This dissertation examines the lives of recently-arrived Mexican immigrant youth who arrive to New York City from both rural and urban Mexico, and either enter into formal school settings, or remain out of these settings, foregoing formal schooling altogether or entering into non-formal educational institutions. Based on a qualitative case study of fifty-three Mexican youth, both pre and post immigration, this dissertation employs transnational theory, cultural and social reproduction theory, and life course theory to explain how even prior to immigration, youth are already forming ideas about work and school-going in the United States. Subject both to the social and economic conditions of their home communities, as well as to the messages they receive from their kin and friends already in New York City related to age, work and schooling, Mexican immigrant youth's worldviews are oriented towards particular pathways prior to immigration. Post-immigration, Mexican immigrant youth continue, for the most part, on these pathways, as they interact with social institutions and fields in New York, including the labor market and the educational system. Contributing to current immigration and education literature which emphasizes the formal school-going practices of immigrant youth, this dissertation broadens this discussion to explore not only their practices in pre and post immigration settings, but also how they impact school-going or non school-going.

A central feature of modern government is its role in designing welfare improving policies to address and correct market failures stemming from externalities and public goods. The rationale for most modern environmental regulations stems from the failure of markets to efficiently allocate goods and services. Yet, as with any policy, distributional effects are important there exist clear winners and losers. Despite the clear theoretical justification for environmental and energy policy, empirical work credibly identifying both the source and consequences of these externalities as well as the distributional effects of existing policies remains in its infancy. My dissertation focuses on the development of empirical methods to investigate the role of environmental and energy policy in addressing market failures as well as exploring the distributional implications of these policies. These questions are important not only as a justification for government intervention into markets but also for understanding how distributional consequences may shape the design and implementation of these policies. My dissertation investigates these questions in the context of programs and policies that are important in their own right. Chapters 1 and 2 of my dissertation explore the economic costs and distributional implications associated with the largest environmental regulatory pro- gram in the United States, the Clean Air Act. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the social costs of air pollution in the context of transportation externalities, showing how effective transportation policy has additional co-benefits in the form of environmental policy. My dissertation remains unified in both its subject matter and methodological approach - using unique sources of data and sound research designs to understand important issues in environmental policy.

In recent years, there has been a growing body of research demonstrating that the way parents make choices about schools is anything but colorblind. In fact, some research suggests that parents, particularly middle- or upper-middle-class white parents, make choices about where to live and send their children to school based on perceptions of public school quality and the race and class composition of the school district and/or schools (see Johnson and Shapiro, 2005; Cucchiara, 2008; Lewis, 2003; Holme, 2002; Posey, 2012; Roda & Wells, 2013). This qualitative case study extends this body of literature by not only examining parents' choices between highly segregated schools and school districts but also within an urban elementary school that offers two self-contained academic programs--a majority white Gifted and Talented ("G&T") program and a majority black and Latino General Education ("Gen Ed") program. It asks how the meanings that parents make about their available school choice options and their sense of "place" within the school system and larger society help to perpetuate and legitimize the separate, stratified system and how this "sense making" is intertwined with the inertia working against changing the system. This study begins to address these questions by examining the ways that "advantaged" parents--namely white, higher income and highly educated parents (see Bilfulco, Ladd and Ross, 2009)--make sense of their child's place[ment] within a demographically changing New York City elementary school with a G&T and Gen Ed program. Interviews were conducted with 41 advantaged parents with similar degrees of economic and social advantage whose children were enrolled, based on one test score, in the G&T program, Gen Ed program or both to understand the ways in which these social actors simultaneously embody, resist, and reproduce the social structures in which they live their lives and educate their children. Findings indicate that parent's struggle for high-status positions in the status hierarchy across programs and classrooms in their school. Meanwhile, they embody contradictory dispositions related to their sense of the "place" where they and their children belong within a segregated two-track school, their desire for their children to be exposed to racial/ethnic and socio-economic "diversity" - at least in the abstract and if their children are not in the minority, and their drive to provide their children with the "best" education, even when they are uncertain about what that means within this context. In contradictory ways, parents say they would prefer to enroll their children in diverse schools that have strong educational programs. But, for most of these advantaged parents, having their children enrolled in a program with other students "like them" in terms of their social status and privilege and thus being associated with other parents "like them" was the most important factor, superseding all other desires, including "diversity." They continue to make choices that privilege their children and perpetuate the status quo. Therefore, studying the contradictions that result from their school choices in a highly segregated system can tell us important information about why social conditions change or get reproduced and how policies could be altered to create fewer distinctions between schools and programs.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

