<p> Beginning teacher attrition is a problem that exacerbates the inequity of opportunities for all students, especially for those in schools that are already challenged by poverty. This study makes use of the <i>Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Survey</i> (covering the period between 2008 and 2012) and U.S. Census data to identify which teachers leave and to explain why. Beyond that, it also offers a look into the characteristics of those teachers who stay at the same school for five years. The empirical investigation is embedded in a conceptual framework that draws from motivation and identity theories and brings in insights about the importance of geography and of neighborhood effects from works on poverty and education.</p><p> The study utilizes a dataset with survey responses from approximately 1,800 full-time teachers from a sample designed to represent the overall population of beginning teachers in the United States. By combining individual-level longitudinal data with information about communities, it makes an important contribution to the study of new teacher placement, attrition, and retention. The evidence is presented using a variety of descriptive and inferential statistics, and the analysis includes factor analysis and logistic regression models. </p><p> The results show that indicators of leaving the profession before the fifth year become apparent early on, as factors measured at the end of year one have significant effects on early career outcomes. Most prominently, higher degrees of burnout reported by teachers, which includes factors such as decreased enthusiasm and increased fatigue, are associated with increased risks for leaving the profession without the prospect to return to it and with transferring to a different school district. Several other factors on the individual and school-level emerge as relevant to career outcomes. Teachers who have Highly Qualified Teacher credentials and report a supportive school climate are at less risk to leave the profession. On the other hand, teachers with alternative certification and master&rsquo;s degrees are more likely to move to a different school or districts in the first five years.</p><p> In terms of socio-geographic factors that help explain teacher retention and attrition, the only significant variable in the regression models used in the analysis is the percentage of White residents at the Census tract of the Year 1 school. When everything else is held constant, decreasing this percentage from 100 to 0 increases the predicted probability of leaving the profession by approximately 20%. Considering that a vast majority of beginning teachers both in the sample and in the overall population are White, this findings fits in with theories about &ldquo;the pull of home&rdquo; and cultural habitus. The magnitude and significance of this finding suggest that it warrants further exploration, as racial composition of the communities is likely a measurement proxy for complex processes of inequality.</p>

<p> The effects of Tennessee&rsquo;s Response to Instruction and Intervention (RTI²) framework were evaluated to determine the impact on one middle Tennessee public school district. General education teacher&rsquo;s beliefs, student achievement, and special education referral and eligibility data was assessed before, during, and after implementation. Results indicate that teacher&rsquo;s beliefs were mixed and varied according to the time participants were surveyed. Significant achievement differences were found on TVAAS math fifth grade, TVAAS reading fourth grade, and STAR reading and math scores. Practical significance was noted for students referred and made eligible for special education. A recommendation that RTI&sup2; supports student achievement and decrease special education services was derived, while teacher&rsquo;s indicated a greater need for implementation support.</p>

<p> Human capital, financial support, and other resources are often provided to schools by private organizations such as corporations, community organizations, universities, and governments. There is a wealth of research on the benefits of public school-external partnerships (Barnett, Hall, Berg, &amp; Macarena, 2010; Gardner, 2011; Norman, 2009, Semke &amp; Sheridan, 2012), however, there is little information on the sustainability of public school&rsquo;s external partnerships. Beabout (2010) argued that external relationships can be difficult for school leaders to establish and maintain. Since partnerships are essential to offset school shortage and provide opportunities for students, it is crucial to expand our understanding of how schools maintain their external partnerships. </p><p> This qualitative study involving interviews of 23 partnership organizers examined how schools maintained their long-term partnerships. This study explored institutional theory as a theoretical framework to examine how schools and organizations function as institutions. Powell and DiMaggio (1991) and Selznick (1957) stated that as an organization is &ldquo;institutionalized&rdquo; it tends to take on a special character and to achieve a distinctive competence, in other words, a trained or built-in incapacity. The study drew on Bolman and Deal&rsquo;s (2003) four frames for how people view the world: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic.</p><p> Partnership organizers described effective communication as an important factor in maintaining partnerships. Key factors in effective communication were establishing points of contact for both the school and the partner, understanding each other&rsquo;s roles, and having clear expectations. Partnership organizers shared that collaboration that moves the partnerships forward were key. That kind of collaboration involved understanding and respecting the school culture and procedures as well as building buy-in for the school and the organization stakeholders and it offered real world experiences to students. Participants cited a commitment to working through barriers with a focus on commitment, flexibility, and dedication as key factor.</p><p> Based on the partnership organizers experiences, this study offers a deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to maintaining public school-external partnerships, with implications for existing and future school partnerships. This study also offers implications for policy on school partnerships.</p>

