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This dissertation consists of three papers. In each paper, I use applied econometric methods to study the factors affecting educational investments in low- and middle-income settings. The findings provide insights into how to better support students and families in the decision-making process from a policy perspective, facilitating them in making informed choices and realizing the full potential of the investments. In the first paper, I examine high school students’ expectations about their intended college majors in rural China. I find that students hold a high level of uncertainty about their choice of college majors. Using a randomized controlled trial, I demonstrate that access to information on disciplinary knowledge and career opportunities of college majors increases students' certainty about their choice by 0.15 SD. However, the intervention reduces female students’ likelihood of choosing a science major by 10 percentage points. I provide evidence that the effect is not driven by students’ perceived ability in math. The findings suggest that preferences for college majors are formed as early as the first years of high school, and gender-sensitive approaches are needed to cultivate interests in science majors. The second paper explores how parents make decisions regarding the number of tutoring hours for their children. Through a field experiment conducted among Chinese middle school parents, we demonstrate that parents' investment decisions are affected by their beliefs about their peers' investment levels, and that they often hold biased beliefs about those levels. When provided information about the actual distribution of tutoring hours invested among their reference groups, parents adjust their investments accordingly. Our heterogeneous analyses suggest that one driver of investment in private tutoring is the fear of falling behind. The third paper estimates the effect of an economic crisis on school choice in Colombia. We find suggestive evidence that a one-percentage-point increase in recession intensity (or decrease in GDP growth rate) leads to a decrease in the number of test takers by 0.7 percentage points in private schools compared to the years before the recession. We also find a 1.2 percentage-point difference in the effects of private and public schools on the number of test takers. Our estimates suggest that families adjust their educational investments after a recession by withdrawing their children from private schools. Such changes could have important implications for students in both types of schools.

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each, I use applied econometric methods and economic theory to study the American teacher workforce. The first paper evaluates a novel policy to address teacher shortages by promoting experienced school staff to be teachers of record. Controlling for demographics and baseline scores, I find that students assigned to these teachers perform just as well as those assigned to traditionally licensed teachers on average and outperform their peers in math. My results point to an untapped resource of potential teachers and underscore the value of principals’ local knowledge to identify capable candidates for teaching positions. The second paper, co-authored with Shirin Hashim, documents historical trends in the teaching labor market in context by incorporating the nursing workforce as a relevant comparison group. We document historical trends in skill level, average and relative wages, wage dispersion, unionization rates, and quantity, and find important divergences in the teaching and nursing professions that cannot be explained by previous theories. We posit two new theories that align with our documented trends: technological innovation and occupational differentiation in nursing. We argue that trends in the nursing profession indicate that declines in teaching quality were (and are) not inevitable. The third paper analyzes school principals’ human capital strategies and how they relate to school-level changes in teacher effectiveness and principals’ own conceptualization of their strengths. I identify three distinct human capital strategies: hiring, developing, and selectively retaining teachers. I find that about 2% of the variation in changes in overall teacher quality can be tied to principal-specific effects and that hiring has the largest amount of principal-level variation among the strategies. I also find suggestive evidence that principals specialize in different strategies, but they generally conceptualize themselves as strong in all strategies and often cannot accurately identify their own human capital strengths or weaknesses. This work contributes new evidence on the role of principals in ensuring teacher quality, providing a framework for understanding different principal strategies and principals’ conceptualization of their own personnel practices.

Throughout an undergraduate’s education, writing essays constitutes a significant source of stress for students. The majority of these essays are written in a specific format indicated by the educator for the class. This paper provides context behind the implication of writing formats, such as why they are used to begin with, as well as descriptions on the two most commonly used formats in the United States: the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). This paper analyzes the narrative of format use in high school and postsecondary education today, as well as student and professor responses to format usage in the classroom setting.

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each paper, I leverage a different quantitative method to study a downstream effect of technology on educational outcomes. In the first paper, I study the impact of an online math learning program on 3rd through 5th grade math achievement in Louisiana. Employing Zearn Math usage metrics and administrative data from the Louisiana Department of Education, I find that grade-levels that programmatically used Zearn Math scored, on average, about 0.03 standard deviation units higher on Louisiana’s statewide math assessment. A placebo test using English language arts scores and several robustness checks suggest this may be an underestimate of the true effect. The findings offer timely information on curricular decision-making as pandemic-related school closures have led to a twentyfold increase in public school spending on Zearn-related materials between July 2019 and July 2021 and its presence continues to expand across the nation. The second paper, co-authored with Mary Laski, synthesizes previous theories explaining declines in teacher quality and expands on the current literature by incorporating a useful comparison group: the nursing workforce. We document historical trends in skill level, average and relative wages, wage dispersion, unionization rates, and quantity, and find important divergences in the teaching and nursing professions that cannot be explained by previous theories. We posit two new theories that align with our documented trends: technological innovation and occupational differentiation in nursing. We argue that trends in the nursing profession indicate that declines in teaching quality were (and are) not inevitable. The third paper examines the impact of instructional format and tutors on student outcomes in the context of an early literacy tutoring initiative. It presents the first within-program experimental evidence comparing the impact of in-person versus remote tutoring. Overall, we do not find statistically significant differences in students’ literacy outcomes between in-person and remote tutoring. However, substantial variation in student learning outcomes was attributable to differences across tutors, with the overall tutor effect estimated to be larger than that of instructional format. Additionally, students receiving in-person tutoring exhibited higher attendance rates and tutors reported closer relationships with their in-person students. These results suggest that while differences between in-person and remote tutoring may exist, the benefits of having a proficient tutor far outweigh these disparities.

This dissertation is comprised of three articles that explore policies and practices to improve college and career readiness in the state of California, with a focus on reducing racial and socioeconomic inequality. The articles range from broadly exploring the role of charter schools in preparing student for better college enrollment outcomes, examining the effect of implementing a district-level policy to increase four-year college eligibility, and describing the inequities observed in course-taking patterns in the state of California. Findings from these three papers all show disparities in college preparedness, access, and enrollment by race, socioeconomic status, and English learner status. While the policies discussed in this dissertation may show evidence of an attenuation of inequities, large disparities remain, and are important to consider in future research efforts. The first article, Beyond Test Scores: Exploring the relationship between graduating from a California charter school and college enrollment, explores the differences in college enrollment rates between charter school students and traditional public school students in the state of California. The descriptive study provides a comprehensive comparison of college enrollment patterns, inclusive of all students in the state who enroll in public, non-alternative, traditional and charter schools. Findings reveal that students graduating from charter schools exhibit lower rates of enrollment to any postsecondary institution 12 months following high school graduation compared to their traditional public school peers. However, of the students enrolling in college, charter school students are more likely to enroll in one of California’s public four-year universities compared to traditional public school graduates. These findings contribute to the wide variation in charter school performance expressed in the existing literature. The second article, Requiring A-to-G: Examining the effect of aligning high school graduation requirements with California’s public university admissions course requirements, examines the causal effect of unified school districts in California aligning their high school graduation course requirements with the course sequence necessary for eligibility to the state’s public four-year universities, known as the A-G requirement. Findings show that requiring the A-G sequence to graduate increases A-G completion rates, graduation, and subsequent enrollment to a California public four-year university 12 months following graduation. However, results also indicate a decrease in overall college enrollment rates, which is in large part driven by a significant decrease in California Community College enrollment rates. Although overall results are similar in pattern to results for different racial/ethnic groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, respectively, students of color and socioeconomically disadvantaged students benefit most from this policy. The last chapter, Inequality in Academic Preparation for College, is an overview of the course taking patterns of California high school students. Findings reveal racial disparities in A-G completion rates, Advanced Placement test participation, dual enrollment participation, and advanced math course taking. In addition to differences in these outcomes by race at the state level, we also find that disparities in these outcomes exist within districts and schools, suggesting that it is not merely a difference in racial composition of students across the state. This article was published by the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), an independent, non-partisan research center and co-authored with colleagues at The California Education Lab at UC Davis.Together, these articles contribute to the literature on equity in college preparedness and access, suggesting that students’ educational outcomes and trajectories are influenced by the policies, practices, and strategies taken by schools. The work included in these papers highlight the factors that education practitioners and policymakers should consider in helping more of California’s youth—particularly those from historically marginalized groups—make college enrollment and degree attainment a reality.

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each paper, I use applied econometric methods to study the implications of public school choice policies. The findings offer insights about how to improve upon existing school choice models so that these policies are more likely to mitigate rather than exacerbate existing inequalities in our school system. The first paper estimates the impact of public school choice on neighborhood composition and segregation. Public school choice decouples neighborhoods from schools, changing longstanding incentives for families deciding where to live. In this paper, I find that families strategically sort across and within neighborhoods in response to school choice, leading to a reduction in income segregation in neighborhoods with choice relative to neighborhoods without choice. The empirical results suggest that certain types of school choice policies could contribute to the voluntary creation of more mixed-income neighborhoods, but the wealthiest families may decide to leave these areas entirely. The second paper estimates the effect of winning a public school choice lottery on public school enrollment. I find that students who do not get assigned to their top choice school are 15 percentage points more likely to leave the public school system entirely than those who do get an offer at their top choice. This effect is driven by higher-income students who are more likely to be able to afford private schools. These effects are important to understand as districts undergo efforts to expand access to high quality schools by increasing participation in school choice programs, while seeking to maintain district enrollment. The third paper explores the relationship between school funding inequality and school choice, interrogating the common criticism that magnet and charter schools drain traditional public schools of much needed resources. I do not find evidence consistent with this concern. Instead, I find that funding inequality across schools within a district is largely driven by schools that serve student populations with specialized needs—like alternative schools or schools that have a higher proportion of students requiring special education services. Funding disparities that are, in other words, motivated by efforts to increase equity.

