The reconfiguration of public education around free-market aims means each charter school must define its product, and its product features, around marketability - specifically their school's pedagogical practices, aims, and goals. Yet how these are defined may not align with how teachers perceive of the aims and goals of teaching. This in turn impacts how individual teachers make meaning of their roles within a school culture, and how they talk about what the purposes and practices of teaching are for them. This descriptive phenomenological study explores how one group of teachers at an urban charter school react to phenomena (including how the various product features of their school are presented) and how they make meaning of the prominent concepts in contemporary school reform, including teacher autonomy, accountability, failure, choice, and equity. This study also examines how, and how broadly, these perceptions are shared among these teachers, and how these concepts are internalized by them. One key finding from this study was agreement among these teachers around the idea of equity, as each of the study participants defined equity in the same way. This research contributes to the literature on the evolving process of teacher professional identity development in urban charter schools, and also has implications for research on teacher retention and training. / Urban Education

This dissertation examined the assumptions and motivations that shape teachers’ participation in a service-learning practice and community of practice and how their participation affects their professional practice and identity. Framed by Santoro’s (2013) model of teacher integrity, defined as an educators’ ability to teach in alignment with their commitments, it presents an understanding of challenges to participants’ integrity, and how they mitigate those challenges. Heuristically, this project can be understood as the study of two components conducted using an ethnographic perspective over the course of 16 months: (1) the study of the community of practice and (2) the study of how its characteristics manifest in practice. It involved 100 hours of participant observation, 31 interviews, and the collection of artifact data. Data promote service-learning as a vital pedagogy by shedding light on its potential to sustain urban educators whose integrity is challenged by discourses, policies, and practices that emphasize competition and social efficiency rather than more holistic understandings of education as a civic and social good. Findings show how and why urban educators’ professional and personal commitments are intertwined with beliefs about social justice and democracy. Because of their work with student populations underprivileged and marginalized by systemic situations, meeting students’ social and emotional needs, honoring student voice, and teaching citizenship skills were important to participants. Conditions in their urban schools— a lack of curricular autonomy; insufficient time and resources to meet students’ needs; and deficient support systems— challenged participants commitments. As a result, participants were pushed to participate in service-learning and a service-learning community of practice. In addition, several characteristics of the community of practice pulled participants to participate: a framework for integrating quality service-learning into school- or school district-mandated curriculum; pedagogical and emotional supports specifically needed by urban teachers; and recognition that countered discouragingly negative perceptions of urban teachers. These resources and supports helped urban teachers’ fulfill their professional and personal commitments, validated their work, and sustained them in the profession. / Urban Education

School exclusion during adolescence, namely suspension, expulsion, and drop out, has a number of immediate and long-term consequences for youth. Among these consequences are an increased likelihood of engaging in delinquency and risk of incarceration. Recent research has coined this process the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and while substantial evidence portraying the negative effects of school exclusion exists, much of this evidence overlooks important antecedents to exclusionary school punishment. Employing a developmental life course (DLC) framework, this dissertation applies a social control model across adolescence to evaluate how youths’ bonds to school influence school misbehavior and delinquency and contribute to suspension, expulsion, and drop out. It also expands on prior research that considers the consequences of school exclusion by evaluating this experience’s effects on employment, postsecondary education, and romantic relationships as youth transition into young adulthood, and considers how these age-graded sources of social control contribute to continued offending and incarceration. Importantly, using a diverse sample of 1,216 first-time juvenile offenders, this dissertation explores how these processes differ across race/ethnicity through multi-group structural equation modeling. Findings reveal partial support for the application of a social control model to the school-to-prison pipeline. Bonds formed to mothers in early adolescence are shown to positively influence the formation of a strong bond to school. Strong school bonds, in turn, reduce the likelihood that youth engage in school misbehavior and delinquency. Bonds to school are indirectly related to school exclusion and dropout through school misbehavior and delinquency. These negative events—school exclusion and dropout—increase the likelihood that youth offend in young adulthood, with dropout also increasing the risk of incarceration. While support for prosocial bonds in young adulthood acting as turning points is limited, individuals who are employed are less likely to experience incarceration. The multigroup model indicates that these relationships do not vary across race. Examining the school-to-prison pipeline under a unified lens allows for multiple intervention points. Implications for policy are discussed at each stage of the model and include targeting youths’ relationships with parents early in adolescence, engaging youth in school to promote strong bonds and discourage school misbehavior and delinquency, and implementing strategies to reengage youth who are excluded from or drop out of school. / Criminal Justice

