This dissertation examines the socio-cultural underpinnings of neoliberal educational reforms vis-à-vis the national educational settings in Russia. By drawing upon NVivo-aided Discourse and Frame analysis as a methodological path, this study critically examines a corpus of state laws on education and official government statements from 1991 to 2012 in contrast to contemporary societal discourse on education, where novel and indigenous educational meanings have been contested and re-negotiated. This thesis shows how the conceptual mélange of global neoliberal ideas has been interpreted, institutionalised and resisted in Russia by exploring the semantics of key neoliberal reform ideas - ‘quality assurance,’ ‘educational standards,’ and ‘commercial educational service’ - at the micro-level of policy texts, political debates and public discussions. This thesis shows that having heralded an educational revolution, the official reform narrative rhetorically endorsed neoliberal orthodoxy, while continuing in practice to discursively draw on pedagogical and administrative frameworks which it previously renounced as outdated. In communicating the spirit of radical neoliberal modernisation, the Russian government rhetoric has collectively embraced a number of contradictory concepts, slogans and directives that have never been harmonised in a unified reformatory framework. The study also argues that the public interpretation of neoliberal concepts has been radically different from the intended conceptualisations offered by the global international stakeholders and conveyed by the Russian educational elite. It shows how, when interpreted through the lens of local pedagogical values, the semantics of global modernisation templates, such as ‘educational quality’ and ‘educational standardisation,’ took on unexpected, culturally-specific, meanings. It also finds that the newly introduced principles of entrepreneurship, self-interest, consumer choice, self-responsibility and competition, which underlie the neoliberal economic reform, remained in opposition to fundamental principles of Russian culture, such as communalism, egalitarianism, state paternalism and anti-monetarism. By unpacking opposing ideological and pedagogical frames, this thesis explains the cultural aspects of the widespread public resistance to post-1991 education reform in Russia. This dissertation seeks to enhance the understanding of the policy formulation process and interpretation of global neoliberal ideas from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. By advancing a culturalist approach to policy analysis, the present study addresses an overlooked piece of the long-standing puzzle of perceived post-Soviet educational crisis, supplementing the broader scholarly discussion on the successes and failures of neoliberal reforms in the post-Soviet space.

Bolivia and Guatemala experienced a process of education reform in late 90's. Even though both countries had great international support to eliminate inequalities, especially among indigenous peoples, the domestic political contexts determined to what extent such changes were possible to make. In Bolivia the process started in 1994 with the signing of the Reform Law of Education, and in Guatemala in 1996 with the signing of the Peace Agreements. After more than two decades Bolivia and Guatemala present very different outcomes derived from their respective education reforms. This study is a comparison of them, an attempt to unveil the reasons why Bolivia has moved forward in terms of diversity, indigenous languages, and inclusion while Guatemala has apparently nullified the education reform process and remains in authoritarianism. / text

A variety of policies originating from Ontario’s Ministry of Education make it clear that education reform requires that teachers reflect on their practice. Despite this, there is little evidence of a common understanding of just what reflection would look like in teacher practice.This means that Initial Teacher Education programs face ambiguous challenges both in producing teachers who can reflect on practice in order to participate in school reform and in matching program goals regarding reflection to admissions requirements. This study investigated the understanding and evaluation of reflection in an Initial Teacher Education program through interviews with 15 instructors and field partners who had evaluated applicants’ written evidence of reflection. Differences among participants were evident in the understanding of reflection;however, the overriding theme of conscious attention to and engagement with experience as a vehicle for change was consistent with current literature. Differences in the evaluation of profiles were based on perceptions of how well applicants met the criterion of specificity, which was emphasized in the rubric; what role their judgement should take in evaluation decisions and the knowledge base on which those decisions were made. Participants described an organizational context in their Initial Teacher Education Program in which reflection was encouraged but not formalized or defined in any consistent way, and described opportunities for reflection that resembled informal communities of practice. They articulated some significant dilemmas in the fair evaluation of reflection that were similar to the challenges of school administrators evaluating the reflection required of teachers. The results of the study have implications for admissions policies as well as for creating a culture of reflection and inquiry in an Initial Teacher Education Program or school.

