This dissertation includes three studies that investigate the factors that shaped emergency educational policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon scholarship on federalism, bureaucratic behavior, and partisanship, these studies expand our knowledge on the impact that local and state politics can have upon street-level bureaucrats’ choice of policy initiatives, capacity to implement that policy, and how politics can influence the decision to depart from the bureaucracy entirely.The first study considers non-political factors’ association with the partisan reflex to either open schools virtually (for Democrats) or open in-person only (for Republicans). The key finding from this investigation is that factors like special education populations countervail the Republican likelihood of selecting in-person only instruction. The second study explores the ways in which local political competition drives feelings of professional burnout for K-12 educators and their decision to stay in the profession. Results from this study support the theory that more competitive local politics increase feelings of professional burnout, while those feelings of burnout, in turn, are associated with the decision to exit the profession unexpectedly. The final study in the project examined the association between local and state partisanship and the volume of risk-mitigating safety policies, including mask mandates, asymptomatic testing, and HVAC improvements. Results from this study suggest that although schools in liberal counties saw increased volume of COVID-19 mitigating policies, this relationship increased substantially for liberal counties housed in conservatively-controlled states (states with Republican governors). / Political Science

Art education has faced cutbacks in school funding because of the mandates and current trends in our nation’s educational policies. The United States Department of Education states that its federal involvement in education is limited. In fact, federal legislations, regulations, and other policies dictate the structure of education in every state particularly with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and now the Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative. The arts have been unfavorably impacted under the nation’s most predominant policy, NCLB, and run the risk of further adverse impacts with RTTT, regardless of the public’s support of the arts and its educational benefits. By linking federal funding to the school's yearly progress in reading and mathematics, NCLB created an environment in which art is viewed as nonessential and secondary to the academic mission of the school. Policymakers have underestimated the critical role the non-profit cultural sector can offer to arts learning for academic support. Collaboration of the arts community with local schools expands access to the arts for America’s schools. Some schools have already adopted this strategy to tap the expertise of local community arts organizations to address the issues surrounding arts education, like the lack of funding and resources. The future of our educational system must create innovative ways for students, teachers, parents, and the community to work together in partnerships to ensure all American children is provided a high-quality education. An example of this promising practice would be to connect schools with the arts community, particularly schools and museum partnerships. School and museum partnerships have a long-standing history of collaborating with one another and therefore share a commitment to some of the same educational goals (Osterman & Sheppard, 2010). The purpose of this study investigated features and operational logistics of successful partnerships between museums and schools. The study explored an existing partnership with an art museum and an urban public school district. To understand the elements of these partnerships, the study investigated art education and cultural governing policies, program goals and long-term goals, operation and funding. It is my hope that through this study a discourse about policy recommendations or policy-making eventually develops that could aid in the creation of successful partnering relationships to sustain art education in the state of Georgia. In this qualitative case study, the research design utilized several methods of data collection, including semi-structured interviews, documents, and visual methods, specifically image elicited exercises as positioned by Harper (2002). Participants in the study included school administrators, principals, art teachers, and museum educators.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / This dissertation presents an institutional and historical analysis of the emergence of new graduate schools of education, or nGSEs. A controversial reform in the field of teacher preparation, nGSEs offer teacher preparation, state certification, and master’s degrees in a variety of new non-university contexts. With bipartisan support and philanthropic backing, the nGSE phenomenon has gained traction quickly. Today, 11 nGSEs, some with several branches, are operating in 16 different states. The dissertation examines the emergence of nGSEs using concepts from sociological neoinstitutionalism through primary document analysis and institutional analysis to answer the following questions: (1) What is the nature of nGSEs as organizations, including their historical features, funding models, and organizational environments? What changes have occurred in these features since the inception of nGSEs? (2) What institutional logic animates nGSEs as organizations? (3) What happens to teacher preparation in market-organized environments? Analysis revealed that nGSEs have diverse organizational origins and that they have largely reconfigured time and place for teacher preparation. As organizations that have moved the bulk of teacher preparation to K-12 schools and/or the internet while evolving rapidly in different environments, nGSEs naturally have different cultural-cognitive schemata. However, market logic is evident in some form, though to varying degrees, at each new organization. nGSEs tend to be private sector solutions to problems in the public education system, and they enjoy the support of education philanthropists who fund alternatives to the public education bureaucracy. I show how nGSEs are fundamentally responses to specialized, and oftentimes regionalized, circumstances that create demand for new kinds of teacher preparation programs. nGSEs are tailored for particular contexts and conditions—some nGSEs serve certain geographical communities while others serve certain kinds of school communities or pedagogical movements. I argue that this has led to the creation of highly specialized niches in the 21st century market for teacher preparation. Though they all constitute one reform, namely the relocation of teacher preparation from universities to new and different kinds of organizations, nGSEs are remarkably different from one another and from the wider field of teacher preparation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

