This dissertation highlights the interconnected relationship of community, family, and school by tracing the lived experiences of African American students and parents to capture how they come to terms with where they are situated in racially diverse settings. The research also shows the intergenerational impact of tracking on African American families who attended the same racially diverse school and lived in a segregated African American neighborhood. Racialized tracking and the segregated African American community have contributed to separate and unequal outcomes, treatment, and performances that demonstrate a racialized duplicity in the United States. Utilizing and building on the theorizing of Pierre Bourdieu's (1977a, 1977b) theorizing about habitus, this study reveals how race, place, and class impact the perceptions of African American students and their parents by mapping out their routes, which include their everyday journey from their homes, school, and community. In addition, Michele Foucault's concept of subjugated knowledge captures how tracking and unequal educational experiences are deeply rooted within a larger struggle for equality for African Americans, which results in an uneven distribution of power/knowledge in the United States. The duplicity that African Americans have to confront in schools and communities is what I refer to as Plessy's tracks. This dissertation thus examines and connects the routes, roots, and academic tracks of African American students and their parents to bring an understanding of how they perceived academic placement and their social positions in a segregated community and a racially diverse school.

Institutions of formal education have a survival interest in the question of why most adults do not participate in more formal adult education. This study, using a descriptive approach, gathered evidence from 16 adults (8 males and 8 females) who had not participated in formal education in the past 10 years. The evidence gathered was used to answer the question, How do adults, who have not participated in formal education as adults, describe their reasons for not participating? The evidence was gathered from multiple individual interviews and two focus groups.Much of the previous research in discovering why adults did not participate in formal education has been done from the perspective of the participating adult. An examination of this previous research identified job related reasons as the prominent reasons adults gave for participation in formal education. Barriers/deterrents to participation were most often identified as lack of time and money; however, the study presented here found neither money nor time reported as important reasons for nonparticipation in formal education for adults.The informants in this study answered the question clearly. They did not participate in formal education for adults because they found no need for, or value in, additional formal education. Furthermore, they had no interest in exploring potential benefits.Some research on participation in formal adult education shows some adults who participated, did so for social reasons. The informants in the study presented here may have avoided formal education for social reasons, that is, a fear of failure in that context. All informants were satisfied with the way they learned needed skills and/or knowledge. Previous formal education, schooling, was not recognized as an important contributor to the informants' current or future adult lifestyles. Schooling, as described by the informants, was not credited with providing them with understanding, knowledge, and/or skills required to find employment or to support or enhance their adult lifestyles.Hands-on, and less often reading, were the methods employed by the informants and their peers. There seemed to be a threat to their self esteem if they were involved in formal adult education to gain skill and/or knowledge. / Department of Educational Leadership

This thesis examines the relationship between the community and school in Arctic Bay in north Baffin Island. The objective is two-fold: first, to provide insights into the interaction between Inuit community members and school, and second, to describe and analyze the internal changes that school effects among community members. The central concern underlying the thesis is the ongoing process of Inuit cultural change. / This thesis expands the framework for studies in educational anthropology in two ways. First, the thesis examines the interaction between the community and the school from the perspective of the community, rather than from that of the school. Second, it applies anthropological understandings of social structure, social control and social personhood as analytical categories in examining the two cultural contexts. The thesis illustrates the fundamental contradictions in worldview between Inuit and the institution of schooling. / Observations of contemporary life illustrate that Inuit have been able to maintain the organizing principles of their kinship system in the transition from pre-settlement life to the community. Observations of socialization in school illustrate that the social norms and interrelational processes young Inuit learn in school contradict some of the organizing principles of Inuit kinship. Moreover, the responsibilities that Inuit adults are required to undertake as parents of school children impinge on their kinship obligations. The thesis concludes that although Inuit have maintained authentic, albeit modified, cultural practice in the community, the socialization of school, a culturally foreign institution, increasingly impinges on their normative values and social relations.

No description available.

