This study was concerned with a review of the events preceding and following the 1949 action of the Indiana Legislative Assembly as it applies to the School City of Indianpolis, located in the Capitol City of Indiana.

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Education policies tend to target failing schools that are often located in disadvantaged communities. However, the use of high-stakes testing to identify and punish failing schools has become increasingly controversial. An overemphasis on test scores to determine school quality has led to unintended consequences and overshadows other valuable school-based resources that parents feel meaningfully contribute to students' academic experiences. To better understand how low-SES parents describe their children's low performing schools, I interviewed 92 families in an under-served community. Through these interviews I illuminate the school-based resources that contribute to school quality. In fact, these additional elements were often more important signifiers of school quality for low-SES parents than were test scores.

The definitions of trauma and trauma behavior are expansive and have continued to grow in the past century. While biomedicine continues to expand the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for cultural competency and subjective experience, the concept of trauma is still limited to certain behavior and events determined by hegemonic views. This becomes detrimental to families and children exposed to everyday instances of structural violence. Looking at major child care sectors— the education system, biomedical care, and the family unit—to understand the influences of biopower and the consequences of structural violence, data collected from the greater Boston area reveals the consequences of structural violence on both child behavior and the manifestation of trauma. This thesis reexamines the social construct of trauma and trauma behavior, and uses its own term, structural trauma, to account for the social frameworks that create a legitimacy deficit for the trauma-related behaviors children embody. Examination of these three main child care sectors and the barriers that contribute to, or try to deconstruct, structural trauma reveals that these institutions have organized themselves into a pastoral apparatus that can prove to be more harmful than helpful for addressing child trauma and family well-being. Through structural trauma, researchers and society can gain further insight on how policies and practices create additional, unintentional vulnerabilities in underserved populations, consequently inhibiting healing and understanding amongst families and institutions.

As constraints on public funding become more prevalent and public policy devolves funding responsibility to the agency level in part, public organizations seek additional revenue streams. One identified private resource is philanthropy, which has seen a growth in importance over the past decade as individuals with vast sums of wealth commit a portion of their fortunes to aid society. The literature on philanthropy primarily seeks to understand donor motivations in order to aid organizational pursuit of these funds, with some scholars finding that giving is often undemocratic and can give private donors power relative to other stakeholders. What is far less understood are the effects donations have on organizational priorities. This becomes an important question for public administration as philanthropic donations to public agencies seeking additional funding. To better understand the effects of this phenomenon, this research undertook two replicative case studies in public higher education, an area where public organizations that have a long history of fundraising as well as decreased public funding. Through the lens of quasi-autonomous governmental organizations, rather than privatization, this study triangulates archival, historical, and interview data to study changes in salience of university priorities after a mega-gift is made. In the two cases studied, mega-gifts were found to have some limited effects on salience of priorities. Three different interpretations can be drawn from the findings. First, as loosely-coupled structures, higher education institutions guard against change. Second, control is a negotiated proposition and thus the potential for gifts to create change may be limited. Third, mega-gifts enable structural change, which allows some organizational actors to work with private donor to set agendas for otherwise public functions. These findings are particularly important for public policy makers, administrators, and citizens to understand and scholars to build upon as increasing numbers of public organizations seek to raise private monies. / Ph. D.

This study examines the effort to achieve equal federal education funding for California's children living in poverty. In 1998 California's children living in poverty received an average Title I per pupil expenditure of $603. The national average was $717. Some states received as much as $1,200 per child. Put another way, California had 14.8 percent of America's poor children and received only 11.3 percent of Title I funding. This study addresses a fundamental question. What are the causes of this inequity? It is reasoned that the examination of inequity will provide strategic direction in the achievement of a more equitable policy benefit for all children. This case study of the 2001–2002 effort to reauthorize Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, employs a qualitative and comparative theoretical approach. It begins with a historical examination of the origins, development and processes of the United States Congress. The examination continues with a thorough review of the legislative history of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. These examinations reveal the utility of three theoretical perspectives: elitism, class conflict and pluralist bargaining theories. These theoretical approaches are used in a case study that utilizes a thorough review of the relevant documents, observation of the process and interviews of primary participants to reveal key components in achieving a more equitable educational benefit for California's students living in poverty.

This study explores Palestinian university teachers' beliefs regarding the concepts of culture and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and the impact of their perception on classroom teaching practices. The study argues that in the age of globalization, spread of English as a lingua franca, and growing opportunities of intercultural communication, the focus on linguistic competence or literary competence may not be adequate to enable Palestinian university students to use English communicatively and interculturally. Further, the current objectives of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), which seem to exclude the cultural/intercultural dimension, can be expanded through integrating ICC into English language classes. Using a case study of one of the leading Palestinian Universities, the study explores the aforementioned assumptions and investigates teachers' beliefs regarding the concepts of culture and ICC in the Palestinian university context. Analyzing data from interviews, observations, and documents, the study reveals that EFL Palestinian participants perceived culture as a way of life that comprises a shared system of values, beliefs, ways of thinking, and behaviors. To them, language and culture are interwoven components, and without culture, language acquisition might be difficult to achieve. Additionally, ICC was perceived as the ability to communicate with people from other cultures through gaining cultural knowledge about English /American culture and promoting personality traits. Data analyses disclose that the linguistic competence had the upper hand in classroom teaching practices, and that the target culture(s) was used as a background to assist language learning. However, ICC was absent in EFL Palestinian university classes, and it was perceived, to some extent, as an equivalent to communicative competence. The study concludes with sets of recommendations to local Palestinian English departments, teachers, international textbooks designers, and future research.

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No description available.