The contemporary United States is at a crossroads with race: some believe achieving political equality rests in the ability to wilfully ignore race, while others assess colorblindness is a racial frame that only serves to prolong and irritate inequalities. Higher ed institutions have become involved in this conversation due to critiques of higher ed devaluing racial minorities both in the curriculum and in hiring practices. As a response, higher ed has promised to restructure their institution with diversity and PoC in mind. This research study seeks to understand if higher ed has maintained this promise. Twelve participants were qualitatively interviewed to assess their satisfaction with higher ed and the curriculum as it pertains to race. It was found that students were generally heavily critical of their education, particularly in the “diversity” claims made by the school. Their narratives additionally highlight the importance of sociological spaces within a neoliberal university.

Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has suffered through centuries of disenfranchisement, poverty, slavery, environmental disasters, internecine racial prejudice, and foreign infringement. Its people won independence from France in 1804 but only at the cost of huge human and financial losses. Since then, Haiti has known little freedom or democracy. In 1991, the first truly democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was elected (with a 67% majority). Nine months later, he was deposed by a military coup d'état. During that time and the chaotic years that followed, groups of human rights observers traveled to Haiti in an attempt to record and report publically, officially, what was actually happening to the Haitian people and their institutions. Although much has been written about the country during that period, there have been no studies focused on the human rights observers who were intimately involved with the people and the country. These groups and other groups participating in similar situations have not been studied and, yet, research in that area might provide important insights in the field of social justice. It is important to identify what encourages individuals to become a part of the effort to make a positive difference in the lives of others, in the most adverse situations, the process by which human rights observers become engaged, and how that engagement affects their lives both during and after their in-country experiences. The purpose of this phenomenological study is to see if there are commonalities (e.g., socio-cultural influence, self-directed learning readiness, etc.) among the initial in-country experiences of several human rights observers and further to discover what, if any, effect those experiences had on their leadership styles. The study identified socio-cultural influences (self-directed learning readiness and familial, religious, educational impact); motivational factors; methods of processing the experience (immediate responses of connectedness/love and reasoned responses involving individual and group reflection); and multiple outcomes (spiritualty, social action, and creativity). The overarching findings included identification of transformational learning in the participants and the evolution of their leadership from the servant model into a transformational/chaos model, including reflection in and on action as an operating context. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

College access programs (CAPs) have proliferated throughout the United States to address disparities in college enrollment between White, higher-income students, and racial/ethnic minority and lower-income students. While CAPs have helped to reduce such disparities, considerable challenges remain. U.S. higher education leaders are facing renewed urgency to address this issue because racial/ethnic minority and lower-income groups are now the fastest growing segments of the population, and because educational attainment – acquisition of a college degree – is increasingly important to national economic growth and individual well-being. However, to date, only a few researchers have examined CAPs’ influence on participants beyond college enrollment, so there is a knowledge gap regarding the kinds of systems and supports needed to help members of these populations achieve a college degree. This study examines the relationship between CAP participation and the undergraduate experiences and outcomes of CAP alumni who enrolled in college. The primary data for this study consisted of individual interviews with 24 alumni from five CAPs in the New York City metropolitan area who subsequently attended college. The CAPs varied by primary funding source. Four to six participants per site were college juniors or seniors, recent college graduates, or individuals who enrolled in college but withdrew before graduating and never returned. The data highlighted the following key themes and implications: (1) CAPs in this study were largely successful in helping alumni enroll in colleges and universities known to be selective; (2) While the CAPs exerted helpful influences, alumni nonetheless faced serious challenges through the college years, such as meeting academic demands and navigating barriers of bigotry and intolerance that are deeply embedded on many campuses; and (3) CAPs in this study influenced alumni’s post-college aspirations, directions, and trajectories regarding career choices, and family and community uplift. Drawing on these findings, this study proposed a model of the psychosocial, academic, and sociocultural resources that appear to contribute to the undergraduate experiences, outcomes, and post-college trajectories of CAP alumni. The study concludes with implications for practice, policy and further research.

<p> Asian Americans are generally considered an educationally and economically successful minority in the United States, a perception known as the model minority myth. These images can negatively impact Asian Americans, especially in higher education, by neglecting their challenges and limiting the research conducted related to their struggles and obstacles in higher education. Since most studies involving Asian Americans focus on their enrollment in elite universities, there is not much recognition of Asian Americans in community colleges. This study focuses on one specific subgroup of Asians, Korean Americans. Although this group is more likely to attend highly selective colleges regardless of socioeconomic status, I focus on the Korean American students who attend community colleges. </p><p> This study aimed to explore the perceptions and experiences of Korean American students attending community colleges and how their perceptions and experiences influence the construction of their possible selves. More specifically, this study examined the opportunities and obstacles they experienced in community college and how these experiences intersected with model minority myths. This study also focused on the possible selves Korean American students might construct while attending community college. Possible selves are &ldquo;representations of the self in the past and they include representations of the self in the future&rdquo; (Markus &amp; Nurius, 1986, p. 954) and various self-conceptions that include &ldquo;the good selves, the bad selves, the hoped-for selves, the feared selves, the not-me selves, the ideal selves, and the ought-selves&rdquo; (Markus &amp; Nurius, 1986, p. 957). For this study, 29 Korean American community college students were recruited and semi-structured interviews were conducted regarding their high school experiences, community college experiences, and future goals and plans. Through data analysis inspired by a grounded theory approach, 40 codes were developed and three major themes emerged related to the experiences of Korean American students at community college. </p><p> The findings showed that before Korean American students attended community colleges, they negatively perceived community colleges as a place for those who did not get into four-year colleges or did not do well in high school, a perception strongly influenced by others such as parents, peers, or members of Korean communities. However, once they attended, many of them had positive experiences through the various academic and career services offered and interactions with faculty and peers. These positive experiences changed Korean American students&rsquo; negative views of community colleges. Although positive experiences changed their negative perceptions of community colleges, they consistently encountered negative perceptions from others which conflicted with their positive experiences. Korean American students also constructed various possible selves based on their academic and career goals. Most constructed positive possible selves if they had more specific academic and career goals and as well as the confidence to achieve them. These students thought community colleges helped develop their future goals but were ultimately ambivalent about their attendance at community college. Some believed community college was a foundation or stepping stone for achieving their goals while others thought attending community college would negatively influence their future. </p><p> This study is important because it explores an issue to which little scholarly attention has been paid and which has not been thoroughly investigated. Theoretically this study can contribute to the literature on possible selves and Asian Americans in higher education, give a deeper understanding of a particular group in relation to model minority stereotypes, and provide a guide for how to examine multifaceted elements which can influence the understanding of how community college students develop possible selves. This study also has practical benefits: it can promote how to better support Korean American students in order to help them succeed in achieving their goals in higher education.</p><p>

The problem of this study was to ascertain the effectiveness of two techniques for encouraging teachers to use sociometric data to effect change in the sociometric status of the least-preferred children in their classrooms.

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.