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The influences of school reform on the instructional practices of a seventh-grade language arts teacher was the focus of this study. This study was conducted in three phases: an ethnographic study, a pilot study, and a case study. The ethnography focused on the restructuring committee's proceedings, yielding information relating to the origin of reform efforts. The pilot study, stemming from the ethnography study, explored the instructional practices within a block scheduling format. Finally, the case study, investigated the viewpoints of the restructuring efforts as perceived by the participants. Data sources consisted of observations, formal interviews, previous and current classroom assignments, school reports, student surveys, and field notes. The data were analyzed, noting changes in curriculum intent, instructional approaches, assessment, and classroom management. The results of this study suggest that this teachers' success occurred as a results of the school division's posture toward restructuring and the teacher's level of readiness and intense personal desire for change. The implications for this study suggest that success in reform depends greatly on the approaches used in decision making, the level of teacher preparation and ownership, and the perspectives of all individuals involved. / Ph. D.

There are local and national cries for high school reform, especially in our at-risk high schools; however, close examination of our at-risk high schools shows some are succeeding despite the odds against them. This is a case study of such a successful, at-risk high school. The National Association of Secondary Schools defines an at-risk school as one having a student population of at least 50% minority students, 50 % free and reduced lunch students, and 90 % or better graduating and being accepted into college. Bright Star High School was chosen because it fits these criteria and it was recognized by school officials inside and outside of the school district for its high student performance on a variety of other student achievement indicators. The collection of data took place over a twelve month period between June 2006 and June 2007. This case study answers two questions: (1) What makes Bright Star High School so successful? (2) How did it become this way? In response to the first question, the findings show that there is not one factor that makes the difference but multiple factors that interact with each other. These factors include: (1) common vision and mission; (2) a safe and secure, small, personalized environment; (3) strong, instructional leadership; (4) a faculty that functions as a learning community; (5) rigorous academic programs and intervention and support strategies (6) parent involvement. The factors identified in this case study are similar to those identified in other successful, at-risk schools and to those reported in related literature and research studies. In response to the second question, the findings show: (1) the Bright Star faculty nurtured a culture that supports and encourages the establishment and maintenance of a collaborative learning community; (2) changes at the district, state, and national levels in graduation requirements, accreditation requirements, and the No Child Left Behind Act had a powerful impact; (3) real change takes time, persistence, patience and an understanding that it is messy and not easy. / Ph. D.

School divisions and principals are tasked with meeting state standards and federal annual measurable objectives (AMOs), as well as with closing the achievement gaps that exist in schools. To accomplish this mission, organizational learning, specifically the use of protocol-structured discussions, has become a fundamental component of school reform processes. Protocols to examine professional practice, engage in data-driven decision-making (DDDM), and look at student work have gained more notoriety as school reform strategies in K-12 education. The purpose of this single-case embedded common qualitative case study was to examine and describe how Uprising Elementary School (UES), in the mid-Atlantic part of the United States, made changes during the school reform process that benefited students from 2012 to 2015. Qualitative data were collected through interviews, focus groups, observations, document reviews, and reflexive notes. I used NVivo 11 Pro to store the data transcripts by creating specific nodes and the constant comparative analysis method to determine themes in the data collected. During triangulation, the multiple sources of data of data kept the qualitative data reliable and accurate. The six findings included: (a) organization of the staff into organizational learning structures created a uniform system of continuous improvement, (b) leadership was a key element influencing the overall success of UES, (c) protocols can be organized into a professional learning model to promote organizational learning, (d) the professional learning model had a profound impact on organizational learning and teacher leadership, (e) the implementation of protocols had a positive effect on school culture, and (f) the strategic implementation of protocol-structured discussions as a school reform strategy transformed learning. / Ed. D.