Competency-based education is intended to benefit working non-traditional students who have knowledge and skills from prior work experiences, but it also enables self-motivated students to accelerate their time to degree, thereby increasing affordability and efficiency. Competency-based education clarifies what a credentialed student will be able to do and makes assessment more transparent and relevant to those outside of higher education. Competency-based education has arisen in response to the problem defined by the national reform discourses of accountability and affordability. In the first manuscript, History & Objections Repeated: Re-Innovating Competency-Based Education, I review the history of social efficiency reform efforts in American education in order to re-contextualize the “innovation” of competency-based education as a repackage of older ideas to fit the public’s current view of what needs to be fixed in higher education. I discuss the concept of “efficiency” and how it has been interpreted in the past and today with regard to competency-based education and its rejection of an earlier attempt at increasing efficiency in education: the Carnegie credit hour. For the second manuscript, Framing Competency-Based Education in the Discourse of Reform, I analyzed four years of news articles and white papers on competency-based education to reveal the national discourses around competency-based education. I used thematic discourse analysis to identify diagnostic and prognostic narrative frames (Snow & Benford, 1988) that argue for and against competency-based education. These frames were put in the context of the politicized conversation around the current main issues in higher education: access, attainment, accountability, and affordability. Each of these issues provided a foundation of coding the discourse which was then shaped by the context of competency-based education, particularly its positioning as a solution to the Iron Triangle dilemma of decreasing cost while increasing access and quality. The third manuscript, Idea and Implementation: A Case Study of KCTCS’s CBE Learn on Demand, involves an institutional case study of a competency-based education program, Learn on Demand (LOD), within the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). Eleven semi-structured interviews were conducted with student success coaches, faculty, and staff who are directly involved with the program across seven different colleges, and documents such as marketing materials, presentations, and administrator-written articles were also analyzed as a representation of the official discourse of the program. As institutions start to explore and develop competency-based education programs, the faculty and administrators at those institutions are likely influenced by the intersection of pre-existing organizational and subgroup culture, societal beliefs about the definition and purpose of education, and how innovations may shape the experiences of individuals. Through interviewing individuals, I was able to parse out the impacts of both institutional politics and innovation-related concerns on the success of implementation.

This was a qualitative study designed to document the historical process which brought about a performance-centered accountability (or results-based) system in educator preparation in Texas as reflected in the documents of the first 17 institutions approved under the new approval process for educator preparation. The study will also serve as a historical record which used the change process in political systems to analyze the adoption of the Accountability System for Educator Preparation (ASEP). Additionally, the study provided a thorough review of the literature on Michael Fullan's Change Process Model and David Easton's Political Systems Model.

Education reform initiatives continue to push schools to improve methods of measuring accountability intended to improve student achievement in the United States. Federal programs like the Teacher Incentive Find (TIF) provide school districts with funds to develop and implement school accountability and leadership programs. Teacher leadership is one of the concepts being formally developed amongst these initiatives. My applied thesis project focused on work I conducted with a team of researchers at American Institutes for Research, where we evaluated a teacher leadership program in its third year of implementation. Teacher leadership is facilitated through distributive leadership. School leaders distribute responsibilities that provide teachers with opportunities to extend their expertise outside of their own classrooms. My thesis explores teacher leadership roles and investigates implementation across the client school district. It also discusses how particular anthropological theories about communities of practice, learning, and identity can provide a foundation for conceptualizing teacher leadership implementation and the social interactions between program actors.

Thesis advisor: Patrick J. McQuillan / This dissertation presents two case studies of educational leadership, followed by an extensive discussion of methodological, historical, and philosophical issues that pertain to education research, policy, and leadership development. The case studies utilize qualitative research methods and the theoretical framework of complex systems to ascertain how and to what extent principals fostered cultural and educational change at their schools, with attention to how principals leveraged distributed leadership, instructional leadership, and the generation of cultural norms. Findings from the study were consistent with literature on systems leadership, and reinforce the significance of history and path dependence in school systems, the need to limit disequilibrium and turbulence within sustainable ranges, the importance of trust within social networks to facilitate productive change processes, and the importance of shared cultural norms to align staff values and behavior. Following the explication of the two cases, a meta- analysis is presented to address the methodological and interpretive limits of the study. The role of human development and the influence of cultural ideology and social infrastructures are highlighted as crucial dimensions of reality that warrant integration in educational research. Integral Theory is utilized as a means to explore the cultural, social, and psychological factors involved in achieving more comprehensive interpretations of social reality. Key topics include: complex systems, Integral Theory, modernity, postmodernity, education reform, neoliberalism, and developmental psychology. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / Beginning in 2000, a number of new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) have been established in the U.S. in response to increasing calls for more effective teachers. Among these are programs affiliated with “No Excuses”-style charter schools, which are focused on closing the achievement gap in urban K-12 schools. Teacher education programs at nGSEs affiliated with “No Excuses” schools were designed to prepare teachers specifically for these schools. Although these nGSEs have been applauded by the press and by education reform advocates, there has been almost no independent research about them. Systematic study of the goals, practices and beliefs of teacher educators and candidates at these programs is necessary to understand the impact “No Excuses”-affiliated nGSEs may have on teacher preparation for urban schools. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to analyze teacher preparation from insiders’ perspectives at the Sposato Graduate School of Education, which is connected to the Match Education charter management organization. For this study, the Sposato GSE was regarded as an illustrative and an instrumental case of the nGSE phenomenon. Drawing on multiple data sources and using qualitative data analysis methods, this dissertation found the Sposato mission was to create “jaw-droppingly effective rookie teachers,” and it argues this mission was in large part realized due to the remarkable coherence of the program’s design, curriculum, and vision. However, this dissertation also argues the success of the Sposato teacher education program came at a cost. My analysis shows that Sposato leaders and faculty members zeroed in almost exclusively on two goals: (1) implementing a technical, moves-based epistemology of teaching in their teacher preparation curriculum; and (2) socializing teachers into a gradualist and technically rational vision of equity and justice consistent with the goals of “No Excuses” schools. This study has important implications for the practice of urban teacher preparation, research into the nGSE phenomenon, and policies related to improving teacher education program quality and the goal of closing the achievement gap.