The decisions that students make about their educational attainment have profound impacts on their future economic, demographic, and social outcomes. These decisions, however, do not happen in a vacuum. There is a long tradition of research that studies inequality in educational decisionmaking and the various factors that contribute to creating, or reducing, this inequality. However, inequality in educational attainment persists. This dissertation takes a multimethod approach to identifying sources of inequality and evaluating policies aimed at reducing it. In three distinct empirical chapters, this dissertation extends the literature on educational decision making, expanding our knowledge of how inequality is created and maintained. The first empirical paper, evaluates two “free tuition” policy designs, informing policy conversations about how to reduce economic inequality in selective college attendance. Proposed “free college” policies vary widely in design. The simplest set tuition to zero for everyone. More targeted approaches limit free tuition to those who demonstrate need through an application process. We experimentally test the effects of these two models on the schooling decisions of low-income students. An unconditional free tuition offer from a large public university substantially increases application and enrollment rates. A free tuition offer contingent on proof of need has a much smaller effect on application and none on enrollment. These results are consistent with students placing a high value on financial certainty when making schooling decisions. The second paper focuses on the role of social context in shaping student decision making. There is a long history of sociological research that identifies the essential role of social forces in shaping educational attainment; however, siblings have been understudied as a direct mechanism contributing to educational decision making, overshadowed by the focus on parents and institutions. Using longitudinal qualitative interviews with 36 high-achieving high school seniors from families with low incomes, I explore the unique role that older siblings play in shaping the postsecondary decision making of their younger siblings. I find that the support provided by siblings is distinct from other social resources. The intensity of the relationship, and the internal and external relevance, or the fact the information shared is recent and personalized to the students’ circumstances, each make this relationship unique. By studying only parents or considering only the role of parent educational or economic circumstances in contributing to inequality, we ignore an important source of heterogeneity in the lives of students from families with low incomes. The final empirical chapter describes gaps in postsecondary educational attainment between urban, rural, and suburban communities using student-level longitudinal data from the full population of Michigan public high school students. Using several recent high school cohorts, I document rates of college attendance, college selectivity, and bachelor’s degree completion overall and within subgroups, providing updated estimates for urbanicity gaps in college attainment. I find that there is less racial and economic inequality in college outcomes within rural areas; however, it does not come from improved outcomes among racially minoritized students or those from families with low incomes. Students in rural areas from traditionally advantaged groups have substantially lower rates of college attainment than their suburban and city peers. Therefore, while media narratives about White, rural students falling behind are not inaccurate, they tell an incomplete story. This chapter highlights some key areas for policy intervention to better target the distinct needs of students.

This dissertation uses historical and qualitative research methods to understand teachers’ complex relationships with school reform and instructional change. It presents three discrete cases of classroom change over history and probes what these changes mean to the individuals charged with carrying them out: teachers. Paper I, “From Teacher Improvement to Teacher Turnover: Unintended Consequences of School Reform in Quincy, Massachusetts, 1872-1893,” reconsiders the “Quincy Method,” widely considered a successful nineteenth-century school reform. Pioneered by Francis Parker in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1875, it fostered broad pedagogic change to an ordinary school system and transformed it into a renowned hub of child-centered instruction. In this article, I revisit the reform and explore its interaction with the Massachusetts teacher labor market. In a market characterized by low wages and a teacher oversupply but few experienced, well-trained ones, teachers used Quincy’s reform to obtain higher-paying, higher status positions while municipalities used it to recruit competent applicants. Both practices jeopardized Quincy’s cohesive system. Though the ensuing turnover may have brought progressive pedagogies to the mainstream, departing teachers frequently assumed positions outside public schools or in systems ill-structured to maintain their expertise. Accordingly, the article probes a celebrated reform’s unintended consequences and contributes to scholarship on nineteenth-century progressive school reforms and women teachers. Paper II, titled “‘But Aren’t We Extinct?’: Inhabited Reform and Instructional Visibility in an Open Space School Forty Years Later,” reconsiders 1960s open space school, a reform which removed partitions between classrooms in part to alleviate teacher isolation. This model was long ago deemed a failure. Years later, teachers in surviving open space facilities continue to navigate the reform. Despite wide dismissal of the model, components of teachers’ work that open space schools sought to normalize (collaboration, informality, proximity) are increasingly valued for improving teachers’ professional communities. In addition, “open” designs are resurfacing in new school models. Picking up where earlier scholars left off, this article elevates perspectives of teachers working in a surviving open space school today using a conceptual framework of situated cognition. In so doing, it seeks to extend literature on teacher collaboration and teachers’ social sense-making in implementation. Findings illustrate a schooling environment in which teachers are enormously impacted by one another’s classrooms, prompting an array of coping strategies. While participants underscore frustrations with the design, they also highlight regular exchanges of teaching practices and professional camaraderie, both of which participants largely attribute to the instructional visibility normalized by open spaces. As a result, these teachers are decidedly conflicted about their district’s plans for a new facility of self-contained classrooms. This research complicates the popular narrative of teachers as impediments to school reform, as Hilltop teachers remain notably sympathetic to open space despite its challenges. The work additionally extends literature on situated cognition as it relates to teachers’ implementation of policy, highlighting the impact of social context on individual teachers’ sense-making. Further, to capture the uniqueness of participants’ situation, occupying past reformers’ ideas, I advance a theory of inhabited reform to describe teachers’ ongoing, evolving negotiation of particularly durable reforms. While these findings do not encourage a renewal of open space schools, they do suggest that schools offer teachers regular time and space for informal collaboration and interaction in addition to more formalized approaches. Paper III, “‘I Need to Sit Beside Them’: Teachers’ Relational Work with Students in Changing COVID-19 Contexts,” examines pandemic teaching across four secondary schools in a single city. Through in-depth interviews with forty-one teachers and three instructional coaches, the paper traces teachers’ evolving relational work with students over three school years shaped by COVID-19. Its analysis illuminates complex interactions between teachers’ changing contexts and their relational work. Though conceived with equity and safety in mind, fluctuating, technology-driven instructional arrangements and their associated policies radically limited teachers’ relational opportunities with students. Individual school practices occasionally moderated these constraints. At times, individual teachers creatively adapted teaching’s relational demands amid uncertainty. Many, however, experienced a profound sense of loss and diminished commitment as their work became increasingly unrecognizable and their interactions with students grew complicated. Though the contexts I examine were particular to COVID-19 and unusual, my analysis of teachers’ responses to them underscores the primacy of teacher-student relationships and interactions in teachers’ work in ordinary times. A close examination of pandemic teaching reveals how fragile teachers’ relational work is when the circumstances of teaching and learning are upset so intensely.

This study explores the implementation of the global refugee educational policy on the educational experience of Congolese refugee students in the United States (U.S) public schools. The current policy stresses the integration of refugee students into the national education system of receiving countries. The study involves high school Congolese refugee students who have resettled in Lansing, Michigan under the U.S Refugee Admission Program (USRAP). Based on previous studies, these students arrive in the U.S with a unique migration experience which often causes socio-emotional challenges, family separation, trauma, communication barriers, and cultural shock. The participants are aged between 18 and 22 and are considered to have a disrupted educational experience. Consequently, this study examines the influence of migration and pre-migration experiences on the educational experience of refugee students in the U.S public schools. In examining educational experience, this paper will focus on three contexts: the country of origin, transition country, and receiving country. People interested in the experiences of Congolese refugees in the U.S education will find this study helpful because the resettlement experience of Congolese is still understudied. Lastly, people who study the integration of refugees in places where there are not large foreign-born communities would also find this study useful.

This thesis delves into the intricate analysis of multidimensional enrollment records spanningtwo and half decades, covering various regions within U.S. academic institutions. LeveragingHidden Markov Models (HMMs) with hypothesis testing, we seek to unearth underlying patternsand trends in higher education enrollment.The study commences with data preparation, involving the extraction and aggregation of dataacross institutions, majors, and genders over two and half decades, resulting in a rich, 4-dimensionaldataset. To streamline the analysis, the dataset is divided into nine geographic divisions.The results offer a granular view of enrollment trends, enabling institutions and policymakers tomake informed decisions regarding diversity and education equality. This research bridges the gapin modelling matrix-variate data within the HMM framework, addressing the unique challengesposed by multidimensional datasets.By adopting this innovative approach, we contribute valuable insights to the field of highereducation enrollment analysis, facilitating more inclusive and data-driven educational policies.This thesis comprises four chapters. The first chapter talks about the motivation and objectiveof this paper, and the second chapter introduces the HMM tailored for matrix-variate time seriesdata. The third chapter demonstrates the application of this model with hypothesis testing usingundergraduate enrollment data from US institutions, and the fourth chapter concludes with the keyfindings and the significance of this method.

Preschool absenteeism rates are high. Children with higher absenteeism rates perform worse on assessments of literacy, math, and social-emotional skills by the end of a school year and are more likely to be absent in subsequent years than their peers with lower absenteeism rates. Nevertheless, little is known about the predictors or longitudinal consequences of preschool absenteeism, or about approaches for prevention. In this dissertation, I use Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model to inform a more holistic understanding of children’s absenteeism during preschool and through early elementary school. In Paper 1, I use statewide administrative data from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to examine patterns of absenteeism from preschool through the early elementary years and whether these absenteeism patterns are associated with children’s academic outcomes in Grade 3. Given prior evidence showing particularly high absenteeism among low-income children, in Papers 2 and 3, I home in on preschool absenteeism among a sample of low-income children enrolled in Head Start programs—using the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey, 2009 cohort. In Paper 2, I focus on understanding who is most likely to be absent by using latent profile analysis to identify profiles of household risk factors and their associations with absenteeism. I then examine which family engagement factors (e.g., parents’ satisfaction with Head Start, Head Start programs’ provision of family support services) can be used to reduce absenteeism and for whom these factors are most effective. Finally, In Paper 3, I address the conditions under which preschool absenteeism may matter more for children’s learning and development. Specifically, I move beyond estimating average associations between absenteeism and children’s developmental outcomes by examining these associations in the presence of varying levels of classroom quality and household stimulation. Together, the findings of these papers not only address basic questions such as “Does absenteeism matter” but also push the literature on preschool absenteeism forward by examining questions like “How does absenteeism change over time and how do these changes matter for children’s outcomes?”; “Who is absent?”; and “For whom and under what conditions does absenteeism matter for children’s learning and development?”. Findings can support the development of more targeted and timely interventions for reducing absenteeism beginning as early as the preschool years.

This three-essay dissertation takes an explicit anti-deficit framing of students, their families, and communities as they experience K12 education phenomena across multiple levels of analysis (macro, meso, and micro). Deficit framing in education is an artifact of centuries old racist discourse, implicitly or explicitly blaming those with the least power for their circumstances and outcomes. Therefore, these essays each take particular interest in how different phenomena are experienced by Black and brown and/or low-income students, families, and communities – vulnerable groups long depicted as deficient. Each paper proposes to accomplish this using distinct bodies of literature. Essay one is a narrative literature review that focuses on the (macro) institutional environment that has shaped students’ school moves: neighborhood changes like gentrification (prompting the family to move to a new neighborhood and thus school) or school changes (prompted by school choice expansion or the closure of schools). This literature review investigates whether there is demographic or geographic variation in student school and neighborhood displacement and mobility experiences. This study finds that the most vulnerable populations are put at increased risk of the negative outcomes of school and neighborhood changes: low-income, racially minoritized, and low-performing. Both phenomena impact urban spaces, but school changes have also reshaped rural districts and towns. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2011 restricted panel dataset, the second study contributes to representative bureaucracy theory by investigating schools as racialized organizations (Ray, 2019). Employing an individual fixed effects regression approach, it explores whether meso-level school organizational policies moderate the negative effects of bureaucratic race/ethnic nonmatch that scholars have found to influence client outcomes (Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016; C. A. Lindsay & Hart, 2017; Meier, 2019; Vinopal, 2019; Vinopal & Holt, 2019). This study finds that this meso-level PBIS policy may work to constrain negative teacher nonrepresentation effects on student math achievement. Yet, when results were disaggregated by race/ethnic groups, Black and Latine students experienced larger negative effects of having a nonrepresentative teacher, lowering their math achievement in some models. Asian students and even white students experienced positive moderating effects of PBIS on the teacher representation effects, leading to higher math achievement for these students.Finally, essay three uses an inductive constructivist grounded theory approach to collect qualitative data regarding micro-level processes for parental engagement and collaboration with school administrators and board members (school leaders) at a standalone, nonprofit charter school. Parent perspectives and the differences from school leader perspectives, intentions, and governance mechanisms made available are explored to build a theory regarding nonprofit charter school micro-level governance practices. This study finds that the participating nonprofit charter school, after reorganizing their board and administration to be racially, socioeconomically, and geographically representative, developed school governance processes which encompass more than simply finances and operations but also include parents and their desires and concerns regarding the school. Parents are able to shape school decisions regarding academic, behavioral, enrichment, and social capital building policies and activities for families and their students to meet their needs.

