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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.

abstract: Every year, potential graduate students hunt through websites and promotional materials searching for the perfect program to fit their needs. The search requires time and patience, especially for those future scholars who seek a doctoral program in Education Policy Studies (EPS) with a focus on interacting with the policymaking process. The primary objective of this project was to explore the promotional materials of EPS doctoral programs in order to better understand how these programs promote formalized training for students to engage with education policy and the policymaking process. I selected the top 10 EPS programs in the nation along with my own institution (Arizona State University) as the sample for this study. By reviewing their websites, I found that programs provide a comparable training description for similar careers as well as upholding similar goals in the subfield of EPS. Ultimately, the program materials revealed that while these programs advertise significant formalized training in research methods and scholarly pursuits, opportunities to actively engage with policymaking were missing from the materials. Instead, it is more likely that such opportunities occur in informal settings such as apprenticeships and working at research centers. This study provides a detailed discussion of how programs promote training opportunities to students, the types of careers that programs claim to prepare students for, and the important role that faculty projects and additional resources play in the student experience related to engagement with policy and the policymaking process. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2014

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.