The role of school culture in facilitating underrepresented students' access to and success in college is examined in this ethnographic study. The purpose of this study is to examine an urban, public high school's culture in the southeast region of the United States with a high population of African Americans and students living in poverty. The college-­ going culture theory proposed by McClafferty, McDonough and Nunez (2002) and later refined by McDonough (2006) is used as a framework for this study and an ethnographic research design is employed using interviews, observations, open-­ended surveys, and document review as data collection methods. The objective of the study is to describe the culture of an urban high school by examining its artifacts, values and beliefs and underlying assumptions, specifically as it relates to preparation of students for postsecondary education. Findings from this study will help inform strategies on reforming school culture to support college access and success for urban high school students, and will support the use of the college-­going culture theory as a useful lens through which to understand college access issues. Additionally, this study helps to describe some of the common characteristics of urban education in the heart of education reform and describes the core challenges associated with developing college-­going culture in urban communities with high poverty and low college attendance rates.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / Prior to the widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in 2009, writing was largely neglected in the education policy realm. However, the CCSS called for major shifts in the teaching of writing reinforced by the requirements of rigorous new standardized writing assessments. While the high stakes attached to these new assessments place all teachers under increased pressure to improve students’ writing, little is known about how teachers perceive the standards and assessments or how these are influencing classroom instruction. To address this need, this case study explored how English teachers at one urban high school made sense of their school’s new writing initiative, which incorporated use of CCSS-aligned, standardized writing assessments to improve students’ writing. In this longitudinal study, I drew from multiple, nested data sources, including interviews with teachers and school leaders, observations of department meetings, and teacher “think alouds” about students’ writing. Relying on the theoretical lenses of sense-making (Spillane et al., 2002) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), I argue that teachers’ sense-making of the writing initiative was individualized and heavily mediated by the standardized assessments they used. This study has three major findings. First, at the school level, there was a “coherence gap” between how the multiple, conflicting purposes of the initiative were represented to teachers and lack of organizational structures to support streamlined implementation. Second, at the department level, the discourse about writing was constrained by the decontextualized nature of the CCSS and the standardized writing assessments, which oversimplified teachers’ understandings of writing as a social process. Third, at the classroom level, teachers relied on two particularized dimensions of their professional knowledge – their “reform knowledge” and their “relational knowledge” – to exercise agency in implementation. Overall, teachers made meaning of the writing initiative in localized ways consistent with their established writing instruction and their perceptions of students’ needs. This study underscores the central importance of particularized teacher knowledge in translating reform meaningfully to the classroom. Until school leaders and policymakers recognize teachers’ knowledge as valuable and create opportunities for teachers to share this knowledge with others, reforms are unlikely to be successful. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the origin, development, and implementation of the Better Schools Program in Tennessee. Materials were gathered from East Tennessee State University Library, University of Tennessee Library, Walters State Community College Library, Belmont University Library, Tennessee State Library and Archives and Morristown-Hamblen County Library. These materials consisted of government documents, presidential and gubernatorial speeches, audio and video tapes, books, and periodicals. Personal interviews were also collected from two TEA members and seven legislators. The materials were analyzed, and important passages were marked, incorporated into the paper, and documented. The research questions were (1) What prompted the instigation of the Better Schools Program? (2) Who was instrumental in establishing the Better Schools Program? (3) What areas of education were affected by the Better Schools Program? (4) Who were the proponents and opponents of the Better Schools Program? and (5) How did the Better Schools Program's ten points translate into statutes or regulations in Tennessee? The research reached three conclusions based on an analysis of the materials. It was determined that Governor Alexander's political philosophy closely coincided with those concepts held by the Better Schools Program. Despite the opposition from TEA, the Governor and his cabinet were able to solicit enough support from politicians, educators, business people, the media, and the public to enact their policies into laws governing Tennessee's educational system. The reform movement terminated in four acts: the unnamed act whereby vocational-technical schools were placed under the Board of Regents, the Public Education Governance Reform Act of 1984, the Comprehensive Education Reform Act of 1984, and the Revised CERA of 1985.

Attempts to restructure public high schools by establishing separate school-within-a-school (SWS) models have not endured beyond 3 to 5 years. This qualitative case study examined a SWS that has thrived for more than 12 years. The study investigated how teachers at the school explained the success of the SWS, their experience of working at the SWS, and their resilience in addressing the challenges that led to the lack of success of other SWS schools. The theories and models of educational change developed by Fullan, Hargreaves, and Giles and Hord provided a conceptual framework for the study. Data were collected through open-ended questions in individual interviews with 8 teacher participants who each had more than 5 years of experience at the SWS. According to study results, teachers experienced the challenges that led to the closing of other SWS high schools. However, at the inception of the SWS, the leadership established a commitment to the vision of the SWS, a tradition of collaboration among the SWS teachers, and a positive reputation among parents and alumni. The faculty of the SWS maintained its commitment through multiple leadership changes, changes in school/district policies, challenges to the vision, and changes to SWS teachers' workloads and classroom assignments. Sustaining educational change depends on the strength of implementation of the change: strong leadership, stakeholder commitment to the vision, and establishment of a collaborative professional community of teachers. These results provide guidance for educational leaders attempting to implement and sustain educational change, such as the implementation of a SWS.

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Due to accountability measures put in place by No Child Left Behind (NCLB), many schools identified as failing by the legislation are implementing reform efforts. This qualitative case study examined the initiatives one school put in place in order to remove themselves from the NCLB list of failing schools. Additionally, this case study sought to discover evidence of the components of capacity building in one elementary school, Cottonwood Elementary in East Tennessee. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the five components of capacity building as defined by Newman, King, and Youngs (2000). The five components defined by the authors are: teacher knowledge, skills, and dispositions; program coherence; professional community; technical resources; and leadership. Data were collected using interviews, observations and documents. The findings related to the first research question posed in this study were examined through four initiatives created by the administration in an attempt to remove the school from the NCLB list. The administrative team and faculty at Cottonwood Elementary chose to focus on: behavior and the structure of the building, attendance, literacy through professional development, and on data and accountability. Additionally, evidence of each component of capacity building as defined by Newman et al. (2000) can be found at Cottonwood Elementary. After the data were analyzed an additional component of capacity building, internal accountability as defined by Elmore (2007) was found to exist.

Efforts to affect changes in student achievement through altering the manners in which schools operate have been countless. However, there are few empirical studies on the relationship between these reform activities and student outcomes, especially outcomes for students with emotional disturbances from geographically diverse locations. The current study was a secondary analysis of data collected as part of the School and Community Study and the Urban School and Community Study conducted by the Research and Training Center for the Childrens Mental Health at the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida. Both studies examined the relationship between student exposure to school restructuring efforts and change in academic and behavioral functioning. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between student outcomes and school reform activities and to compare students attending suburban/rural schools and students attending urban schools on academic achievement, psychopathology, and mental health service utilization. Using baseline data from the School and Community Study to match students from the Urban School and Community Study on the variables gender, income, and age; 66 matches (i.e., 132 students) comprised the study sample. Differences between the suburban/rural students and the matched sample of urban students were statistically significant in reading achievement, math achievement, functional impairment, and mental health service utilization. There were no significant differences between students on the variable of level of behavior problems, all of the students scoring in the clinical range.