As the first city with a majority African American population and a school system that has long served majority low-income African American children, DC offers a compelling case study about public education and school choice in an increasingly affluent city. Using The Washington Post archive, this dissertation considers how discourse about one of the most vital public goods evolved between 2007 and 2012, a period of rapid economic, political, and social change in the city. DC is a civically engaged and diverse city and, The Washington Post has one of the most diverse newsrooms in the country. Post leadership and most writers and contributors were critical of policy and rulings that might cause greater racial segregation in American public schools. Yet, there was no discourse in this archive to suggest that encouraging greater racial or economic integration would be a successful campaign. Instead, The Post advocated for school reform and choice for the neediest students while seemingly absolving families with means who chose to opt out of the public school system. Failing to interrogate the school choices made by middle-class families represents a silence in the archive and illustrates how silence can be productive because it contributes toward the maintenance of a segregated public school system. / Geography

<p> This study conducted an international comparative study between Japan and the United States to examine both problems and possibilities in the use of the term &lsquo;sustainable development&rsquo; (SD) among environmental educators. In so doing, this study applied a multilevel analysis&mdash;national, state/prefecture, and individual levels&mdash;to assess SD&rsquo;s overall influences. Such a comparative elaboration of the individual perceptions, as well as the policy contexts, helps in comprehending both the conceptual and practical obstacles, and their possibilities, when using an internationally-promoted term. I found that respondents of both countries tend to have a firm grounding in the field of EE, and make only supplementary use of the notions of sustainable development and ESD, primarily for emphasizing social and economic dimensions of environmental issues. </p><p> Some of the notable results are as follows: 1. Environmental educators of both countries are still hesitant to embrace ESD or Education for Sustainability in their teachings; 2. Environmental educators of both countries, while not rejecting the concepts of sustainable development and ESD, are instead operationalizing them to punctuate social and economic issues; and 3. Most environmental educators perceive EE as being larger and more comprehensive than ESD. This is demonstrated in the survey results in which none of the American environmental educators perceived EE as being smaller than ESD. </p><p> Implications from the results are as follows: 1. The &lsquo;shift&rsquo; in discourse from EE to ESD appears to be incomplete, contrary to some recent observations. I believe that this is because the field of EE, while showing some differences at the national level, has been affirming the incorporation of social and economic processes into teaching practice through attention to laws, literacy plans, guidelines, and conferences. The individual educators appear to be influenced by these shifting emphases, professional networks and policy contexts.</p>

