintendent of schools in Glastonbury, and David J. Calchera, director of EASTCONN, a regional education service center.

Of the chief education executives in 50 states and seven U.S. territories, 20 are women, according to the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington.

Connecticut has had 16 education commissioners, all men, starting in 1838 with Henry Barnard, who along with Horace Mann in Massachusetts, was a pioneer in the development of America's common schools.

Sternberg, associate commissioner in the education department for the past 11 years, will oversee a public education system confronting financial strains, a chronic achievement lag for low-income and minority children, and the rigorous demands of President Bush's school accountability law, the No Child Left Behind Act.

In Sternberg, the state's public education system will be getting an administrator noted for her work in curriculum and teacher training but with limited experience in the political arena. She has been at the state education department for 23 years, working under four commissioners on reforms such as a 1986 law that resulted in higher pay and stricter standards for teachers.

She was instrumental in designing the state's program for mentoring new teachers, oversaw development of Connecticut's 10th-grade achievement test and was a key contributor to a guidebook that serves as the state's blueprint for reading instruction.

Sternberg also has written about the culture of high schools and the sense of alienation among young people - a subject that took on added urgency after she was the target of an attack by a teenager in a state parking lot five years ago. The attack prompted increased security at the State Office Building and left Sternberg shaken.

"What remains with me - haunts me, really - is the image of his stone face, completely devoid of any emotion, as he looked me straight in the face and struck me," she wrote of her attacker a year later.

Although much of her work has been behind the scenes, Sternberg will take on a higher profile as the state's chief advocate for public schools - a job that includes frequent contact with the legislature and the governor's office.

Toensing, the state board chairman, said two weeks ago that Gov. John G. Rowland had met with the three finalists and found them all acceptable. Rowland, a Republican, had developed a good relationship with Sergi, a Democrat, and the two often appeared together at events in public schools. Sternberg, like Sergi, is a registered Democrat.

Sternberg, 53, of West Hartford, began her career as an elementary mathematics teacher in San Jose, Calif., in 1972 and came to Connecticut in 1975 to work at a regional education service center that served the northwest corner of the state.

She was hired by former Education Commissioner Mark Shedd in 1980 to head the state Department of Education's Bureau of Curriculum and Staff Development. She later headed the department's Division of Curriculum and Professional Development and has been the associate commissioner in the Division of Teaching and Learning since 1992.

Sternberg has a bachelor's degree from Brandeis University, a master's from Teachers College at Columbia University and a doctorate from Stanford University. She was selected recently as the recipient of a distinguished alumni award from Teachers College.

A discussion of this story with Courant Staff Writer Robert A. Frahm is scheduled to be shown on New England Cable News each half-hour today between 9 a.m. and noon.

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