The ‘separation of church and state’ is a fundamental precept of the United States, yet the phrase itself is not written in the Constitution and even Supreme Court justices disagree on how it should be defined. The ambiguity surrounding religious liberty is perhaps most felt in K-12 public education, where the fear of inflicting faith formation on impressionable students has inspired the vision of a secular, God-neutral, government-run school system. As such, federal and state laws dictate that public school educators who coerce students by promoting or inhibiting religious devotion risk losing their jobs. Yet, the reality is that the fabric of a school is woven by the people who work, learn, and play in it—and oftentimes those people and their religious faith are indivisible. In this circumstance, the religious faith of individuals becomes a stealth moderator of school-based decision-making and outcomes, and as such, the ‘separation of church and state’ in public education becomes a misnomer. This three-papers-on-a-theme dissertation interrogates the under-studied topic of the role that religiosity plays in K-12 public education. Employing both qualitative and quantitative methodology, I utilize a nationally representative survey on public school perceptions, criminal and civil court records from Milwaukee, and Twitter discourse about the firing of a praying football coach to explicate this often-controversial topic. As a result, this dissertation provides evidence of the statistically significant predictive power of religious faith on students, parents, and teachers. At the same time, this dissertation reveals the complexity and apprehension that everyday Americans have about religion in K-12 public schooling. In my first study, I challenge the stereotype of Evangelical Christians being adversarial toward public education due to their faith by using parent and teacher survey data to compete the factors of religion, race, and political ideology to determine which identity drives discontent with public schools. I find that the variable of religion carries no statistically significant effect. Instead, race and political ideology are the major drivers of perception on public schooling, with political ideology having the greatest influence. In my second study, I found that low-income students of color in Milwaukee who either attended religious services at least once a week in 8th or 9th grade or attended a private, mostly religious high school had fewer criminal convictions and paternity suits by their mid-20s compared to their matched counterparts in Milwaukee Public Schools who came from homes with low religiosity. My third and final study is a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Twitter comments following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Kennedy v. Bremerton, which deemed it constitutional for a Christian public school football coach to pray mid-field with his players after a game. I discerned from the CDA that religious freedom was viewed in terms of winners and losers; that the public has opposite interpretations of what the phrase “separation of church and state” means; that people often interweave racism, abortion rights, and other social issues with their views on religious freedom; and that unfettered religious expression in public schools could have unintended consequences for Christians.

This dissertation consists of three essays that estimate the impact of policies and practices on college student outcomes and inequality in higher education. The first essay shows that salient and accessible signals about academic qualifications affect college enrollment choices. After highly selective four-year colleges published GPAs that could guarantee transfer admissions, high-GPA community college graduates increased flagship enrollment by 32 percent. Increased transfers to flagships over less selective regional and private colleges also accompanied higher graduation rates and lower student debt. Gains were largest for students with historically lower transfer rates. These findings suggest that publishing transparent college admissions standards can be a low- to no-cost strategy for increasing access to selective colleges. The second essay estimates the impact of faculty on college students’ long-term achievement. I use statewide data from Texas and Virginia to study whether students assigned to more effective faculty in developmental courses are more likely to graduate on time and have higher earnings. Using residual pass rates as a measure of faculty value-added, I find that replacing a community college instructor in the bottom 5 percent with an average instructor boosts academic persistence, college completion, and earnings by 0.02-0.13 SD. Impacts on long-run outcomes are mediated by short-run academic indicators such as reduced course withdrawal, improved follow-up course performance, and increased credit accumulation. Faculty value-added is decreasing in the number of courses and students taught each semester, and is less related to demographic characteristics such as faculty gender, race, education, and age. These results suggest that efforts to improve faculty hiring, assignments, or working conditions may affect student outcomes. The third essay evaluates a program to reduce faculty’s biased behaviors and identifies potential channels through which faculty can affect student outcomes and gaps. Although more colleges have invested in unconscious or implicit bias training for college faculty to reduce achievement gaps by race and gender, little is known about their impacts on faculty choices and student performance. Through a field experiment with over one thousand faculty members at four colleges, we estimate the impact of de-biasing tool that introduces faculty to the concept of implicit bias, offers faculty a chance to understand their own biases through the implicit association test, and understand evidence-based teaching and advising practices to implement. This paper presents pilot evidence from one community college during Fall 2020, and shows that the program increased the use of blind grading among faculty. Second, faculty’s average gap in course grades between white and non-white students does not change significantly in the immediate semester, but then decreases by half in the following year. Finally, there is suggestive evidence that persistence and completion increase. This is the first study to our knowledge that estimates the impact of de-biasing teaching tools on faculty teaching choices and student outcomes.

Intervention research in education investigates whether and how particular educational programs help students learn. Treatment effect heterogeneity, or variation in a program’s impact, makes this effort more complicated, because it means more work must be done to understand what works, for whom, and in what contexts. This dissertation consists of three papers that explore distinct sources of treatment effect heterogeneity in the context of educational interventions. The first paper, co-authored with Ethan Scherer, uses a factorial design to compare the effectiveness of three features in a reading-focused text messaging intervention: personalized information about students’ observed reading behaviors, goal setting for summer reading, and framing the purpose of reading as useful for skill-building (an instrumental view), a fun activity (an entertainment view), or both. We find that that personalized messages increase the amount of summer reading and students’ reading skills when they return to school in the fall. The effects of personalized information on test scores are amplified when families receive a combination of instrumental and entertainment-framed messages. We find no evidence of impacts for goal setting. The second paper investigates how the effects of a district-run, universal-access pre-K program vary based on the access of the control group to different counterfactual options. Using administrative records and program waitlists, I reconstruct a matched sample that was plausibly randomized, either to receive a space in the district pre-K program or not. While on average I find no evidence of an impact of the pre-K program on kindergarten readiness, I find large positive effects in communities where the control group students are more likely to report either not attending pre-K or attending a different subsidized pre-K program. The third paper considers an emerging experimental design in education research: Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (or SMARTs), which are used to develop, refine, and test adaptive interventions. I use principal stratification to identify endogenous subgroups determined by how individuals respond to each of the Phase 1 treatments, and I use these strata to highlight a latent assumption in current analytic techniques. I also present a simulation study to explore the magnitude of estimation bias when this assumption is violated.

This paper explores the historical context and current state of diversity within the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) system, emphasizing the challenges and complexities faced in achieving racial and socioeconomic integration. Tracing the evolution of APS from the post-Brown era to the present day, we analyze the impact of historical events, legal decisions, and demographic shifts on the composition of the student body. Recognizing the limitations imposed by current legal landscapes that restrict the explicit use of race as a central factor in diversity initiatives, we propose a set of race-neutral strategies to promote a more inclusive and equitable educational environment.

Neoliberalism has become the hegemonic rationality of our time, framing nearly every aspect of our social world in terms of competition. This dissertation sheds light on neoliberal infiltration and naturalization within the field of language education through three distinct but interrelated papers. In Discourses of dual language bilingual education, I map out the discursive landscape of the field and, building on Ruiz (1984), I theorize a cross-epistemic model to demonstrate why the English-as-resource paradigm of the nationalist era has transformed into a multilingualism-as-resource paradigm within the current neoliberal era. In Rebranding bilingualism: The shifting discourses of language education policy in California’s 2016 election, I use critical discourse analysis to compare Proposition 227 (1998), which effectively banned bilingual education in California, with its legislative repeal, Proposition 58 (2016), specifically demonstrating the discursive shift to neoliberalism that occurred between 20th and 21st century language education policies. In Mechanisms of neoliberalization within California’s language education policy, I draw on the tools of critical discourse analysis as well as corpus linguistics to examine California language education policy texts spanning from 1967 to the present, laying bare three discursive mechanisms of neoliberalization within the field: 1) infiltration of market-based vocabulary; 2) terminological sloganization; and 3) commodification of multilingualism. While the neoliberalization of language education has contributed to more widespread support of bilingual education—now rebranded as multilingualism—it has also altered the reasons behind this support—from promoting equity and social justice to a market-based rationale of expanding individual opportunity in an increasingly globalized world. My findings point to the ways in which those who have traditionally been served by bilingual education—that is, racially and linguistically minoritized students—are being crowded out by more privileged (i.e., white) students seeking a competitive edge in the global market era. Neoliberal policies–through color-blind, a-historic, and universalistic rhetoric–are deceptively designed to appear objective and democratic (“for all”). I argue, however, that neoliberalism undermines democracy by reproducing colonial relations of power that privilege Whiteness. This collected work contributes to a deeper understanding of the political work of language.

The United States lags far behind other developed countries in terms of preschool provision and access. Because subsidized preschool effectively serves as childcare for enrolled students, preschool policies have ramifications in the labor market; namely, whether or not parents return to work after having children. This paper investigates the only two state-wide universal pre-k programs in the country, those of Florida and Vermont. I use a synthetic controls approach in order to address the impact these programs have had on maternal labor force participation rates in each state. I find that while Vermont’s pre-k policy may have produced a significant increase in maternal labor force participation, the results from Florida’s policy are insignificant. This outcome suggests that differences in how the policies have been implemented drive whether or not the policy has meaningful impacts on mothers’ decisions to rejoin the labor force. Vermont offers more full-day options than Florida, although both programs are only free for half-day provision; additionally, Florida offers programming for children ages 4 and up, while Vermont offers programming for children 3 and up. Finally, I suggest other routes to explore which may aid pre-k policies in making it more accessible for mothers to return to work: these include more targeted programs, more full-day options, and subsidized (rather than free) provisions.