Boys to Men: Building Resilience in Young Black Male Students Stuart Rhoden Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2013 Will J. Jordan, Ph.D. Chair The main purpose of this research was to help identify persistence as reported by Black male college students who were the inaugural graduates of the Class of 2011 from a predominantly Black, all-male Charter High School in the Mid-Atlantic region. Examining this population of students was significant because too often Black male educational choices have been examined through the lens of deficit models. This study adds to the growing body of data which has begun to identify positive attributes of Black male role models at the secondary and postsecondary level. Identifying relevant factors which helped Black male students successfully navigate through high school despite these traditional challenges and achieve academically, has the potential to give educators strategies to help increase the likelihood of more Black males attaining higher educational achievement. One of the ways young Black males countered the toxicity of negative influences and expectations was through persistence. Thus, despite the fact that these young Black males often had to navigate through a history of racial discrimination in this country, challenges in family structure, low income, and in many cases, extremely violent neighborhoods, communities and schools, they had still experienced positive supports and maintained positive attitudes that carried them through to positive academic achievement. Central to this persistence and positive attitude was trust. In order to create more positive educational outcomes, it is critical to examine why some young Black males succeed in the face of adversity while many of their peers do not. This study was conducted qualitatively through interviewing ten graduates of a predominantly Black, all-male charter high school in the mid-Atlantic region of the country. Interviews focused on subjects background experiences growing up, their high school experiences while at DuBois Charter High School (pseudonym) and their experiences either currently attending or formerly attending college. A group interview with two key administrators, the CEO and the College Counselor at DuBois Charter high school also took place. These interviews provided contextual background information on the participants' high school experience. The significant actors who helped these young Black males achieve and attain positive academic outcomes are threefold; parent(s), peers who attended their high school, teachers and administrators of their high school. Some of the actions these mentors took to help them achieve college attendance included; teaching them how to seek academic assistance when needed, helping them become self-advocates, showing them how to learn from setbacks and move forward, helping them to present themselves in a manner that was both authentic to their culture, as well as to their academic abilities, teaching them to rise above perceived expectations of what it meant to be Black and male, and guiding them through the navigation process in a new, unfamiliar environment and being successful. Conclusions drawn from this study included; 1. Trust was essential to overcoming perceived and real structural inequalities. Educational resilience can only be demonstrated when institutions are willing to provide a safe, nurturing environment which allows for failure to contribute to positive growth. 2. Seeking academic and social assistance from peers and adults was constructive in contributing to increased positive academic achievement. 3. Cultural capital and exposure to an expansive array of experiences can help minimize the negative effects of poverty if done purposefully and reflectively. 4. Family, peers, and individual agency were critical in sustaining persistence throughout the identity development which resulted in the demonstration of resilience. 5. Understanding and nurturing the social-emotional, racial and gender identity of young Black men was an essential component to positive academic and social achievement. / Urban Education

Thesis advisor: Susan Bruce / The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 led to unprecedented shifts in American education. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, children across the United States were primarily educated in brick-and-mortar school buildings, with only .6% of the over 50 million students in the country attending fully virtual schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). By March 2020, K-12 school buildings across all 50 states began to close their doors, eventually pivoting from traditional, in-person learning to some form of distance education. While all students were affected by school building closures, of particular concern was the experience of students with disabilities, whose right to a free, appropriate, public education in the least restrictive environment is governed by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004). Using a multi-layered case study design, this dissertation examined how one state, district, and school implemented special education policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. This dissertation drew on multiple data sources, including state and district policy documents, interviews with leaders and teachers, and school committee meeting transcripts. Using policy as discourse (Bacchi, 2000) and sensemaking theory (Coburn, 2004; Spillane et al., 2002) as theoretical frames, I make three key arguments. First, I argue that legal and regulatory, structural, and local forces acted on the special education policy context during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, I argue that these forces were mediated by three factors: congruence with existing policy messages, perceived legitimacy of new directives, and the coherence of policy enactment. These arguments build toward my third, overarching argument—that educators and caregivers in City district made sense of special education policy during the COVID-19 pandemic by engaging in a process of equilibration. This dissertation concludes with the implications for research, policy, and practice related to future times of educational emergency. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teaching, Curriculum, and Society.