Though many studies address the issue of immigrants in schools, relatively little research attention has been given to the education experience of immigrants who have migrated from one developing country to another (or "South-South" migration), although this accounts for about half of all migration worldwide. The studies that do exist in this realm tend to focus on the classroom experience of immigrant students without due consideration of the policy context that influences the immigrant students' school experience. Consequently, although we are learning more about immigrant student experiences in classrooms in developing countries, to date, we lack information about the policy context in which educational stakeholders in developing countries find themselves when attempting to incorporate immigrant students into an education system that, more often than not, is struggling with issues of poverty and lack of resources. This is especially true in the African context where continental migration rates continue to increase yet immigration education policies tend to be unclear, if not altogether absent. Using the case of South Africa, an African country beset by xenophobia--most notably, the infamous xenophobic riots of 2008, this exploratory baseline sociological study sought to document how the social context of a developing country nfluences educational policy implementation and interpretation with regard to access for immigrant students. This qualitative study, which took place from December 2010 to November 2011, employed semi-structured interviews with 17 educational stakeholders at both the meso and the micro organizational levels of the educational bureaucracy as well as NGOs to better understand how policy was interpreted and implemented for immigrant students. Additionally, this study employed a reviewof existing policy documents as well as a qualitative case study using tenets of ethnographic observation. Data analysis for this study employed methods of themed coding and frequency identification. The data analysis revealed little consensus on how education policy regarding access for immigrant students should be applied, leading to disparate understandings and lack of access for some immigrant students depending on country of origin. The data also revealed that immigrant education policy interpretation was heavily influenced not only by organizational type and role, but personal experience of the actor as well. Additionally, the findings indicated that the role of the principal was paramount in how education policy was applied in schools, and because of the policy confusion, principals in some cases were able to employ innovative methods to obtain resources that aided the immigrant learners in their school. The findings also revealed that although xenophobia does exist in the South African socio-cultural fabric, it was not the primary determinant used to grant or deny access to immigrant students. The institution of South African schooling, centered around success on a final qualifying exam, emerged as the driver of educational stakeholder policy interpretation and implementation regarding immigrant student access. Overall, the data revealed that the education situation in Cape Town was the result of a combination of which policies actors used as their interpretive framework, the specialized demographics of the Western Cape polity, and the interactions and politics between the organizations of the educational institutions and immigrant service organizations in Cape Town. Study findings are discussed in detail with reference to agenda for future research and actionable recommendations for policymakers.

This study examines whether small high school reform in New York City has fulfilled its goal of providing disadvantaged students access to rigorous mathematics curricula, thereby increasing their college readiness. Between 2002 and 2010 in New York City, 27 large, comprehensive high schools were closed or downsized and replaced by over 200 new small schools (Jennings & Pallas, 2010). Although extant research indicates that these schools have produced higher attendance and graduation rates (Bloom et al., 2010; 2012), the literature on small high school reform and college readiness remains inconclusive. To address this gap in the literature, my dissertation employs a longitudinal database of New York City student and school-level data from 2000-2010 to examine the impact of small high school reform on student math course-taking for two cohorts of students (the class of 2009 and 2010). I address the threat of selection bias by utilizing several propensity score matching techniques within a multilevel modeling framework. I find a small, positive impact of attending a new, small high school on students' progress through the math curriculum (one-sixth of a year) for the class of 2009, but not for the class of 2010. Yet while students in the new, small high schools, who are among the most disadvantaged in the city, might be faring slightly better than they would have had they attended an alternate high school option, they are still failing to complete even one semester of Algebra II/Trigonometry--the lowest level of course deemed "college preparatory" by the district. Furthermore, small high schools are not equally beneficial for all types of students. Black and Hispanic students appear to do better in the small schools than in alternate high school options, while the reverse is true for whites. Meanwhile, students with initially low math achievement benefit from attending small high schools, while students with middle-to-high levels of initial math achievement are better served elsewhere. Moreover, the new, small high schools are much less likely to offer advanced math courses such as calculus or any Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate math--effectively cutting their students off from the opportunity to take these courses. Finally, my results suggest that the rigor of math courses in the new, small schools may be weaker than in the alternate high school options in New York City. Taken together with the existing research, my results suggest that the consequences of small high school reform in New York City are both more complicated and less positive than the reformers promised or district officials will admit (Gates, 2005; Walcott, 2012). While these schools are unquestionably improvements over the large, failing schools they replaced, they remain at the bottom of an intensely academically stratified school system, and they have failed to raise students' college readiness in math. Moreover, these schools are particularly under serving high achieving students by cutting them off from rigorous, advanced math courses.

This is a study of teachers' experiences in organizations. In particular, this study explores the experiences that prompted Black male teachers to consider a career in teaching, the organizational conditions that influenced their workplace experiences, and the organizational dynamics that affected these teachers' decisions to stay or leave their current schools or the profession. Drawing on interviews from 27 Black male teachers across fourteen schools in Boston Public Schools, this study found that an early experience teaching influenced participants' decisions to enter the teaching profession. Findings from this study also suggest that the number of Black men on a school's faculty influenced participants' workplace experiences. Participants who were the only Black men on the faculty, or whom I describe as "Loners," faced greater challenges in navigating the organization when compared to participants in schools with many more Black male teachers, or "Groupers." Moreover, there was a relationship between the reasons participants cited for leaving, participants' actual decisions to stay or leave, and organizational characteristics. Loners stayed. Groupers moved to other schools and some left teaching altogether. Loners cited the school's overall working conditions as their reason for staying, while Groupers described administrative leadership as their reason for leaving. This dissertation builds on the nascent literature that explores how organizational conditions, characteristics, and dynamics in schools affect the pathways into the profession, experiences, and retention of Black male teachers.