Thesis advisor: Rebecca Lowenhaupt / This single case study examines how stakeholders of a local education agency (LEA) understand and implement state turnaround policy for its chronically underperforming schools. While there is ample research on how to improve chronically underperforming schools, that research becomes limited when looking at turnaround implementation actions that are in response to policy mandates. This qualitative study uses the theory frame of policy sense-making to identify how implementers come to understand turnaround policy and to explore how that sense-making impacts their implementation decisions. Focusing on school leaders as turnaround policy implementers, this research considers how school leaders come to understand their work of turning around a chronically underperforming school in the context of responding to policy mandates. Research findings, which emerged from Interviews, observations, and policy analysis, reveal that school leaders in this LEA are engaged in sense-making of turnaround policy and practice, which informs their decisions about how to implement turnaround. School leaders begin by asking questions about the policy requirements which center on decisions about how to organize staff and utilize resources. Yet, findings show that their sense-making goes beyond policy requirements to other areas of turnaround work. Namely, they also make sense of the data, which plays a prevalent role in turnaround in that it informs how school leaders diagnose the school's strengths and weaknesses. School leaders then consider the leadership practices that would effectively raise achievement in the school. Findings also show that how school leaders make sense of these areas is influenced by their communication with other stakeholders, their background knowledge and experience in turnaround, and the context of the school. These findings lead to the recommendations to increase communication that focuses on facilitation of sense-making, to communicate a transparent process about how decisions about resource distribution are made across the LEA, to build capacity around data analysis throughout the LEA, and to communicate a vision of turnaround leadership for the LEA. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / A new phenomenon in teacher education, referred to as new graduate schools of education, or nGSEs (Cochran-Smith, et al., 2016), is gaining traction in the U.S. Profoundly different in program structures and arrangements from most university programs, these non-university affiliated teacher education programs have emerged during the current era of standards- and accountability-based reform. However, limited empirical research has examined how nGSEs conceptualize and enact teaching and learning and how these programs might signal a shift in the field of teacher education. This dissertation attempts to address this empirical lacuna through an in-depth qualitative case study of the first such program, located within High Tech High (HTH), a charter school network. The purpose of this study is to understand the HTH program’s core beliefs and behaviors, as well as the organization’s relationship with its institutional environment (i.e. the broader educational policy, funding, and field-level contexts). Utilizing institutional analysis and sensemaking theory, I argue that teacher education programming at HTH drew on a core logic of constructivism, which informed the school’s instructional work of teaching and learning and its organizational design. Through this constructivist approach, teacher education faculty and students were able to “practice with theory,” bridging the theory-practice dichotomy and informing a relational and actionable conception of knowledge. Finally, HTH took an active stance towards its institutional environment, developing organizational networks to both retain organizational fidelity to its mission and also enact change in accordance with this mission. My analysis has implications for teacher education, organizational analysis, and education policy. Because constructivism dually informed instruction and organizational structures, HTH offers new possibilities for the design of education organizations. The centrality of constructivist logics allowed for both remarkable consistency in values, beliefs, and goals across the organization as well as considerable agency for individual actors. The agency of HTH personnel, paired with the program’s “active stance” towards environmental forces, such as funders and field-level partners, informed how education leaders’ design choices simultaneously supported individual agency and organizational mission as well as ground-up approaches to change. Lastly, the case of HTH indicates that the nGSE phenomenon models new organizational approaches to teacher education, which can challenge and expand the ways in which we understand teaching and learning for educators. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.