Equity gaps are present on who enters and completes college where racially minoritized and low-income students are less likely to do either compared to White and more affluent students. My dissertation is comprised of two papers. The first paper examines an access barrier—submitting a FAFSA—and the second examines equity activities at Californian community colleges to help students persist and complete. My first paper examines FAFSA submission rates and if there are inequalities by race and sex for California’s 2018 high school graduates. I also explore the school characteristics associated with higher FAFSA completion rates using multilevel logistic models. I find that out of low-income and high achieving students (i.e., students that have at least a 3.0 GPA when they graduate high school), 85 percent of Asian students submit a FAFSA making them the most likely to do so. Native Indian/Alaska Native students are the least likely to submit a FAFSA as only 60 percent submit one. White students are the second least likely to submit one with just 68 percent submitting a FAFSA. Inequities by race and sex are also present where females are consistently more likely to submit a FAFSA compared to their male counterparts. The multilevel analysis finds that four school characteristics are associated with the odds of a student submitting a FAFSA—the share of a students that are socioeconomically disadvantaged, the share of classes offered that are A-G, the share of students who pass the English Language Arts section of California’s standardized test, and the share of 12th graders who complete the A-G sequence. All four characteristics increase a student’s odds of submitting a FAFSA as the characteristic increases. Differences are present by student racial background. My second paper provides an analysis of the California Community Colleges 2020 Annual Reports. In these reports colleges give an update on how they are spending equity funds and the progress on activities for selected equity goals based on their three-year Student Equity Plans. These goals are based on different student groups (e.g., race, income, veteran) and metrics (e.g., enrollment, completing college level math and English, and completion). I document and analyze the common activities colleges are using to close equity gaps and how they are spending their equity funds. While colleges reported on a variety of activities to close gaps for their metric goals, counseling/course scheduling and academic support are the two activities most frequently reported. However, some differences are present across the colleges based on regions and college characteristics (e.g., size, share of Promise students, staff racial background). Two concerning findings is the prevalence of cultural awareness activities being reported, as well as the number of activities reported for all students. Both raise questions if they will help close equity gaps. Finally, colleges are spending most of their funds on salaries. This is unsurprising given counseling was the most common activity category, with staff resources as the fourth most common category. What is unknown is if colleges are creating new programs with new positions or are they using funds to cover salaries for existing positions.

The California Community College (CCC) system serves an integral role in the state’s public education. Serving more than 2.1 million students annually across 116 colleges, it is the largest higher education system in the nation. It provides students with remedial education, precollegiate instruction, and workforce preparation. Moreover, a substantial share of graduates from California’s four-year universities begin their coursework in the CCC system. The state uses a centralized funding formula to apportion CCC revenue. This formula is crucial in allocating resources across districts, colleges, and students in a manner that reflects the state’s priorities for the system’s many educational functions and student populations. Historically, the state used an enrollment-based funding formula that weighted funding for all students equally. However, in 2018, the state adopted the Student-Centered Funding Formula (SCFF) which represented a substantial shift in the state’s funding priorities for the CCC system. The SCFF funds districts according to enrollment levels, equity, and student success. The equity component is based on a district’s counts of financial aid recipients. The student success component is based on a district’s counts of students who achieve various academic benchmarks including certificate or associate degree completion. This component is also weighted according to the number of financial aid recipients who achieve a given benchmark. The SCFF poses significant implications for the CCC system. The added equity and student success components comprise roughly a third of total apportionment funding. Administrators thus face increased financial incentives to effectively administer financial aid to students and to improve student performance along the state-set metrics. If districts and colleges successfully respond to the SCFF’s financial incentives, the policy may improve student outcomes through reformed financial aid administration and/or increased completion of certificates and degrees. However, the failure to respond to these financial incentives may result in revenue shortfalls that limit the operational effectiveness of districts and colleges. This dissertation is comprised of three papers in which I explore the SCFF’s effects on district revenue, student financial aid receipt, and degree production in the CCC system. In the first paper, I provide a detailed discussion of CCC apportionment. I describe the funding mechanics of the SCFF and the enrollment-based funding formula that preceded it. I also use ordinary least squares modeling to estimate the impact of the SCFF on district revenue in its first operational year. For this analysis, I use CCC apportionment data in 2017 and 2018. I find that districts serving higher proportions of lower-income students experienced an increase in revenue from the SCFF relative to the prior formula, on average. In turn, the SCFF increased progressivity in CCC funding. In the second paper, I measure the SCFF’s effects on student receipt of Pell Grants and Promise Grants. I draw on student-level administrative data from the CCC system in the 2015-2019 period. I use an interrupted time series model to estimate effects on Pell and Promise Grant receipt systemwide. I also use comparative interrupted time series models to estimate differential effects across college groups. I find a systemwide increase in Pell Grant receipt—but not Promise Grant receipt—associated with SCFF. These effects did not show substantial differences across college groups that were financially affected or unaffected by the SCFF’s financial incentives. However, heterogeneity in Pell receipt was driven by the extent to which a college could expand awarding among students who likely would have been eligible non-recipients in the absence of the SCFF. In the third paper, I measure the SCFF’s effects on certificate and degree production. I draw on student-level administrative data from the CCC system in the 2015-2018 period. I use an interrupted time series model to estimate systemwide changes in certificate and degree awarding after the adoption of the SCFF. I also use comparative interrupted time series models to estimate differential college effects. I find an increase in certificate and traditional associate degree awarding associated with the SCFF. These gains are impressive considering that this analysis uses only a single year of post-SCFF data. However, Associate Degrees for Transfer exhibit null effects associated with the SCFF. I find modest evidence that heterogeneity in effects across colleges was driven by the extent to which a college was affected by the SCFF’s financial incentives. Across two distinct grouping methods, college groups that were more affected exhibited somewhat larger awarding gains in most degree types than college groups that were less affected. However, partially due to power limitations, the differences between more- and less-affected colleges were generally not significant, so these results are suggestive but not conclusive. This dissertation makes several contributions to existing literature. The first paper reviews CCC funding in a level of detail that, to my knowledge, has not been covered in nearly two decades. The second paper is novel in its topic since the SCFF is unique in its use of financial aid receipt as a student metric. These results offer encouraging evidence that financial aid incentives may be efficacious in increasing student financial aid receipt. Finally, the third paper contributes to a relatively larger body of literature on the effects of performance funding policies on student certificate and degree completion. While prior research largely finds that performance funding policies do not benefit student academic attainment, my results find early evidence of gains in certificate and associate degree completion associated with the SCFF.

Bullying during childhood and adolescence can negatively influence various aspects of youth development and long-term well-being. Adults who were bullied as children or adolescents are more likely to struggle with mental health problems such as panic disorders and anxiety, while adolescent bullies are more likely to engage in violent behaviors later in life. Yet, bullying is a common experience for many youths around the world and global surveys estimate that approximately one in three adolescent males and one in four females have been the target of bullying at school. This dissertation focuses on adolescent bullying in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region of the world affected by high levels of intentional violence among youth, but that so far has been relatively under-researched. Together, these three papers explore the role of socioeconomic factors at the individual and school levels and assess the national policy landscape in the region. The first paper focuses on the relationship between student socioeconomic status and different dimensions of bullying victimization (e.g. physical and verbal). The second paper investigates how the school’s socioeconomic context relates to student bullying victimization. These two papers use data from the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The third paper provides an overview of the antibullying legislative context in Latin America and the Caribbean. This paper includes a descriptive analysis of existing school-based antibullying laws and uses both empirical and iterative methods to create a quantitative legal dataset, which is subsequently used to assess the scope of existing laws, bullying definitions, and preventive measures. Analyses of the PISA data reveal a sizeable number of missing data, especially among more vulnerable students. Data completeness also varies across participating countries. These findings highlight the difficulties of conducting large international assessments and should support future studies on the topic by underscoring measurement challenges and existing data gaps. Results from the last paper indicate most countries in the region have yet to adopt national antibullying laws. Nevertheless, encouraging signs included the fact that the most populous countries in the region have laws in place and that new laws have steadily emerged over the past ten years.

This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring my overarching research question: How does sense of place shape a teacher’s orientation to their profession? My first chapter empirically answers the question: Is there a relationship between place attachment and measured aspects of teacher quality? In an attempt to qualify the strength of bond between a teacher and his or her community, I adapted a place attachment instrument developed by Raymond, Brown, and Weber (2010). Each teacher is given a place attachment score informed by their responses on the 21-item survey. Next, I correlated these scores to other aspects of teacher quality including retention, loneliness, job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and instructional effectiveness. This paper is an exploration of place attachment with a limited sample size and measure of impact. While I will give a more in-depth overview of the findings, in preview, I find a weak relationship between a teacher’s place attachment and teacher quality metrics. In my second chapter, I explore the ways in which teachers engage in the broader community. I conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with 18 teachers from across the United States and various school types including traditional public schools, charter schools, and private schools. These interviews informed three archetypical profiles of teachers in the community. My final chapter is a mixed methods investigation of Marshallese English Language Learners (ELL) in Springdale public schools in Northwest Arkansas. This context provides a critical case study of the importance of community and its relationship with a student’s education. I employ a mixed methods research design leveraging student achievement data and focus interviews with district employees to answer two questions. First, what is the schooling experience of Marshallese ELL students in Springdale district? Second, how do Springdale teachers build relationships with the Marshallese community? Through the quantitative phase of the study, I find a persistent achievement gap between Marshallese ELL students and their ELL peers. The qualitative interviews reveal that the district’s approach to ELL instruction is geared towards Spanish-speakers, and cultural differences between Marshallese families and the dominant culture in Springdale create barriers in the classroom for students and teachers to overcome.

With U.S. classrooms increasingly characterized by linguistic diversity, teacher education has come under heightened scrutiny to respond to these realities. Recent shifts in Massachusetts language policy provide an informative example. Federal oversight prompted the state to implement an ambitious initiative requiring teachers to earn an endorsement in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI). The rollout of this initiative coincided with the final years of the state’s English-only education mandate, and the SEI endorsement remains a requirement for teachers today. As a growing body of research highlights the ideological dynamics of language policy, particularly in English-only educational contexts, this dissertation has two overlapping goals: (1) To develop a theoretical framework for the study of monolingual language ideologies in relation to policy interpretation and (2) to apply this framework within a critical policy analysis of the Massachusetts SEI endorsement initiative. This dissertation consists of three papers. Paper 1 puts forth a theoretical framework for studying monolingual language ideologies. Through a historical analysis of U.S. language policies and previous research on language ideologies, this paper demonstrates how dynamics of race and racism overlap with language policy and teacher education in U.S. contexts. Paper 2 is an empirical study of SEI instructors’ roles as policy interpreters within the SEI endorsement initiative. This study documents how 33 SEI course instructors interpreted the SEI endorsement course in ways that reinforced or augmented the state’s design. Paper 3 highlights these instructors’ discourses around the topics of language policy and race. Drawing on poststructural policy analysis, this paper explores the varying degrees to which participants addressed these topics in relation to the course’s emphasis on language pedagogies. Together, these papers offer a framework for the study of language ideologies with implications for language policy, policy interpretation, and teacher education in multilingual contexts.