In the midst of market-based school reforms urging choice, competition, and high-stakes production of test scores, the complexities of pedagogy and its relationship to culture, power, and student learning are often overshadowed. While research on teaching in culturally diverse contexts has contributed to the development of inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy (Banks et. al, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Gay, 2000), the fate of these practices in the face of market pressures require critical examination by those concerned with equity in schools serving disadvantaged children (Buras, 2010; Macrine, 2009; Picower, 2011). Based on a year of extensive interviewing with twenty-two instructional leaders across an urban market of charter schools, as well as interviews and participant-observations with twenty-eight teachers in four purposefully selected charter schools, this study explores whether and how school leaders and teachers make sense of competition and student culture as resources for learning in classrooms, particularly in a predominantly low-income, black/African American, and Latino community in New York City. The study also made use of school documents and reports compiled overtime by schools and charter authorizers at the city and state level. Findings indicate that a heterogeneous charter sector of independent charter schools shifted overtime to reflect homogenizing tendencies associated with the rise and concentration of schools managed by an influential bloc of private charter management organizations (CMOs). At the intersection of such shifts were teachers and instructional leaders, many of whom describe 'trading-off' on inclusive and diverse approaches to teaching in an effort to yield more tangible and marketable outcomes in the form of test scores. Case studies in four schools, however, revealed important distinctions, as differently managed schools negotiated differently the degrees to which social and cultural boundaries were formed between schools, students, and the surrounding community in which it operated. These negotiations shaped different approaches to teaching and learning and outlooks on competition. The significance of the study is its negation of a culture-free and/or value-neutral assumption about market policies, primarily by illuminating the tension and impact of such policies on specific pedagogical forms and goals. More importantly, market policies are examined in light of social (re)production theory and the extent to which deregulation disrupts or perpetuates unequal social and cultural relations of power between schools and traditionally marginalized communities.

This dissertation examines the increasingly prominent and expansive role of student learning outcomes and student learning outcomes assessment in bachelor’s degree-granting institutions. As higher education institutions integrate assessment into the curriculum, the voices of faculty remain largely unheard. Therefore, this study sought to reveal their voice, and in so doing, try to understand why collective faculty response to student learning outcomes assessment like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) varies among undergraduate institutions. In asking this question, I wanted to understand how faculty perceive assessment impacting their professions, their identity as professors, and their role in the institution. Using a multi-case study, qualitative design, I selected four small, private institutions. The fifth institution that participated in my study was a mid-sized, public institution. Participants consisted of faculty and administrators in each institution involved in governance, curriculum, and assessment. The primary method of data collection was semi-structured interviews. In this age of student learning outcomes assessment, my research showed that faculty are navigating, negotiating, and renegotiating their position and role within the institution; grappling with defining how, and if, assessment is part of the professorial role; and working in concert, and sometimes in conflict, with administrators to establish the jurisdiction of assessment. This study fills a gap in the professionalization literature by addressing more fully the interaction of professionalized roles in organizations and the interaction of professional groups within an organization. I also offer directions for further research.

This study builds on an emerging literature within the effects of schooling tradition by extending the seasonal perspective to a class-based investigation of parenting logics and home influence. Using data from qualitative interviews conducted over the course of a twelve-month period that includes both the school year and the summer months, this dissertation examines possible linkages between home influence and summer learning, and tests the longstanding assumption that home influence acts in a constant and continuous way throughout the year. In particular, I investigate the expectations and beliefs that parents hold for their children during the long summer break from schooling and examine how summertime expectations and family practices differ from those during the school year. I find evidence that home influence changes across seasons, and that the availability of economic resources plays an important role in shaping seasonal change. Specifically, my data suggest that mothers’ attitudes and expectations vary by season, as do household rules around bedtime and screen time. I identify mechanisms that facilitate summer learning loss, including a “carry-over” effect, and I present evidence that the neighborhood context seems to take on outsize importance during the summer months. I also find that two sub-groups – children with disabilities and dual-custody families – seem to experience greater seasonal variation than the general population. My findings suggest the need to modify the assumption that home influence acts in a constant way and to develop a more precise understanding of home influence, one that takes into account the likelihood of seasonal variation, particularly by class and by subgroup.