<p> Reforms early in the 21st century purported to close the achievement gap between White students and students of color, to provide accountability and transparency to taxpayers, to implement meaningful consequences for low-performing schools, and to create the workforce for the century. In this study, I investigated the effects of school reform on the lived experiences of students who graduated from high school in 2014 by inquiring into six young people&rsquo;s perceptions of their schooling. I sought to better understand whether participants were aware of the existence and intent of school reforms, and how or whether their aspirations for their futures had evolved over the course of their formal schooling in concert with the expressed goals of those reforms. The data set consisted of narratives from six recent low-income male and female high school graduates of color. Analysis revealed striking similarities between their experiences despite the variety in outcomes. The narratives indicated that school reforms have had little impact on students&rsquo; lives other than to graft the go-to-college imperative, onto the young people&rsquo;s inherent aspirations. Young people remained alienated from their education, and outcomes continued to adhere to racist, classist, and gendered expectations. </p>

No description available.

This dissertation is concerned with the implications of the theory of structuration for education. Central to the theory of structuration, is the idea of structuring social relations across time-space, in virtue of the duality of structure. Anthony Giddens, who coined the term 'structuration', acknowledges the call for a decentering of the subject but reaffirms that this does not imply the evaporation of subjectivity into an "empty universe of signs". Rather, social practices, "biting into time and space", are considered to be at the root of the constitution of both subject and social object. However, the value of structuration theory lies in the fact that it helps to illuminate problems of educational research. The points of connection are to do with working out the logical implications of studying a 'subject matter' of which the researcher is already a part and with elucidating the substantiative connotations of the core notions of structure and action. The polarisation in thinking about education is only one symptom of the classic and fundamental tension in social theory between those explanations which stress structure and those stressing action, between deterministic and voluntaristic views of behaviour, between a concern with statics and one with dynamics, between man viewed as subject and man viewed as object. The theory of structuration has implications for education in that it has pointed to a possible resolution of this dualism. The oppositions of society and individual, determinism and voluntarism, structure and action and so on are dealt with by denying that they are in opposition. Social structures are both constituted by human agency and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution. In societal terms, actors, since they know how to behave, contribute through their actions to the continuous production and reproduction of the social structure of rules. Yet in every action there is the potential for actors to participate in changing the 'rules' or structure which they may know and realize in further action. In this way Giddens is able to deal with a recurrent difficulty in sociological theory accounting for both continuity and change. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, 1989.

<p> This doctoral research is an ethnographic study that describes the lived culture of Alice Lloyd College, a work college located in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, and its efficacy in engaging Appalachian students in sustainability education in a college setting. Campus culture was found to be consistent with that of the broader Appalachian region, with three blue collar values emerging as core cultural indicators within the campus community. The three core values are work ethic, service, and self-reliance. Student participants reported low levels of cultural dissonance in transitioning from their family lives to life in college, with most claiming that their immediate families were supportive of their decision to attend college. This is uncommon in the higher education landscape as many Appalachian students on more traditional campuses are first-generation, struggle to persist to graduation, and experience clashing between their home culture and that which they experience at school. The institution was found to be a model of sustainability education in the areas of social and economic justice. Social justice is promoted through the enactment of the institution&rsquo;s mission of cultivating leaders to serve and improve the Appalachian region. Economic justice is fostered through the College&rsquo;s work program which makes higher education possible without debt for low-income Appalachian students by providing tuition waivers to those who work a minimum of 10 hours per week carrying out critical campus operations. While environmental justice was not found to be a current outcome, the institution&rsquo;s practices have valuable implications for re-envisioning higher education as a tool for promoting&mdash;rather than impeding&mdash;holistic sustainability efforts by reinforcing and promulgating sustainable blue collar values through teaching subsistence skills and systems thinking in a work college setting. Data collection for this study was conducted via responsive qualitative interviews with multiple campus constituent groups, including students, faculty, and staff. Data analysis consisted of attributes coding, magnitude coding, and values coding, followed by code landscaping to identify patterns across each coding phase.</p>

No description available.