Private choice programs provide government resources to qualified families to enable them to enroll their children in private schools of their choosing. “Gold standard” experimental studies have found overall mixed impacts of voucher programs, one form of private school choice arrangements, on student academic achievement. Yet, these results face external validity challenges, as both states, schools, and students can choose to participate in private choice programs, generating selection issues. This dissertation focuses on the decision-making of states, schools, and students in participating in private school choice programs. The first study estimates the effect of state-level social factors on private school choice program adoption and expansion. Results indicate that political factors dominate predictions of policy adoption, and once enacted the program expansions tend to be driven by educational needs within states rather than their political environment. Also, individual tax-credits/deduction policies show a different logit in terms of program adoption and expansion than other types of private school choice programs. The second paper examines private school participation patterns in voucher programs in DC, Indiana, and Louisiana for 2014-15 school year. Results reveal that higher tuition levels and larger cohort enrollments, conditions normally associated with high quality schools, help identify schools that are less likely to participate in voucher programs. Further, private schools in D.C. and Louisiana, the two states that have higher regulatory burdens, are less likely to participate in their voucher programs compared to private schools in less-regulated Indiana. The last paper focuses on student participation patterns in the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP). Specifically, we investigate if there is any systematic pattern regarding program attrition. Little evidence is found that more disadvantaged students, economically and academically, are “cream skimmed” into or “pushed out” of the voucher program. Students with lower baseline test scores, however, do tend to face a greater risk of leaving the LSP, as do students who were assigned private schools farther from home and schools that serve larger minority populations. Results indicate that in the LSP, students’ self-selections into and out of the program are driven more by the program design rather than by their personal demographics.

This dissertation studies the effect of education policies on the behavior of individuals—particularly the criminal behavior of juveniles. The first chapter of this dissertation, "School Entry and Criminal Behavior", examines the effect of an education policy that affects when children are allowed to begin school on their likelihood of committing crime later in life. Children whose birthdays fall just before the school entry cutoff are the youngest in their cohort for their entire education. A large literature documents that, among other things, the youngest students in a classroom have lower test scores, are more likely to be held back, and are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. This paper investigates if being the youngest in a cohort has an impact on an individual's propensity to commit crime. I use records for over 4 million arrests spanning a 20-year period in California to assess if being the youngest in a school cohort increases the likelihood of being arrested at any point between the early teen and young adult years. Overall, I find no effect on the probability of arrest for serious crimes and no persistent effect for less serious crimes. However, the youngest students in a cohort have a higher risk of arrest for certain offenses at age 14, corresponding to the age at which they would transition to high school. This may reflect the influence of school setting, peer group composition, and monitoring standards on behavior and the probability of arrest. The second chapter of this dissertation, "School Quality, Student Performance, and Behavior", examines the effect of an education policy that places low-performing schools on probation on the school's academic progress and student misbehavior. School districts and state education boards across the U.S. have implemented school accountability systems in order to identify which schools may need to be improved. I use an accountability system implemented by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) which placed schools on probation if they failed to reach a certain performance level based on a combination of test scores, attendance, and student growth. Schools that are placed on probation and do not show improvement may face sanctions that include principal removal, staff turnaround, or school closure. I find that schools that receive low enough performance ratings to be placed on probation in one year show slightly more improvement in their performance in the following year relative to schools that just miss being placed on probation. That is, schools that received low performance ratings increased their rating in the next year by 3 more percentage points than schools that were not placed on probation. However, this difference was generally not large enough or sustained for long enough for many schools to get off of probation. Given the nature of these schools, this is potentially a resource issue as many of these schools are in poor, urban settings. From a behavior standpoint, I do not find evidence that receiving poor performance ratings has any effect on changes in student misconduct across the probation threshold. The third chapter of this dissertation, "The Effect of School Year Length on Juvenile Crime", examines the effect of a shortened school year on juvenile crime. As a result of the Great Recession during the late 2000s and early 2010s, many public sector employees were subject to mandatory work furloughs due to budgetary shortfalls. In order to alleviate the effects of the recession, public schools in California instituted work furloughs, which in effect decreased the number of days students would attend school. Specifically, schools were allowed to shorten their school year by five to twelve days. Given that a shorter school year implies that students will be in school less often, there may be changes in their behavior stemming from the incapacitation effect of attending school. Literature has shown that juveniles are less likely to commit property crime while in school due to a higher probability of detection and more likely to commit violent crime due higher concentrations of juveniles on school grounds. This paper examines the effect of a shortened school year on juvenile criminal behavior. I find that decreasing the amount of school days in the school year has no significant impact on juvenile arrests. This result may be explained by the overall decrease in juvenile crime over the past 20 years, as opposed to school year length changes having no effect on juvenile criminal behavior.

This research paper aims to investigate associations between education investments and economic growth on the state level. These relationships are measured in terms of two dependent variables: state gross domestic product output and cumulative personal incomes by state. These dependent variables, or indicators of economic growth were selected from previous supportive literature. The present study analyzes publicly available aggregate school finance data reports and aggregate GDP output reports for the year of 2018. Two hypotheses were tested to assess these associations. The results of the present study showed significant, positive associations for both tested hypotheses. This study further supports existing literature stating that educational investment impacts economic growth on the state-level.

This dissertation’s overarching and guiding research question was: “How are education policies and schools both reproducing structural inequality and promoting educational equity and social justice?” This dissertation explores this broad question through an exemplary case: The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and its implementation in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Three papers, representing two “planes of analysis” (Rogoff, 1995) – the federal policy formulation and local implementation levels – and structured to focus on the interplay between “policy, people, and place” (Honig, 2006), were used to explore this question. Each paper also interrogates 1) how federal policy-makers use education policy (NLSP) to position public schools as sites of intervention for mitigating broader social inequities (food insecurity), and 2) the efficacy of delivery of social provision (nutritious food) at the local level. Paper one focuses on the historicity of policy through an examination of the historical and contemporary (1930-2010) landscape of the NSLP. The paper demonstrated how the NSLP has served as a quintessential example of the “educationalized welfare state” – that is, the American preference for using education policy to redress broader social problems and schools as sites of intervention and for the delivery of social provision. Furthermore, this paper includes an analysis of the tensions between and the affordances and limitations of federal versus local level policy-making. Finally, paper one considers how the privatization of the NSLP in the 1970s-1990s reflects the dangers of education privatization, which undermines the educationalized welfare state and thus, social welfare more broadly.Paper two focuses on policy, people, and place at the federal policy-making level. Using the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Text Analysis, this paper analyzed the discourse utilized by legislators and Congressional hearing witnesses throughout the Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) that led to the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) of 2010 – the most recent reauthorization of the NSLP. This research finds that legislators and witnesses defined and framed the problems of childhood hunger and obesity as both a consequence of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and children and parents’ bad dietary choices. Furthermore, these problems were considered a moral responsibility of the U.S. government to resolve for the benefit of children’s physical and cognitive development, a critical part of health care reform and long-term public health, and as a matter of national security as well as American competitiveness in the world. Finally, legislator’s discourses led to the construction of the HHFKA as a means for expanding and increasing students’ access to healthier school meals through, for example, mandated, science-based nutrition standards and the provision of universal free lunch in high-poverty schools. However, partisan politics and the tradition of placing social provision in the realm of schools also led to legislators taking away funding from the Food Stamp program (a broad food assistance program) to pay for the HHFKA (food assistance in schools). Finally, paper three focuses on policy, people, and place at the local policy implementation level. Drawing on data from a three-year ethnographic case study of the implementation of the HHFKA in OUSD, paper three examines the constraining and enabling conditions that allowed California Thursdays – an innovative farm to school initiative – to go to scale across 84 districts in California. This study finds that local level actors developed a “bite-sized implementation strategy” that broke down the process of changing school food systems into small, scaffolding manageable tasks that, through a “progress-based journey,” accumulated into larger systems change. This research also finds that the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) in Berkeley, CA, played a critical role as an “intermediary organization” in its use of a “collective impact model” to organize school districts implementing California Thursdays into a network. The California Thursdays network shared resources and best practices through an email listserv, which advanced the initiative’s “co-construction” and ability to scale across a variety of implementation contexts. Furthermore, CEL also positively shaped the discourse of school lunch through the trademarking and branding of California Thursdays, and its use and facilitation of empowering language through the listserv. Finally, this research finds that California Thursdays is reshaping the school food landscape in California and creating broader, cross-sectoral impacts.

Political efficacy is a construct comprised of two dimensions. Internal political efficacy is the individual’s assessment of his or her own capacity to navigate a political system and external political efficacy is the individual’s judgment of the political system’s responsiveness. Although political efficacy has been associated with political activity (e.g., voting), consensus building, empowerment, and trust in government, few studies have developed measures of political efficacy for use outside of the field of political science. The current study makes three distinct contributions. The first paper begins with a review of the political science and political psychology literature specific to the development and application of the construct of political efficacy. It then integrates a review of social cognitive theory and positions political efficacy within that theoretical framework and contests that political efficacy would be a useful and revelatory tool in an education policy context. The second paper contains both a pilot study, which develops the measures of internal and external political efficacy, and a parent study. Following the measure development, survey research was conducted among a national sample of homeschool teaching parents. This study finds that that internal and external political efficacy are positively and significantly associated with basic needs satisfaction (a key construct in self-determination theory), the use of autonomy supporting instructional practice in individual home schools, and parent perceptions of student engagement. Finally, the third paper investigates individual and contextual predictors of internal and external political efficacy and hypothesizes that teacher collaboration, and organizational construct, predicts both. Data from a sample of traditional public and charter school teachers and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) allow decomposition of the variance in order to examine how the demographic and substantive independent variables are associated with internal and external political efficacy. The study finds that EPE varies significantly with school membership and is strongly predicted by teacher collaboration. The current study contains three distinct papers. The first paper begins with a review of the political science and political psychology literature specific to the development and application of the construct of political efficacy. It then integrates a review of social cognitive theory and positions political efficacy within that theoretical framework and contests that political efficacy would be a useful and revelatory tool in an education policy context. The second study investigates the relation between political efficacy beliefs and the instructional choices of homeschool teaching parents. The paper begins with a pilot study to develop valid and reliable measures of both internal and external political efficacy. In the parent study, over 2000 teaching parents participated in the study. A series of regression analyses were used to examine relation between political efficacy beliefs, needs satisfaction (for autonomy, relatedness, and competence), autonomy supporting instructional practices, and perceived student engagement. Competence, educational attainment, and oldest student’s grade were significantly and positively associated with internal political efficacy while oldest child’s grade and homeschooling likelihood were negatively associated with external political efficacy. Finally, a host of variables (including internal political efficacy) were positively and significantly associated with the use of autonomy supportive instructional practices. The final study used survey data from more than 700 traditional public and charter school teachers. This study hypothesized that collaborative school environments would be positively and significantly associated with individual levels of internal and external political efficacy. HLM (hierarchical linear modeling) was employed to partial the variance to within school and between-school components. Collaboration and internal political efficacy were positively and significantly associated with teacher external political efficacy (teacher experience was negatively related). External political efficacy and teacher experience were positively and significantly associated with internal political efficacy.

