<p> Problem and Purpose</p><p> The American K-12 school principal is responsible for providing a learning environment that is physically and emotionally safe. An abrasive teacher who displays bullying behaviors towards students is a threat to that environment, impeding student academic progress and decreasing student perceptions of safety. Principals intervene, with risk to themselves. </p><p> This study sought to understand principal intervention by: (a) estimating the prevalence of abrasive teachers, (b) asking how principals identify abrasive teachers, (c) classifying situational elements that enhance or inhibit the principal's motivation to intervene, (d) exploring the interventions principals used, (e) examining the effects those interventions had on the schools, and (f) searching for patterns in interventions that might be helpful to theorists and practitioners. </p><p> Method</p><p> A fully integrated, mixed-methods design was used in collecting and interpreting data from 515 surveys and 21 semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The volunteer sample was composed of K-12 principals from California public and private schools. Findings were based on the perceptions of the principals. Principal perception was used due to the principal's legal and moral responsibility for the school, its students, and its teachers, and due to his/her access to all school stakeholders. </p><p> Results </p><p> The study found that four out of five (80.1%) of the schools represented in the study currently have&mdash;or in the past 3 years have had&mdash;an average of 2.9 abrasive teachers. The teachers were disproportionately distributed across grade levels, subject areas, sex of the teachers, years of teaching experience, and race. </p><p> The study identified five types of teacher maltreatment of students: verbal, professional, physical, non-verbal, and social. The study found that student symptoms could be grouped under the headings of emotional states, psychosomatic manifestations, fight responses, flight responses, and asking for help. The study also categorized the various theories principals hold to explain why a teacher would use abrasive behaviors. </p><p> Nearly half of the reported interventions resulted in improved teacher performance as perceived by the principal. Nearly a quarter resulted in the teacher leaving the classroom, and a little more than a quarter resulted in no change or in the worsening of the situation. Local teacher unions sometimes worked cooperatively with the principal who was striving for the professional improvement or removal of a teacher. More often, unions impeded the principal's role of safeguarding the learning environment for each student. Due to the exploratory nature of this study, additional textual analyses were conducted, and 14 additional hypotheses and 18 sub-hypotheses were tested. </p><p> Conclusions and Recommendations</p><p> From the findings it was concluded: (a) abrasive teachers were present in a large majority of schools, (b) anxious principals were less likely to use interventions that required action with tangible outcomes, (c) schools need a systemic approach to dealing with aggression on all levels within the school community, and (d) principals and unions should develop ways to maintain teacher protections without sabotaging student learning. </p><p> Implications for practice include six recommendations for school stakeholders, three themes that should be included in professional development for principals, and 12 pieces of advice that veteran principals wished to give to rookie principals. The study ends with six specific recommendations for further research.</p>

<p> Six charter schools in California have aligned their fiscal management and special education services to create a power base that protects their diverse approaches to schooling. This qualitative case study offers an insider's perspective on how these schools came to working together and how neighboring districts have been affected. Using the lens of special education services and analyzing data gathered through interviews and documentation, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of a model that can transform the school district landscape.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study is to focus on the Obeys college and career investments and determine: Obeys expectation for a plan to address Oregon college and career readiness; how these investments align to high school students' successful completion of at least nine college credits prior to high school graduation; how successful Eastern Promise as. non-Eastern Promise high school students are in completing at least nine college credits prior to high school graduation; and how scalable the Eastern Promise early college program is statewide. The study investigated a purposeful sample of high schools participating in Eastern Promise compared to a purposeful sample of non-Eastern Promise high schools in an effort to determine how many students acquired at least nine college credits prior to high school graduation, graduate from high school in four years, and enroll in a post-secondary institution the following semester. </p><p> After a single year of pilot data, the Eastern Promise is lacking substantial and adequate quantitative data to determine how effective the Eastern Promise is in students completing at least nine credits prior to high school graduation, graduating from high school, and enrolling in a post-secondary institution as compared to a control group of Eastern Oregon high school students. Eastern Promise data availability for 2012-2013 is strictly limited to credit by proficiency overall performance by college course and only represented by academic grade and pass/withdraw rates. </p><p> The OB investments for the Eastern Promise have been allocated so $2,000,000 will support the existing program in Eastern Oregon, and another $2,000,000 will be allocated to scale the Eastern Promise across Oregon through the RIP process. Structured and operative supports for diverse students' needs to ensure that all students have the opportunity to take college courses through the Eastern Promise could address at-risk student access.</p>