<p> The current qualitative study focused on understanding the process of learning to teach. Using interviews of teacher educators, the study explored the importance of a set of teaching activities developed as part of the Teacher Self Efficacy Survey (Tschannen-Moran &amp; Woolfolk Hoy, 2001) as well as the inclusion of instructional and assessment strategies for the teaching activities and the quality of beginning teacher performance of the activities. </p><p> Data were collected from interviews of 15 teacher educators. A process of open, axial, and substantive coding was applied to the data to inductively identify and categorize data relevant to the purpose of the study and to allow comparisons among and between categories. </p><p> Findings suggested that teaching activities are critically important to and a comprehensive description of effective teaching, and that beginning teachers struggle with differentiation and applying their learning to their practice. Further, findings suggested that the source of beginning teacher struggles was found within the teacher education program, within school contexts, and between the two institutions. In addition, findings suggested that beginning teachers perform the student engagement activities and those related to instructional strategies more proficiently than classroom management activities, and that all three teaching activity categories were included in the curriculum, but to different degrees and not all as part of curriculum design. A variety of pedagogies were used to prepare preservice teachers; however, there was no reported knowledge of assessment instruments used to measure preservice teachers&rsquo; readiness for teaching and to obtain data on the performance of their graduates. Lastly, this study revealed that teacher education program leaders were reluctant to participate in a study that sought to draw direct connections between the skills taught in the program and how well beginning teachers perform them. </p><p> Based on the findings, the researcher recommends further studies to determine the viability of the teaching activities as a comprehensive and accurate definition of effective teaching. Further the researcher recommends that teacher education programs and school districts adopt the teaching activities as a consistent framework for providing preservice education, for setting school district expectations, and for conducting teacher evaluations.</p>

<p> Despite rapid expansion of charter schools since the first enabling legislation was passed in 1991 there remains little understanding of the relationship between charter school law components and their relation to the percent charter school enrollment. This study focuses on the twenty charter school law components identified by the National Alliance of Public Carter Schools as being necessary for a strong charter school law and their correlation to charter school enrollment. Results suggest that, of the twenty components, Multiple Authorizers and Equitable Access to Capital Funding are most strongly correlated with an increase in the percentage of charter school enrollment. An additional five components, Equitable Operational Funding, Access to Retirement Systems, Adequate Authorizer Funding, Automatic Exemptions from State and District Rules and Regulations and Multi-school Charter Contracts Allowed, had a moderate correlation to the percentage of charter school enrollment. Additionally, one component, Authorizer and Program Accountability, shows a negative correlation to the percent of charter school enrollment. These findings suggest that if policymakers desire to increase the percentage of charter school enrollment they should carefully consider inclusion of these components in state law.</p>

This thesis begins by exploring the notion of ‘The Big Society’ promoted by David Cameron at the time of the UK general election in May 2010 and arguably one of the most significant ideological themes to have emerged from the British Conservative Party in recent years. This conceptual analysis then explores the intellectual antecedents which inform Big Society ideology, arguing that the eclectic nature of Conservative Party thinking draws on liberal, conservative, radical and socialist models of community, civil society and the role of the state in relation to these. Theoretical models such as Lévi Strauss’s (1962) model of bricolage, Hall’s (1998) agency of political ideas and Vidovich’s (2007) ‘hybridised model’ help uncover the contradictions and limitations in Big Society policy-making and implementation. The thesis argues that there is a distinct silence in relation to the role of capitalism, either in the historical narratives or its place in the new political order that makes up the Big Society. Absent also, is any clear notion of the role and contribution of education in this context. Analysis of Secretary of State Michael Gove’s education policy 2010-2014, demonstrates that an education system constructed on notions of freedom, responsibility and fairness may have radically changed the education landscape in England but has ultimately failed to stem the tide of neo-liberal hegemony, the effects of which the Big Society attempted to ameliorate.