Past literature in democratization, nationalism, and autocratic regime maintenance illustrate how education invites both risk and reward for autocratic states. Education is simultaneously linked with pro-democratic attitudes, political disengagement, and autocratic failure. At the same time, autocrats are predicted to be hesitant towards investing in disenfranchised populations. However, education has also been found to bolster national loyalty and identity, human capital, and long-term development. Nor is the real-world variation clear, autocratic states display significant variation in educational investment and attainment in addition to varied relationships between education and political outcomes. I argue that education can sustain or compromise autocratic stability depending on two factors: the ethnic composition of the state and the extent to which the state uses propaganda in schools. Education does not have a uniform effect. Education will not instill similarly pro-democratic attitudes or identity affiliations across a diverse population, even if the education “treatment” is constant. At the state level, similar educational policies and initiatives across autocratic states can have opposite outcomes, jeopardizing or strengthening autocratic stability. Similarly, at the individual level, increased education can lead to individuals becoming more or less attached to the national identity. My dissertation presents three papers to investigate the factors leading to differences in this real-world variation.

A particularly high-risk time on campus is the alcohol consumption associated with collegiate sporting events, specifically tailgating. The purpose of this dissertation was twofold; first, to identify and critically examine the literature on alcohol use at college sporting events, specifically football games; second, to assess college presidents’ perceptions of alcohol policies regulating alcohol consumption during tailgating using the Health Belief Model. The literature review was accomplished by using multiple search engines, including Academic Search Complete, PubMed, CINAHL, ERIC, Health Source, Sociological Collection, SocINDEX, APA PsycINFO, MEDLINE, and Google Scholar to examine articles published on alcohol use among college students at collegiate sporting events, or football game-day. To be included in the literature review, articles must have been published in the United States within the year 2000 to 2019. A cross-sectional research design was used for the second study, which comprised of a 20-item survey questionnaire assessing college president’s perceptions of alcohol use during college sporting events. The survey instrument included items assessing the Stages of Change from the Transtheoretical Model, as well as the perceived benefits, barrier, severity, and susceptibility constructs from the Health Belief Model. A population census was conducted utilizing the 2019 NCAA Division-I Football Bowl Subdivision listing (N=130). The critical literature review search yielded 25, scientific, peer-reviewed articles involving alcohol use associated with college football games. In many of the studies, researchers used cross-sectional study designs (72%), obtained convenience samples (32%), and did not include reliability and/or validity measures (48%). Data were collected either online (36%), with a paper and pencil questionnaire (32%), hybrid (in-person and online) (12%), or case-study (12%). Three topics emerged from the literature, including alcohol related epidemiological trends (drinking behavior on game-day, negative consequences, and gender), social norm perceptions, and alcohol policies. In the second study, university presidents and chancellors from 130 Division I Football Subdivision (FBS) schools were selected to participate in a study assessing perceptions regarding safety issues pertaining to college sporting events. Respondents from 59 universities completed the survey, yielding a modest response rate of 49.6%. Collectively, respondents were categorized into senior-level administrators (presidents, chancellors, provosts), mid-level administrators (deans, department chairs, department directors), and specialists (substance abuse coordinators). Nearly two-thirds (62.7%; n=37) of the participants surveyed indicated their institution sold alcohol in the stadium, 12.5% (n=7) banned alcohol use during college sporting events, and the remaining schools allowed alcohol use with restrictions. Regarding tailgating, the majority (68.4%) of respondents indicated their institution had a policy regulating alcohol consumption. Multiple regression analyses were used to assess which constructs of the HBM were most predictive of presidential support for alcohol policies on game-day. The perceived benefits was the only construct yielding statistically significant results for both presidential support for restrictive alcohol polices as well as opposition for the sale of alcohol within the stadium. Notably, the enforcement of alcohol regulations during college football games varied across the spectrum (rarely, sometimes, often, always). Overall, event specific research, particularly studies addressing the alcohol use associated with college sporting events constitutes an emerging area of study. Results from the literature review demonstrate that college football games signify a time whereby fans consume alcohol at higher rates than they do during other social occasions. The scientific rigor employed by the researchers varied from study to study and several gaps in the literature were identified. In particular, a current national study identifying drinking patterns and alcohol related policies would allow universities to compare their institution to others and benchmark prevalence rates. Additionally, rigorous studies utilizing randomized control trials, thorough evaluation of interventions, especially related to policy implementation, and information from senior-level administrators about how to address game-day safety issues are lacking from the literature. Findings from the second study indicated that universities were at various stages in terms of their readiness to address the alcohol consumption associated with tailgating. Multivariate analysis revealed the perceived benefits construct from the HBM was associated with support for implementing restrictive alcohol polices. Thus, emphasizing the benefits of policy implementation should be used to generate policy change for college sporting events. While the opinions of university presidents and other senior administrators are essential, additional information could be obtained by assessing athletic directors and prevention specialists. Qualitative data may also provide information on why key stakeholders feel the way they do about various game-day prevention related policies. Ultimately the results from both studies can be used to create a safer game-day environment and reduce the liability universities may incur for the alcohol consumption that frequently occurs during college sporting events.

Food insecurity on college campuses has become a national conversation. It is an issue thataffects every college campus in America, those in cities and in college towns, public or private.While its prevalence on college campuses has occurred for decades, it has only come to theattention of university administrators, state legislators and researchers in the last ten years. Withthe cost of college increasing, federal and state support decreasing and more non-traditionalstudents entering college, it has become harder for students to support themselves, especiallyaccessing food. With food insecurity affecting almost 35% of students on campuses, university 1administrators have begun providing different means of assistance and solutions to tackle theissue. Ohio University, a public university located in the Appalachian region of SoutheasternOhio is just one of the many institutions addressing campus food insecurity. The Dean ofStudents office and other administrative offices on campus have initiated multiple programs toassist food insecure students. Programs such as Cat’s Cupboard, The Meal bank, and theEmergency Microgrants program are some of the initiatives taken by the institution to increaseaccess to food to its students. This white paper reviews Ohio University’s multiple responses tocampus food insecurity through the Bobcats Helping Bobcats initiative. My findings show thatOhio University is proactively tackling campus food insecurity, providing a multitude of campusresources that are frequently used by those in the student body who are both food and financiallyinsecure.

This three-paper dissertation explores problems with the use of standardized tests as outcome measures for the evaluation of instructional interventions in mathematics and science. Investigators commonly use students’ scores on standardized tests to evaluate the impact of instructional programs designed to improve student achievement. However, evidence suggests that the standardized tests may not measure, or may not measure well, the student learning caused by the interventions. This problem is special case of a basic problem in applied measurement related to understanding whether a particular test provides accurate and useful information about the impact of an educational intervention. The three papers explore different aspects of the issue and highlight the potential benefits of (a) using particular research methods and of (b) implementing changes to educational policy that would strengthen efforts to reform instructional intervention in mathematics and science.The first paper investigates measurement problems related to the use of standardized tests in applied educational research. Analysis of the research projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Mathematics and Science Education Program permitted me to address three main research questions. One, how often are standardized tests used to evaluate new educational interventions? Two, do the tests appear to measure the same thing that the intervention teaches? Three, do investigators establish validity evidence for the specific uses of the test? The research documents potential problems and actual problems related to the use of standardized tests in leading applied research, and suggests changes to policy that would address measurement issues and improve the rigor of applied educational research.The second paper explores the practical consequences of misalignment between an outcome measure and an educational intervention in the context of summative evaluation. Simulated evaluation data and a psychometric model of alignment grounded in item response modeling generate the results that address the following research question: how do differences between what a test measures and what an intervention teaches influence the results of an evaluation? The simulation derives a functional relationship between alignment, defined as the match between the test and the intervention, and treatment sensitivity, defined as the statistical power for detecting the impact of an intervention. The paper presents a new model of the effect of misalignment on the results of an evaluation and recommendations for outcome measure selection.The third paper documents the educational effectiveness of the Learning Mathematics through Representations (LMR) lesson sequence for students classified as English Learners (ELs). LMR is a research-based curricular unit designed to support upper elementary students’ understandings of integers and fractions, areas considered foundational for the development of higher mathematics. The experimental evaluation contains a multilevel analysis of achievement data from two assessments: a standardized test and a researcher-developed assessment. The study coordinates the two sources of research data with a theoretical mechanism of action in order to rigorously document the effectiveness and educational equity of LMR for ELs using multiple sources of information.

Maximizing welfare in the economy requires effective policies that mitigate negative externalities and incentivize positive externalities. My first paper concerns emissions at manufacturing plants in the US, a major source of negative externalities. Globalization has created concerns that pollution can move across country boarders. Therefore, I study the environmental performance of foreign manufacturing establishments in the US to test if foreign establishments in pollution intensive industries are heavy emitters. I find that foreign firms are not dirtier than domestic establishments on average. However, they are significantly cleaner in industries with high fixed costs and dirtier in industries with low fixed costs. This is because only the most productive establishments find it profitable to produce abroad in high fixed cost industries and high productivity establishments are generally cleaner. The next two papers focus on higher education, which bears large positive externalities. In the second paper in this dissertation I study the response of student charges to the Post-9/11 GI Bill at 2- and 4-Year public, private, and for-profit institutions. If institutions of higher education increase their student charges in response to increases in student aid, the goals of student aid policies are undermined. I test for supply side responses to the Post-9/11 GI Bill and find statistically significant increases in fees and tuition rates at 4-year public and 2-year private colleges. These increases reduce the effective benefit that students receive which harms their ability to access higher education. The third paper recognizes that the US currently has a shortage of STEM majors and tests whether major contingent loans can incentivize students to select into these fields. That is, if we only offer low interest loans to students studying majors that society values most, do students respond by choosing those majors? Using a natural experiment created by the National Defense Student Loan Program in 1959, which had a provision that teaching, foreign language, science, technology, and math fields receive priority in loan allocation, I find little evidence that students select qualifying majors in response to low-interest loans.