<p> This research study was situated in the policy context of the internationalization of higher education, motivated by the increased presence of culturally and linguistically diverse students in U.S. educational settings and elevated discourses related to student global engagement. It explored the lived experience of 10 second-language (L2) speaking international students enrolled in a mainstream required writing course at a private, urban university in Washington, DC. This study investigated how participants experienced and understood being a part of this required writing course, and more specifically how the thematic nature of the course mediated their experience. This research conceived of a classroom as a socioacademic space, a shared environment where course content and formal academic tasks are combined with mediated social interactions among members of the classroom community. It engaged a hermeneutic phenomenological research approach to tap into both the details of the lived experience and how it was made sense of by the participants who experienced it. Through a series of three interviews, at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester, participants revealed their sociocultural histories, the arc of the lived experience over time, and their reflection on the experience at the end of the semester. </p><p> Findings for this study were organized along four major themes: The context for mobility; Entering the first-year writing course: Hopeful but unsure; The negotiation of the FYW experience: Interactions; Reflection on the lived experience: You get what you put in. Findings highlighted the significance of interactions in socioacademic settings, as well as the strategic ways L2 students responded to both the classroom environment and the tasks it required. The course topic was also found to have a strong influence over participants' experiences, though writing clearly occupied more of their attention during the second half of the semester. The findings of this study add dimension to our understanding of this phenomenon; further develop the literature bases of the internationalization of higher education, second-language writing, and first-year writing; and have implications for future research, institutional arrangements and attitudes, and curricular and pedagogical approaches. </p>

<p> When searching for pluralistic models of bilingual education, looking globally for examples is beneficial. The overarching global perspective toward bilingual and multilingual education supports literacy in the student's first, second, and including the possibility of a third or more languages to attain socio-political pluralism. This dissertation project will specifically examine the voices of stakeholders in the local community of Flowers Bay, Roatan, Honduras where the mission of bilingual education is a pluralistic society. The goal of the research study is to examine the perspectives and experiences around language learning within the lens of language as a problem, a right, and a resource of stakeholders in their local community. Chapter I of this dissertation includes the problem statement of the research project, a historical and contextual explanation of the land, people, and social movement toward multilingual education on the Bay Islands of Honduras. Chapter II is a review of the literature surrounding the two frameworks in the research project. The first framework I utilize is the public sphere to describe who is or is not included in the conversations of multilingual education within the community of Flowers Bay, Roatan, Honduras. The second framework I utilize is language as a problem, a right, and a resource to describe and analyze the data collected from national policies, field observations, and stakeholders. Chapter III is an in-depth description of the research design, the demographics of the stakeholders in Flowers Bay, the method data collected and analysis of the data. Chapter IV features the findings from the data analysis using the two frameworks outlined in Chapter II. Chapter V offers a discussion of the frameworks and further research projects inspired by this dissertation project. Three themes emerged from framework of language as a right and resource of stakeholder voices from Flowers Bay, Roatan, Honduras: <i>access, economy,</i> and <i>identity.</i> Two themes emerged from the stakeholder voices not represented in the frameworks: <i>resources needed </i> and <i>parent engagement.</i></p>

<p> School Wide Positive Behavior Support (SW-PBS) is a current framework for schools to model their discipline strategies. SW-PBS has a framework built on identifying behaviors and predictors of their occurrence, routines to correct and prevent these problems, and implementation of these routines school wide to collect information to evaluate these strategies. Office discipline referrals were reviewed in the secondary school of Rural District 10 in Missouri from 2004-2013 to determine the significance between implementation of SW-PBS and the number of office discipline referrals. School climate was also studied in Rural District 10 as well as other secondary schools around the state of Missouri. A survey was sent to students, teachers and administrators from Rural District 10 and teachers and administrators from other districts around the state that have implemented SW-PBS for at least two years. The data revealed no statistically significance difference between the number of office discipline referrals before and during implementation of SW-PBS in Rural District 10. Based on the perceptions from the questions on the survey, teachers and administrators in Rural District 10 felt as though the climate and culture of the building overall was better compared to the perceptions of students in Rural District 10. Comparing Rural District 10 to other districts, Rural District 10 teachers and administrators felt as though the climate and culture of their secondary school was better, overall, as compared to other districts around the state of Missouri that have implemented SW-PBS for at least two years.</p>