Despite the increasing research that lists cultural incongruence in the classroom among the top factors that speaks to the disproportionate numbers of Black females obtaining STEM degrees there is limited research on the actual number of Black female science teachers at the secondary level in education and the impact this plays on Black females in science, technology, engineering, and math classrooms (STEM). The consequence of all this is that we find ourselves with Black female science teachers “missing in action,” and only 5% of Black females receiving a STEM degree. I employ critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and Black feminist thought to answer: (a) What do the stories of Black female secondary science teachers tell us about issues related to their recruitment and retention within the science teaching force? (b) How do Black female secondary science teachers explain the shortage of Black females entering the STEM field? What do they believe should be done to increase the number of Black females in the field? (c) What contributions do Black female secondary science teachers make or potentially would like to make to increase the number of Black females entering and remaining within the science teaching force? This study explores how Black women are absent in the conversation about recruitment and retention of secondary science teachers. To answer the research questions in a humanizing way, this study was conducted collectively with my participants using the qualitative methodologies of critical narratives and decolonizing methodology. Therefore, this study represents an effort to address this phenomenon by listening to the voices of Black female secondary science teachers and engaging their stories, which often have remained absent from recruitment and retention discussions, to contribute to the scholarship on the recruitment and retention of Black science teachers.

Much attention has been given to “bridging the gap” between research and practice since neuroscience research first made claim to its potential impact in classrooms. With the inception of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) as a new interdisciplinary field, an unprecedented opportunity to explore the educational implications of new research coming out of neuroscience has presented itself. And yet, the gap between research and practice persists while new problems arise as education looks to brain science for answers with ongoing social and academic difficulties faced by students. A critical bicultural methodology, grounded in a decolonizing interpretive approach, is utilized to interrogate the field of MBE in order to shed light on the epistemological power dynamics and social justice issues that inform the field. By examining the historical, philosophical, economic, and ideological roots of neuroscience and education, a colonizing epistemology and hidden curriculum of inequality is revealed. The lack of awareness of how MBE, if left unexamined, will continue to fall short of the democratic and socially just goals of education is also addressed. The argument made is that there exists an abyssal divide within the field that epistemologically privileges neuroscience with its reductionist, Eurocentric, and positivist discourse. The case is made that the field must move toward an itinerant position that honors hierarchical dialogue and praxis and places the voices, scholarship, and values of educators and students at the forefront of this educational movement, in order to close the gap between research and practice in emancipatory ways.

School accountability is a powerful force in education. Today, schools are within the early years of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) which has introduced a new accountability model to states and districts, in a post-pandemic era in which schools’ roles and responsibilities within the larger society have continued to expand, and at the epicenter of complex, and sometimes tumultuous, social and cultural forces. It is within this context that the present study investigates the perceptions of the leaders of 30 Pennsylvania school districts across the continuum of economic disadvantage. It expands on previous research and literature that explored the benefits and challenges of mandated accountability, and that, most recently, has sought to explain how stakeholders understand and make sense of measuring performance. Specifically, this study examines district leaders’ perceptions of mandated accountability, the extent to which they value various mandated and unmandated performance measures, and the strategies they use to communicate accountability to their stakeholders. Findings suggest that (1) district leaders’ perceptions of accountability are complex and nuanced, (2) that they both believe in the importance of public-facing accountability and, simultaneously, raise concerns about its limitations and potential misrepresentation of schools (especially disadvantaged schools), (3) that they value many of the existing performance measures while also desiring additional, more robust measures, and (4) that individual leaders’ approaches to interpreting and communicating accountability measures are not uniform, but are driven by each leader’s personal beliefs as well as community interests. / Educational Leadership

This study examines grading patterns during one intuition’s transition to a responsibility center management (RCM) budget model. RCM is intended to focus an institution on resource growth and cost control, and the model incentivizes and rewards these behaviors. The adoption of RCM is becoming more widespread across the United States, especially as institutions are experiencing declining enrollment and shrinking state support (Barr & McClellan, 2018; State Higher Education Executive Officers Association [SHEEO], 2021; The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2019). This has led to budget management being cited as a top priority for institutional leaders (Bass et al., 2021; Rylee, 2011). This decline in enrollment and shrinking state support makes institutions more reliant on existing and prospective students as their primary source of revenue. Through the lens of Resource Dependency Theory (RDT) it is reasonable to assume that institutions may engage in behaviors and practices to maximize their relationship with students. Moreover, as students continue to see themselves as consumers who deserve high grades and a degree, institutions have changed their grading practices to attract and retain these students, and research has shown that students take advantage of these practices to protect their GPA (Bromley et al., 1978; Goldman, 1985). Additionally, research has shown that students, in part, make course choices based on difficulty and expected grade (e.g., Barr et al., 2009; Butcher et al., 2014; Fournier & Sass, 2000; Sabot & Wakemin-Linn, 1991). Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that institutions may transition to RCM to focus on resource growth, and given their reliance on student enrollment, may engage in practices and behaviors to maximize the relationship between the institution and the student. These actions may have unintended consequences, such as grade inflation. My study begins to examine if grade inflation is an unintended consequence of a transition to RCM by exploring what happened to grades during one institution’s transition to RCM. The results of my study show that at Public Research University (PRU), a pseudonym, grades continued to increase during and after the implementation of RCM, with a statistically significant increase occurring in the year immediately following PRU’s “hold harmless” year. My results also show that grades continued to rise during and after PRU’s transition to RCM across all departments when categorized based on historical GPAs, selectivity levels, and enrollment levels. This study is intended to raise awareness of the far-reaching effects that central university decisions, such as budget model choice, may have across the entire institution – both intended and unintended. / Educational Leadership