The cost for higher education increased nearly 55% from 2002 to 2012, while state appropriations decreased 12% over the same time period (Government Accountability Office, 2014). The cost burden has been shifted heavily on students and their families as institutions have raised the cost of attendance in order to make up for declines in state support dollars. As the country continues to face a student loan bubble that impacts the housing market, marriage rates, and birth rates it will be important to the future of higher education to figure out other sources of revenue to balance budgets (Choi, Zhu, Goodman, Ganesh, & Strochak, 2018). Higher education philanthropy topped $41 billion in 2016 (Council for Aid to Education, 2017). While university endowments currently make up about 9.7% of the overall operating budget for institutions, philanthropy has the potential to make a substantial impact on colleges and universities (National Association of College and University Business Officers, 2016). By looking at how federal student loans, federal grant aid, state appropriations, and the top tax rate impact philanthropy at private and public four-year, non-profit institutions will be added add to existing research on private philanthropy. The findings of this study are that while the tax rate did not influence higher education philanthropy, all the other independent variables had statistically significant results. When the amount of student loans increased, philanthropic support decreased. This was in line with existing research. As federal grants increased there was a parallel response with private support. Finally, state appropriations had an inverse relationship with private philanthropic dollars. In response to the results of this research, this paper includes strategies for higher education institutions to better lobby for students and their families with both state and federal officials. Furthermore, the study can be used to inform and shape current and future financial aid policies and budgets. Additionally, strategies and suggestions for how to grow and strengthen philanthropic research centered around higher education are suggested.

Despite the urgent need to improve US education for the ever-increasing population of recently-arrived secondary English language learners (ELLs) (Gandara & Baca, 2008; Lazarin, 2006), relatively little attention has been paid to the unique challenges and struggles these ELLs encounter. This three-paper dissertation aims to contribute to the development of scholarly knowledge of transnationalism and secondary ESL education by investigating how the everyday experience of Japanese high school sojourner students--a group of late-entrant transnational ELLs--is socially and institutionally organized. This research uses a sociological method of inquiry known as institutional ethnography (Smith, 1987, 2005). The first paper examines strategies that Japanese sojourners use to negotiate the institutional demands of US high school life while also calculating how their choices and performance will promote access to higher education in Japan. Despite the temporo-spatial constraints imposed by corporate transnationalism, Japanese sojourners actively carve out their future educational paths across borders through the effective but high-stakes strategy of graduating a year early from US high schools. I call this early graduation scheme a gambit because the sojourners sacrifice beneficial opportunities and even risk their graduation itself in the hope of securing a positional advantage upon their return to Japan. This paper addresses the sojourners' distinctive educational experiences and needs characterized by the involuntary, transient, and precarious nature of their stay in the US. The second paper examines the realities of high-stakes testing experienced by Japanese sojourners, particularly late-entrant ELLs, focusing on one big risk factor in early graduation gambit--state-mandated high school exit exams--and the sojourners' strategies for maneuvering the academic and linguistic challenges posed by the exams. These Japanese ELLs deliberately flunk the state English language proficiency tests and maintain the ESL status in order to avoid losing ESL accommodations, without which they would have little hope of passing the high school exit exams. This paper highlights the underlying issue of test validity and fairness and the importance of ensuring equitable treatment for transnational ELLs. The third paper examines how the organizational structure of US public high school education regulates late-entrant Japanese sojourners' second language (L2) interactional opportunities, opportunities which the second language acquisition (SLA) and L2 learning literature has found necessary for successful L2 development (e.g., Long, 1996; Lantolf, 2000). Findings show that late-entrant Japanese sojourners' peer interactions and social lives differ markedly from those of long-term sojourners who came to the US as elementary students, and that American high schools' structural constraints draw social boundaries, and limit interaction, between ELLs and American students. Intertwined with the school organizational structure are ideological discourse on limited English proficiency, marginalizing ELLs and imposing different academic expectations on sojourners who stay in versus those who test out of the ESL program. The three papers together show how the actualities of Japanese high school sojourners' lives in a local setting are translocally coordinated at the intersection of corporate transnationalism and educational policies and practices.

Education policy is frequently in the crosshairs of ideological disagreement. This dissertation analyzes three controversial policies over which elected school boards often have control: charter schools, suspension bans, and ability groups. How do charter schools impact district academic growth? Researchers typically focus on large districts with many charter schools, but the most common experience is an average-sized district shifting from no charters to one. A difference-in-differences design analyzing a decade of charter expansion in California reveals that impact is contingent on charter type: locally funded charters (i.e. affiliated with the district) lead to either static or decreased growth while directly funded charters (i.e. independent of the district) lead to higher academic growth. Many policymakers have banned or limited suspensions for all but the most serious offenses. The 2013 suspension ban in Los Angeles Unified School District provides a natural experiment; it led to a substantial, 0.2 standard deviation decrease in academic growth among middle schools that had previously issued the banned suspensions. Four subsequent suspension bans – in San Francisco, Pasadena, Oakland, and (grades K-3) all of California – also appear to have harmed academic growth. Simultaneously, suspension bans have an uncertain relationship with dropout rates, the primary mechanism by which bans are meant to impact the school-to-prison pipeline. Instead of banning suspensions, policymakers should carefully test other efforts that decrease suspension and dropout rates without harming academic growth. Finally, educators have utilized between-class ability grouping – sorting students in one grade into different classes by prior ability – for over a century. Proponents rely on a previously untested mechanism: decreased classroom dispersion in prior academic ability allows teachers to target their instruction more narrowly. This final paper measures classroom dispersion directly for the same students over four trimesters. Multivariate regressions and multilevel models evaluate the relationship between classroom dispersion and academic growth while controlling for other classroom characteristics as well as student, teacher, and school effects. Analyses reveal that English classrooms with less dispersion in prior ability experience slightly less growth. However, there is a trade-off: between-class ability grouping improves equity at the expense of overall academic growth.

Conversational language instructors as defined by the Korean Immigration Service’s E-2 visa category have become a hallmark of foreign language instruction in South Korea, particularly for English. Intended to supplement deficiencies in the language skills and curriculum of local Korean instructors, these instructors are a key source of exposure to the English-speaking cultures of countries such as the United States and Canada. Over the twenty-four year history of the formal categorization of conversation teachers, employment numbers have ranged into the tens of thousands, but have also fluctuated significantly. While factors like the global economic climate and changes of the ruling party in Seoul have impacted demand for teachers, relatively little formal scholarship has evaluated the process of education policy making in this area. This paper identifies the split between public and private education, socio-economic divisions, urban/rural dichotomies, devolution of political authority, and Korea’s modernization experience as key factors in the development of conversational education policy. This is combined with analysis of Korean Immigration Service annual reports on registered foreigners to indicate overall trends in visa issuance to evaluate trends over the course of the program and to discuss the relationship between foreign language education and policy in recent years. As the newly inaugurated Moon Jae-in administration begins to implement its new policy priorities in education, these key factors will continue to influence the success or failure of new policies and will illustrate the continued importance of language education policy in South Korean society.

This thesis examines teachers’ unions transformations from a service model to a social movement unionism model in response to corporate education reform and the efficacy of their resulting strategies and campaigns in combating corporate education reform, securing gains for membership, and building a broader class-focused politics. The thesis hopes to answer these questions: How does a reform caucus unseat incumbents, and once in that position of leadership, how does a union effectively rollout a reform project that changes members’ understanding of the union and their relationship within it? How does a teachers’ social movement union build coalitions and gain public support? What strategy does a SMU take to achieve its goals, does it work, and why? Can SMU effectively challenge bipartisan corporate education reform and develop support for a new class-based politics?The paper is divided into four primary chapters based around two case studies on the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) with an introduction and conclusion. These two cases were chosen primarily as two different unions operating under similar circumstances; they are the third and second largest school districts in the continental U.S., they are both located in states considered Democratic, they have similarly underfunded schools and suffer from aggressive corporate education reform coming from the heads of the cities and schools. The unions are also two of the most successful examples of teachers union’s transforming into a SMU and each then using a comparable strategy to achieve their demands.The first chapter provides a theoretical understanding of SMU and corporate education reform to be used to provide context and a framework for analyzing the case studies. The section will first explain the rise of SMU in the U.S and its main features, then explain the ideology behind the corporate education reform agenda and then the policies and impacts of the project.The next two chapters are the two case studies and they follow the same chapter structure divided into three sections. The first section provides the context of the public schools system by examining budget crises and their causes and corporate education reform in the city. The second section tracks the reform caucus’s rise to union leadership and their internal mobilization. The third section explains the unions’ contract campaigns, strategies and actions towards the district under each leadership. The fourth chapter is the analysis of the two case studies. Following a similar structure to the previous chapters, this section analyzes the similarities and differences in first the context of the unions, then the strategy of union reform and coalition building, then each unions’ external contract campaigns. This chapter will then draw out the significant lessons from the analysis of each section and evaluate SMU as a stronger model for teachers unions and as a potential way of bring about political change.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the nature ofinstitutional adaptation of the University within the context ofthe political upheavals in twentieth-century Spain. I will focuson the changing structure of the University under the Republicanera, the Franco years, and the present democracy. Elementswithin this changing educational structure suggest an idealtypology, a hypothetical university which manages to rise aboveits role as a mere function of the social milieu. By contrast, the reality of the University as an institution controlled by political regimes is evident throughout the paper. The contention herein is that among the three forms, the University under Franco was the furthest from the ideal typology.This paper, therefore, attempts to arrive at conclusionsconcerning the effect of the Spanish political systems ofrepublican democracy, authoritarianism, and socialist democracyupon the University. Ideologies of each system greatlydetermined the proposed institutional changes. By explaining thenature of the systems, as well as the transitions between eachone, I hope to make explicit the institutional reflectiontherein. The employment of an ideal typology aids in clarifying a means of comparison between what the University should be, andwhat actually exists under each system. Lastly, the focus on student attitudes is an integral element to the discussion, revealing the inadequacies and strengths of the University through political transitions.

Understanding how change occurs in lesser developed countries, particularly in Latin America has been the subject of a prolonged theoretical academic debate. That debate has emphasized economics more that politics in general and predictability over unpredictability in the Latin American region. This paper challenges these approaches. Explaining change requires an examination of the politics of public policy as much as its economic dimensions. Second, change in the Latin American region may be less predictable than it appears. Scholars maintain that change in Latin America occurs when contending elites negotiate it. Their power comes from the various resources they possess. Change, therefore, is not expected to occur as a function of regime change per se. This paper considers the treatment of education policy in Nicaragua during the regimes of the dynastic authoritarianism of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1967-1979), the revolutionary governments of the Sandinistas (1979-1990), and the democratic-centrist government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (1990-1996). The central research question is: When regimes change, do policies change? The methodology defines the independent variable as the regime and education policy as the dependent variable. It posits three hypotheses. The right-wing regime of Somoza was expected to restrict both the qualitative aspects and the financing of education; (2) the left-wing regimes of the Sandinistas were hypothesized to have expanded both; and (3) the democratic-centrist regime of Chamorro was expected to have both expanded and restricted certain aspects of education policy. Several chapters describe these regimes' expansive or restrictive education strategies. A comparative analysis of these 26 years demonstrates several variables' effect over time. An OLS regression and a times series analysis specifies the relationship between regime change and percent of GDP each regime devoted to education. Both the statistical and qualitative findings of this study confirm the hypotheses. The study reveals that, as regimes changed, education strategies and policies changed. Such findings challenge some current thought about political behavior with respect to Latin American development in particular and development theory in general.