<p> This multimethod, multiphase study was designed to determine the impact of charter school reform on achievement in North Carolina. The study was designed to be an analysis of the relationship between classroom climate, interactions, and student achievement, through a complexity systems context. This methodology allowed for combined qualitative, quantitative, network analysis, and agent-based modeling to capture the simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic interactions in classrooms. The data for the study were drawn from eighth-grade mathematics teachers and students at four charter schools in a North Carolina urban area (<i>n</i> = 300). Through the analysis of data, a more detailed and nuanced picture of the relationship between classroom climate, interactions, and charter school achievement emerged. The findings suggest that teacher control and second-semester math grades are statistically significant; the higher the level of control teachers exercise, the higher students score on common core achievement. According to the findings of this study, North Carolina charter schools have served as a successful reform strategy to address the achievement gap problem in North Carolina, with school-specific strategies including high teacher support, students&rsquo; teaching students, IAP/tutoring/online supplemental program, and small classrooms. All schools, on average, scored 30.9% to 56.8% higher on grade-level proficiency (GLP) than the North Carolina 2014&ndash;2015 average. The network analysis showed how classrooms can be more or less complex in different ways with instructional, emotional support, and behavior management interactions that fit into network structures of teacher to one-student, teacher to whole class, whole class to teacher, and student to student or students. The predictive ABM, based on achievement scores over time, school achievement strategy, classroom climate, high teacher control, and second-semester math grades, demonstrated accuracy. The ABM captured macroclassroom and microstudent outcomes, along with climate changes based on interactions that either increased or reduced positive climate. This is important because a teacher has limited resources and must deal with uncontrollable influences from outside the classroom. Teachers have the power to create a positive or negative climate by their verbal and nonverbal interactions. Teachers&rsquo; interactions have consequences that impact students&rsquo; achievement and students&rsquo; lives. Consequently, every interaction matters.</p>

<p> In this quantitative study, the perceptions of safety and preparedness of Missouri&rsquo;s high school administrators after participating in active shooter training as mandated by Missouri&rsquo;s Senate Bill No. 75 were analyzed. As school shootings continue, states have passed legislation to prepare schools to provide safety for students and faculty members (Shah, 2013b). There are currently limited data about the perceived effectiveness of Missouri&rsquo;s Senate Bill No. 75 and its ability to help administrators feel safe and prepared in the event of an active shooter. This study involved examination of what schools can do to prepare for a school shooting before one occurs and what schools can do during a school shooting. It also included information on what schools can expect after a shooting has occurred. Fifty-two Missouri high school administrators were surveyed, then data were aggregated by gender, years of educational experience, years of administrative experience, district size, and district location (urban or rural) as reported by the administrators. The majority, or 86.6%, of Missouri high school administrators felt more safe and prepared after participating in active shooter training. Differences did exist between rural and urban administrators in the perception of safety and preparedness with three of the smallest districts indicating feeling the least amount of safety and preparedness. When parsing data by gender only two of the 26 females did not feel prepared after training, while 10 males indicated they did not feel prepared after training. A slight majority, or 53.8%, of the administrators, were not in favor of arming selective school personnel after proper training.</p>

Purpose The purpose of this study was to identify and explain the selective responses that dropout students felt contributed to their leaving school before graduation. Procedures The researcher collected three sets of data which included the review of the literature, the student records in the Southwest School District and the interviews of two hundred participants using McDowell's questionnaire. The questions were conceived of as functioning primarily in the context of justification. Thus, the researcher did not begin with previously identified reasons; rather, the researcher examined the responses to determine reasons which seem to be fruitful. The Sophia McDowell questionnaire was used to collect demographic information on each student to further explain their reasons for dropping out of school in four areas: personal data, family information, career information and school achievement. The results of data findings were described collectively and individually and summarized in tables. Conclusions 1. The literature on early school leavers depicts a profile which identifies them as suffering from personal problems, lack of parental support, economic condition and poor student/teacher relationships. However, these statements represent social and administrative judgments rather than functional terminology. 2. The student personnel records are of little value in gaining insight into early school leaving. The records seem to classify the students' departure as the result of "lack of interest" which offers little insight into the students' real circumstance. 3. The superficial responses for early school leaving as offered by students on a questionnaire varies little from the causes as reported in the literature. When the total sample is viewed, one finds that there were more Black Americans and more males who dropped out of school and at an earlier age than Caucasians and females. The marital status of the participants' parents indicates that more of the dropouts come from homes with married parents. The majority of these students, however, did return to some kind of basic education or to a job training program. On the other hand, more of the permanent dropouts come from single-parent or broken homes and did not return to school. Before one can justify that parental marital status does influence students to either remain in school or to drop out of school, however, more research is needed in this area. The majority of the participants studied were preparing for their future occupations by going back to school. From a sample of two hundred participants, there were 144 attending extended day school, vocational school, on-the-job training and apprenticeship training.

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