In a multitude of nations, the provision of education is predominantly facilitated through public schooling systems. These systems are structured in accordance with school districts, which are geographical territories where educational institutions share identical administrative frameworks and frequently coincide with the confines of a city or county. To enhance the operational efficiency of these schooling systems, the demarcations of public schools undergo periodic modifications. This procedure, also known as school redistricting, invariably engenders a myriad of tensions within the associated communities. This dissertation addresses the potential and necessity to integrate geographically-enabled crowd-sourced input into the redistricting process, and concurrently presents and evaluates a feasible solution. The pivotal contributions of this dissertation encompass: i) the delineation of the interdisciplinary sub-field at the nexus of HCI, CSCW, and education policy, ii) the identification of requirements from participants proficient in traditional, face-to-face deliberations, representing a diverse array of stakeholder groups, iii) the conception of a self-serve interactive boundary optimization system, and iv) a comprehensive user study conducted during a live public school rezoning deliberation utilizing the newly proposed hybrid approach. The live study specifically elucidates the efficacy of key design choices and the representation and rationalization of intricate user constraints in civic deliberations and educational policy architecture. My research looks into four primary areas of exploration: (i) the application of computer science usability-design principles to augment and expedite the visual deconstruction of intricate multi-domain data, thereby enhancing comprehension for novice users, (ii) the identification of salient elements of experiential learning within the milieu of visual scaffolding, (iii) the development of a preliminary platform designed to expand the capacity for crowd-sourcing novice users in the act of reconciling geo-spatial constraints, and finally, (iv) the utilization of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and data-driven analysis to discern, consolidate, and inaugurate novel communication channels that foster the restoration of trust within communities. To do so, I analyzed the previous work that was done in the domain, proposed a new direction, and created a web-application, called Redistrict. This an on-line platform allows the user to generate and explore "what if" scenarios, express opinions, and participate asynchronously in proximity-based public school boundary deliberations. I first evaluated the perceived value added by Redistrict through a user study with 12 participants experienced in traditional in-person deliberations, representing multiple stakeholder groups. Subsequently, I expanded the testing to an online rezoning. As a result of all interactions and the use of the web application, the participants reported a better understanding of geographically enabled projections, proposals from public officials, and increased consideration of how difficult it is to balance multidisciplinary constraints. Here, I present the design possibilities used and the effective online aid for the issue of public school rezoning deliberations and redistricting. This data-driven approach aids the school board and decision makers by offering automated strategies, a straightforward, visual, and intuitive method to comprehend intricate geographical limitations. The users demonstrated the ability to navigate the interface without iii any previous training or explanation. In this work, I propose the following three new concepts: (i) A new interdisciplinary subfield for Human Computing Interaction -Computer Supported Cooperative Work that combines Computer Science, Geography, and Education Policy. We explain and demonstrate how single domain approach failed in supporting this field and how complex geo-spatial problems require intensive technology to simultaneously balance all education policy constraints. This sits only at the intersection of a multi-domain approach. (ii) A sophisticated deconstruction of intricate data sets is presented through this methodology. It enables users to assimilate, comprehend, and formulate decisions predicated on the information delineated on a geospatial representation, leveraging preexisting knowledge of geographical proximity, and engaging in scenario analysis. Each iterative attempt facilitates incremental understanding, epitomizing the concept of information scaffolding. The efficacy of this process is demonstrated by its ability to foster independent thought and comprehension, obviating the need for explicit instructions. This technique is henceforth referred to as 'visual scaffolding'. (iii) In our most recent investigation, we engage in an introspective analysis of the observed input in civic decision making. We present the proposition of integrating digital civic engagement with user geolocation data. We advocate for the balance of this input, as certain geographical areas may be disproportionately represented in civic deliberations. The introduction of a weighting mechanism could facilitate a deeper understanding of the foundational premises on which civic decisions are based. We coin the term 'digital geo-civics' to characterize this pioneering approach. / Doctor of Philosophy / Public deliberations are often the main ingredient in community decisions. However, traditional, time-constrained, in-person debates can become highly polarized, eroding trust in authorities, and leaving the community divided. This is the case in redistricting deliberations for the zoning of public schools. This dissertation provides ways to increase the cohesiveness of a community through technology support that can help to clarify complex data and multidisciplinary constraints.