PhD / When the problem of young people using illegal drugs for recreation emerged in New South Wales in the 1960s drug education was promoted by governments and experts as a humane alternative to policing. It developed during the 1970s and 1980s as the main hope for preventing drug problems amongst young people in the future. By the 1990s drug policy experts, like their temperance forbears, had become disillusioned with drug education, turning to legislative action for the prevention of alcohol and other drug problems. However, politicians and the community still believed that education was the best solution. Education Departments, reluctant to expose schools to public controversy, met minimal requirements. This thesis examines the ideas about drugs, education and youth that influenced the construction and implementation of policies about drug education in New South Wales between 1965 and 1999. It also explores the processes that resulted in the defining of drug problems and beliefs about solutions, identifying their contribution to policy and the way in which this policy was implemented. The thesis argues that the development of drug education over the last fifty years has been marked by three main cycles of moral panic about youth drug use. It finds that each panic was triggered by the discovery of the use of a new illegal substance by a youth subculture. Panics continued, however, because of the tension between two competing notions of young people’s drug use. In the traditional dominant view ‘drug’ meant illegal drugs, young people’s recreational drug use was considered to be qualitatively different to that of adults, and illegal drugs were the most serious and concerning problem. In the newer alternative ‘public health’ view which began developing in the 1960s, illicit drug use was constructed as part of normal experimentation, alcohol, tobacco and prescribed medicines were all drugs, and those who developed problems with their use were sick, not bad. These public health principles were formulated in policy documents on many occasions. The cycles of drug panic were often an expression of anxiety about the new approach and they had the effect of reasserting the dominant view. The thesis also finds that the most significant difference between the two discourses lies in the way that alcohol is defined, either as a relatively harmless beverage or as a drug that is a major cause of harm. Public health experts have concluded that alcohol poses a much greater threat to the health and safety of young people than illegal drugs. However, parents, many politicians and members of the general community have believed for the last fifty years that alcohol is relatively safe. Successive governments have been influenced by the economic power of the alcohol industry to support the latter view. Thus the role of alcohol and its importance to the economy in Australian society is a significant hindrance in reconciling opposing views of the drug problem and developing effective drug education. The thesis concludes that well justified drug education programs have not been implemented fully because the rational approaches to drug education developed by experts have not been supported by the dominant discourse about the drug problem. Politicians have used drug education as a populist strategy to placate fear but the actual programs that have been developed attempt to inform young people and the community about the harms and benefits of all drugs. When young people take up the use of a new mood altering drug, the rational approach developed by public health experts provokes intense anxiety in the community and the idea that legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco and prescribed drugs can cause serious harm to young people is rejected in favour of an approach that emphasizes the danger of illegal drug use.

<p> In public schools, student expression commonly calls for the attention of school staff in one form or another. Educators have a practical interest in understanding the boundaries of student freedom of speech rights and are often directed to the four student speech cases decided to date by the Supreme Court (<i>Tinker v Des Moines</i> (1969), <i>Bethel v Fraser </i> (1986), <i>Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier</i> (1988), and <i> Morse v Frederick</i> (2007)). Sources about these cases abound, but most focus on legal reform issues such as the political arguments of opposing preferences for more student freedom or more school district control or the lack of clear guidance for handling violations </p><p> I propose an alternative approach to understanding the Supreme Court&rsquo;s student speech jurisprudence focusing not on its correctness but on cultural influences which have worked and continue to work on the Court both from without and within. This approach may lead to a new understanding of Court decisions as legally binding on educators and an appreciation of the necessary rhetorical artistry of the Justices who write them. Not intended in any way as an apologetic of the Court&rsquo;s decisions on student speech, this study is based particularly on the work of Strauber (1987), Kahn (1999) and Mautner (2011). It takes the form of a cultural history going back to the Fourteenth Amendment&rsquo;s influence on individual rights from its ratification in 1868 to its application in Tinker in 1969 and beyond. </p><p> Seen as cultural process which begins with the Amendment&rsquo;s initial almost complete ineffectiveness in restricting state abridgment of fundamental rights including speech to its eventual arrival, fully empowered, at the schoolhouse gate, this study attempts to make student speech rights more accessible to educators and others. The tensions between the popular culture which espouses the will of the people and the internal legal culture of the Court itself and its most outspoken and articulate Justices resolve into decisions which become the law of the land, at least for the moment. The study also offers implications for administrators together with suggestions on how to stay current with free speech case law applicable to the schools.</p>