<p> Educational leaders and experts claim that teachers are the number one classroom factor in the educational success of students (Marzano, 2007; Wong, 2009). This study determined there was not a significant correlation between the two teacher characteristics of advanced degree completion and years of experience. These are two of the more quantifiable and highly regarded teacher characteristics in the profession. The typical teacher salary is a major component of education that places high value on these two characteristics. There are many other policies and legislation, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, teacher tenure, hiring practices, and staff reduction policies that place the focus primarily on experience, degree completion, or a combination of the two. Data for the study were requested from rural school superintendents and elementary principals. These data were degree level completion and experience for third and fifth grade teachers, as well as the class mean scores for the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) tests in communication arts and mathematics for those teachers. These numbers were analyzed using the Pearson <i> r</i> and multiple regression to determine whether the two teacher characteristics had a statistically significant effect on student scores. The study found no significant correlation between the two characteristics, advanced degree completion and years of experience, and the scores on the class standardized tests. These results question the effectiveness of using these two characteristics to distinguish teacher quality, and the high priority given to these characteristics. </p>

<p> "Efforts to improve our school system must start with equity" (Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission, 2012). This study is a statistical analysis of the 2003-2012 Minnesota K-12 pubic school general education (foundation) formula in regard to fiscal equality and wealth neutrality. The analysis utilizes a longitudinal approach to compare the findings of previous equity studies to current relatable data as it pertains to the State of Minnesota. A number of modifications have been imposed on the original Minnesota funding formula over the past decade. This study tests the equity level of a selected number of revenue sources and reviews previous studies to determine how equity has or has not been improved as a result of the modifications. </p><p> Fiscal neutrality is described as the wealth of the school district and should be a function of the wealth of the state as a whole, not of the wealth of the local school district. This study analyzed the fiscal neutrality of 333 public school districts in Minnesota in terms of variance, permissible variance, coefficient of variation, and Gini Coefficient. The analysis was based upon three research questions: 1. Based on an analysis of the 2003 to 2012 general education formula, what were the fiscal equality and wealth neutrality characteristics of Minnesota's school districts? 2. Based on an examination of like data elements from the four major Minnesota fiscal equality and wealth neutrality studies, what trends can be observed? 3. Based on the recommendations of previous studies, what legislative impact did they have? </p><p> The findings of the research show that overall the disbursements of revenue through the Minnesota funding formula do meet the standards of wealth neutrality. However, there are categories of the formula that remain inequitable and the reliance of local taxpayers on the referendum revenue source has increased over the years studied.</p>

<p> The purpose of this quantitative study was to provide insight to the perspectives of leaders and individuals in authority within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles system of Catholic parochial schools regarding current models of governance, levels of authority, and decision-making processes. There is a lack of clearly-defined levels of decision-making authority from the bishops to the Archdiocesan Department of Catholic Schools down to the individual schools. </p><p> The pastors, principals, and Department of Catholic Schools personnel shared their perspectives of current governance structures and elements of three emerging alternative governance models. Data were analyzed through a factor analysis of the survey items to explore the strength of the three categories of the governance models represented by the three groups of questions. Next, the descriptive statistics of the specific questions relating to each of the three governance models and community voice were compiled. A Cronbach's alpha was calculated for each group of questions to measure internal consistency. </p><p> In order to explore relationships between perceptions among the three independent variable groups (pastors, principals, and Department of Catholic Schools personnel), a Chi-square analysis was run for each of the questions on an ordinal scale. </p><p> The study showed significant differences in participant responses between the three groups surveyed. However, there was agreement that community voice must be incorporated into governance, but only in a consultative manner. There was also agreement that a strong governing presence at the central office would be beneficial.</p>

<p> Both nationally and at the state level, educational reform is focusing on the improvement of classroom instruction. Recently, Washington State enacted the Teacher/Principal Evaluation Pilot (TPEP) to define evaluation criteria intended to measure effective professional practices, including classroom instruction. This exploratory survey study sought to describe the perceptions of Washington State elementary principals regarding their professional development needs for implementation of the new evaluation criteria. The survey consisted of 5 parts totaling 25 questions and was disseminated to 1,897 elementary principals with a return rate of 354. While the state effectively disseminated initial information about the evaluation criteria through local Educational Service Districts (ESDs), some policy inconsistency appears to have developed between the school district and building level in terms of implementation support for principal leadership activities, learning behaviors, and preferred learning topics. Responses indicated that principals rarely engage in social learning activities that would prepare them as a group to consistently and reliably interpret the criteria on the evaluation. Also, few principals identified a strong desire to learn about collaborative structures within their school, which increases concerns about the sustainability of the TPEP policy, because of the need to develop shared understandings of the language and the expectations. Fostering such an understanding may comprise the next phase of development.</p>