I propose a new approach to measuring character skills. In the following three essays, my co-‎authors and I measure the effort that adolescent students appear to put forward on surveys ‎and tests. First, I examine the extent to which students simply skip questions or plead ‎ignorance on surveys. Second, I develop new methods for detecting careless answers, those ‎instances in which students appear to be "just filling in the bubbles." I show, using ‎longitudinal datasets, that both measures are predictive of educational degree attainment, ‎independent of measured cognitive ability and other demographic factors. Finally, I ‎demonstrate that international differences in reading, math and science test scores appear in ‎fact to partially reflect international differences in student effort on assessments. Just as some ‎students skip questions and carelessly answer surveys, some students do the same on tests. To ‎the extent that effort on surveys and tests reflects noncognitive skills, presumed international ‎differences in cognitive ability (as measured by standardized tests) might in fact be driven by ‎differences in noncognitive ability. Altogether, the measures explored in the paper present ‎three new methods for quantifying student character skills, which can be used in future ‎research. Throughout, my co-authors and I posit that the character skills that our measures ‎capture are related to conscientiousness and self-control. ‎

A significant portion of the education children receive occurs outside of the traditional classroom and produces outcomes not typically captured by standardized achievement tests. This dissertation is part of an effort to expand the educational venues and outcomes educational researchers rigorously examine. In particular, I present the key results from experimental studies of the effects of school tours to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR., and to the Museum of Discovery in Little Rock, AR. Chapter 1 focuses on arts exposure and critical thinking outcomes. A problem for the arts’ role in education has been a lack of rigorous scholarship that demonstrates educational benefits. A component of this problem has been a lack of available data. Analyzing original data collected through a randomized controlled trial of students visiting the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, I find positive effects of art museum visits on students’ ability to critically examine a work of art. Chapter 2 examines the theories of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility. Drawing upon the experimental data from the Crystal Bridges evaluation, I show that students’ exposure to a cultural institution has the effect of creating “cultural consumers” motivated towards acquiring new cultural capital. Importantly, we find that the experience has the strongest impact on students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. As such, the intervention supports the theory of cultural mobility. Finally, Chapter 3 experimentally examines the effects of students visiting a science museum. Many education policymakers are searching for ways to increase students’ competency and interest in science. Existing research, however, suggests that classroom instruction and content knowledge alone may not adequately cultivate an interest in science or increase aspirations for careers in science. In this paper I experimentally test how a school visit to a science museum alters students’ attitudes towards science and future career aspirations. I find that there are positive effects from exposure to a science museum for students, though the effects seem to be especially strong for boys. These findings have important policy implications for whether schools should devote their scarce resources to school tours of cultural institutions and for which types of students these experiences may be most important.

This paper provides an overview of the resources that exist for LGBTQ youth in the Cleveland area and uses the Queers and Allies Club at Oberlin High School (Oberlin, OH) as a case study in community formation among teenagers who identify as LGBTQ or as an ally to the LGBTQ community. Each chapter addresses potential sources of support, including schools, national organizations, and the Internet while presenting opportunities for improvement in each realm, demonstrating that while some LGBTQ youth resources exist, they are designed for youth in urban areas, leaving students in non-urban communities without access to community or information.

This paper evaluates whether students’ perceptions of Appalachian English improve through a method of instruction that uses dialect literature in the classroom. Most existing methods of instruction tend to portray dialects as wrong, incorrect, or in some way less rule-governed than Standardized English, despite the numerous studies that have demonstrated otherwise (e.g., Labov 1969, Wolfram 1986). The data from this study derives from two groups of students enrolled in introductory composition and communication at the University of Kentucky. Each group is given a pre-test to determine attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standardized English. An experimental group is then exposed to a method that incorporates texts that use Appalachian English features, while no specific dialect literature is included in the control group. After the conclusion of the lessons, students in both groups complete a post-test used to analyze whether their perceptions of Appalachian English changed throughout the study. The experimental method results in significant increases in several of the attitude measures for Appalachian English, while the students that did not receive this method of instruction experienced no increase for the linguistic variety. These results demonstrate that this method has potential for reducing negative perceptions towards speakers of non-standard dialects.

This dissertation examines the value of evaluation for Turkey's educational decision making. Relying on individual interviews and document review, the study analyzes how key stakeholders - government officials, academics, and civil society representatives - and governmental acts envision and portray the role and utility of evaluation for public decision making specifically in the education sector. Drawing on social science literature from the fields of evaluation, comparative education, public policy, and international development, this study addresses the need to decolonize the concept and practice of evaluation, as this trans-disciplinary field is rapidly cutting across geographic, historic, social, and cultural borders. This study revisits the origins of evaluation practice in the global Northern context, traces its expansion into the global South across a number of sites, and argues that context matters in transferring, borrowing, negotiating, establishing, practicing, and using the concept and practice of evaluation. Evidence for this study's conclusions comes from Turkey's relatively immature history with evaluation in the education decision domain. Motivated by the desire to become one of the top ten largest economies in the world by 2023, Turkey's rapid development underlined educational achievement and growth as the roadmap. This quest necessitated a specific form of educational governance and decision making driven by the principles of effectiveness and efficiency. At the heart of these principles, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) has long lain as a tool of accountability, learning, and improvement, in which Turkey's entire public administrative culture has historically lagged behind. In response to this immaturity, supranational authorities and international donors have provided financial and technical impetus for locating M&E systems, practice, and information in the Turkish education decision domain. Coupled with the country's official drive for modernization, international actors, to a great extent, paved the way to legal arrangements for streamlining evaluation. Specifically, the Green Paper published after the European Union's "Strengthening the Capacity of the Ministry of National Education Project" later became the conceptual foundation for Decree No. 652 that helped establish M&E units at the Ministry for the first time in Turkey's educational history. Despite all these efforts, the study reveals that evaluation remains as a new concept that is closely associated with quantification, performance-based budgeting, and compliance. Evaluation's value mostly resides in its symbolic representation of modern norms of governance to which Turkey eagerly wants to commit. Yet, reported confusion about what evaluation really entails, as a concept and as a field of practice, is paired with highly centralized and politically polarized educational governance, all together situating evaluation in foster care in Turkey: it is neither fully adopted, nor is it completely abandoned. Adopting a constructivist-critical outlook on the role of evaluation in the global South, this study endeavors to locate this field of practice in the broader context of international development with its negotiated margins, borders, and struggles. By suggesting that evaluation is a marker of a country's quest to modernize and Westernize, this study sheds light on the direction of cross-cultural expansion of the field of evaluation.

This purpose of this paper is to identify the effects an increase in active transportation to and from school would have on both commuters and communities, and to examine how to create a successful environment for active transportation models in Maine.

How does the public learn about issues in contemporary education policy? While changes in the economics of the media industry have shifted the mass media landscape, local communities continue to receive information about the state of their local schools primarily through local newspapers or television stations. It is arguably the most important task of a local paper to provide education coverage, as the schools are often the primary beneficiary of local tax revenues. This thesis reviews the literature surrounding the interface between education reporting and the crafting of education policy, examines the way in which education stories are framed by the media, and then assesses the skills, needs, and resources available to education journalists as it outlines limitations to robust coverage. Adviser: Edmund Hamann

Rural America contributes greatly to the American Community, yet this population is often overlooked and underrepresented in most types of education literature. Choices about residence shape America’s public school system through the formation of school districts and schools associated with these local jurisdictions. Communities with different population densities may have different overall population composition and, therefore, may sort differently into schools. This paper examines the effect that population density, local jurisdictional sorting, homogeneity, peer characteristics, and community social capital may have on student achievement. The first part of this dissertation outlines the importance of rural research and the impact of rural education on all of America. These areas have different economies, opportunities, and peer composition than their non-rural counterparts. The statistically average person is different in rural and urban America. The second part discusses the theoretical implications of locale influence on educational attainment. This theory explains the possible causes of peer effect strength and provides a better predictive model of both rural and urban peer effects. I argue that some level of heterogeneity and high social capital foster strong peer effects, and there is a tradeoff between diverse student body composition and social capital. In the final portion of this dissertation, I explore student achievement using empirical analysis. Based on the analysis in Chapter 4, it appears that student achievement is impacted by peers with and without controlling for teacher effects and social capital (or type) of a locale without controlling for teacher effects. Chapter 5 examines peer effect differences by locale and finds differences in peer effect strength. Suburbs have significantly stronger classroom mean peer effects in elementary school than towns. Skewness influences appear to be the same across grades and locale, and social capital has a positive impact on student achievement in elementary school and a negative impact on student achievement in middle school. The analyses in Chapter 6 conclude that student achievement is impacted by both the average and the percentage of high and low achievers but not similarly by locale. The final chapter discusses the results and their implications for future research and for policy makers.

This qualitative phenomenological study explored how school leaders in seven urban high schools in California make sense of and use equity-related data to create more equitable educational opportunity for their students. Equity-related data here refers to school data (accountability data included) that demonstrate unequal access to educational opportunity and disparity of outcomes for subgroups of students. Data has been part of the U.S. educational system increasingly since 1965. The amount of data available has accelerated even more in the last decade in the wake of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Much of that data has been collected and used by educators for a broader category of assessment and measurement of students and school performance. Recently, however, there is an increasing interest in and research about how school leaders can use data for equity purposes.Utilizing a qualitative phenomenological approach, this research examined how 19 school leaders, at seven urban high schools in the state of California, make sense of and use equity-related data to disrupt patterns of inequality. Through interviews, observation, shadowing, and collection of documents and paper artifacts, this studycollected data that demonstrate how these school leaders were making sense of data at their schools and using such to create more equitable opportunities for students. This study suggests that school leaders' interpretation and use of equity-related data could lead to the transformation and equalization of educational opportunities for all students. However, school leaders do not make sense of data in a void. They come to data with some set of mindscapes or ideological frame of reference that has been shaped by social background, beliefs, values, education, etc. It is important to understand the mindset with which school leaders come to data. This study then provides understanding and perspective that is too often missing in educational research about school leaders and data-driven decisions.

This paper presents the results of a study that explored the effects of using an action research process to examine and develop a system of teacher evaluation that leads to real changes in teacher behaviors. The study explored motivational forces and psychological processes related to the change process in adult behaviors. Data were collected by documenting the action research process and interviewing teachers at a suburban elementary school in Southern California. Findings suggest that through collaboratively developing a teacher evaluation model in a safe and supportive environment, teachers can enjoy the process and note real changes in behaviors as well as growth in student achievement. Key themes emerged, suggesting benefits associated with peer collaboration, goal-setting, evidence collection (portfolios), and ongoing and iterative process.