This investigation examined the practice of relying on field test item calibrations in advance of the operational administration of a large scale assessment for purposes of equating and scaling. Often termed “pre-equating,” the effectiveness of this method is explored for a statewide, high-stakes assessment in grades three, five, and seven for the content areas of language arts, mathematics, and social studies. Pre-equated scaling was based on item calibrations using the Rasch model from an off-grade field test event in which students tested were one grade higher than the target population. These calibrations were compared to those obtained from post-equating, which used the full statewide population of examinees. Item difficulty estimates and Test Characteristic Curves (TCC) were compared for each approach and found to be similar. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of the theta estimates for each approach ranged from .02 to .12. Moreover, classification accuracy for the pre-equated approach was generally high compared to results from post-equating. Only 3 of the 9 tests examined showed differences in the percent of students classified as passing; errors ranged from 1.7 percent to 3 percent. Measurement equivalence between the field test and operational assessment was also explored using the Differential Functioning of Items and Tests (DFIT) framework. Overall, about 20 to 40 percent of the items on each assessment exhibited statistically significant Differential Item Functioning (DIF). Differential Test Functioning (DTF) was significant for fully 7 tests. There was a positive relationship between the magnitude of DTF and degree of incongruence between pre-equating and post-equating. Item calibrations, score consistency, and measurement equivalence were also explored for a test calibrated with the one, two, and three parameter logistic model, using the TCC equating method. Measurement equivalence and score table incongruence was found to be slightly more pronounced with this approach. It was hypothesized that differences between the field test and operational tests resulted from 1) recency of instruction 2) cognitive growth and 3) motivation factors. Additional research related to these factors is suggested.

ABSTRACT A STUDY OF THE LEARNING-FOCUSED SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT MODEL AND ITS EFFECT ON THIRD GRADE READING SCORES IN A SUBURBAN, METROPOLITAN SCHOOL SYSTEM by Douglas A. Daugherty In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Education Act (NCLB). This act calls for a measurable annual increase in student achievement such that students reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic assessments. A historical review of political involvement with education will add to that statement one more objective of the bill: to render more U.S. students globally competitive. Federal funding to state education is tied to the achievement of state standards. To achieve these heightened standards many schools and school systems are adopting whole-school reform models. According to Herman & Stringfield, 1997; Lappan & Houghton, 2003, whole-school reform should address organizational change, staffing, administrative support, curriculum and instruction, supplies and materials, scheduling, and monitoring of student progress and performance; all referred to as central components of the educational process. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the effectiveness of one specific whole-school reform model, Learning Focused Schools Program (LFSP), in a suburban school system for its ability to effect student achievement. The Learning Focused Schools Program was studied through its implementation and use in three suburban elementary schools and compared to three similar elementary schools not using the program. Data from students’ test scores were collected and analyzed for student growth. There were several notable findings in this study. For all the students who participated in the LFSP continuously for a period of 3 years, more children met or exceeded standards than those not exposed to LFS. The results were different when the total population was broken into subgroups. Hispanic students and Multiracial students did not show any statistically significant improvement in any assessed category using the LFSP. More ELL students in the LFS treatment group exceeded standards than their peers who were not exposed to LFS. White students and Students with Disabilities did show statistically significant improvement resulting from the LFSP environment. Black students fared best overall when exposed to the LFS Program and mirrored the results of the “ALL Students” subgroup.