Assessing student achievement in more authentic ways is a major element of school improvement efforts all across the nation. Massachusetts is implementing a comprehensive student assessment program that will provide information about individual and district progress in mastering new curricula and academic standards. On the local level, school systems are instituting broader assessments to gauge progress. With the rich new data that these efforts will provide comes an opportunity to deepen our understanding of what contributes to educational success. We know that student achievement is dependent upon many elements both inside and outside of the classroom including background community factors. This project is designed to explore the relationship between community demographics and outcomes on an education achievement test, the 1996 Massachusetts statewide assessments. By using census data and statistical techniques including cluster analysis, multiple regression, and factor analysis, it is possible to develop a model of education achievement communities that groups municipalities by their affinity for educational achievement. The resultant regression formula and the listing of communities provide researchers with a mechanism to account for the impact of background community characteristics on aggregate achievement results. This analytical study utilized 1990 census data and the results of the 1996 Massachusetts Education Assessment Program to explore the relationship between community characteristics and educational achievement. The project produced two products: a comprehensive community data base; and a kind of community model based on a Community Achievement Factor (CAF), developed in the study, that is the basis for organizing the Commonwealth's 351 cities and towns into 14 education affinity groupings.

In an attempt to understand the meaning of dropping out of high school from former students' perspectives, this study investigates dropouts from a single high school. Data, collected during 1999, is drawn from in-depth interviews with twelve students who left high school and from observations of their former high school and community. Six aspects of the participants' lives were examined in hopes of recognizing themes common to the dropout experience. Participants were purposefully selected based on the absence of known risk factors such as race/ethnicity, low income status and single parent homes (which have already been well documented in dropout literature). This study hopes to contribute to an understanding of why students, who are not typically considered at-risk, drop out of high school.

The contemporary homeschooling movement sits at the intersection of several important social trends: widespread concern about the effectiveness and safety of public schools, feminist challenges to the patriarchal family structure, anxiety about the state of the family as an institution, and challenging economic conditions. The central concern of this dissertation is to make sense of homeschooling within this broader context. Data were gathered through interviews with forty-five homeschooling parents, approximately half of whom are religious and half of whom are secular. The interviews were organized around three central questions: (1) What are the frames that parents use to justify homeschooling? (2) What are their particular tactics or methods for homeschooling? (3) What are the components of homeschoolers' collective identity? I argue that homeschooling bears the imprint of broader changes regarding the gender system and contemporary family life, as well as other economic and cultural changes. Both religious and secular parents come to homeschooling out of shared concerns about schools being ineffective and incapable of catering to their children.s individual needs. They also share concerns about the state of the family and the general moral decline of society. Religious and secular parents differ in their actual practice of homeschooling, depending on their particular conceptions of childhood, but they are alike in the fact that it is women who do most of the homeschooling work. These parents are also different in their collective identities. Religious parents regard homeschooling as just something they do. However, secular parents characterize homeschooling as part of who they are as moral people and this compels them to employ various strategies of identity work. In the end, I argue that this movement is unlikely to contribute to meaningful social change. I base this conclusion on the fact that the homeschooling movement contains two major contradictions: (1) This movement is simultaneously resisting one alleged failing institution – schools - while reproducing another highly criticized institution – the patriarchal nuclear family. (2) This movement offers individual solutions to social problems. While the participants have many concerns about social institutions, their answer is to withdraw their participation and retreat into their own families.

This critical case study explores multiple meanings of a small chapel at Concord Academy, a private secondary school in Massachusetts. The relationship between participation and empowerment is explored, as revealed through the chapel and as understood, experienced, and articulated by people involved with the chapel over time. Architecture is considered as a vehicle for democracy--an opportunity for risk, interaction, community, and encounter. Found abandoned in the 1950s, the chapel was rescued by Concord Academy women, girls, and a few men who took the building down, reassembled and refurbished it at Concord, and built huge architectural carvings, pulpit, altar, and steeple. Seniors and faculty soon addressed the school in morning "chapels," which evolved into a "central rite of passage" for students--pivotal, powerful "Who am I?" experiences described as "saying hello to adulthood and good-bye to childhood." The chapel is explored as building project, rite of passage, evolving drama, and forum for community. Questions include what is empowerment and what makes environments empowering, experientially, pedagogically, institutionally and architecturally? What does the chapel mean to those those who know and use it? Issues include: the relationship between individuality and community; what makes places meaningful; the chapel in relation to women; finding and speaking one's own voice; the separation of learning from doing; and intersections of gender, class, race and sexual orientation. Empowerment is considered both as individual self-confidence and efficacy and sociopolitical consciousness and intervention. This study also explores alternative, participatory ways of conducting research and writing a dissertation--more a weaving of stories and an evolving saga than a removed, academic treatise. For me this has been an odyssey, challenging and inviting us to be engaged as full human beings, not just thinkers. Qualitative, ethnographic, phenomenological, and participatory, this study uses interview/dialogues, participation, photography, and interaction as opportunities for participants' increasing involvement, control, and appropriation. The project should interest the public, educators, architects, environmental designers, historians, anthropologists, community activists, and participatory/action researchers. This study is not simply rational. I hope my heart, C.A.'s heart, and the rhythm of the chapel's steady pulse come through.

This study analyzes the ideological effects of Channel One, the commercial television news program currently being implemented in the nation's public school systems, from a cultural studies perspective. These effects are traced primarily through an audience study of 627 high school students and 39 teachers from public schools in a small city in Ohio. The qualitative research design involves a modified application of the "encoding/decoding" model for studying media effects, developed by Stuart Hall and operationalized by David Morley. Specifically, I apply the encoding/decoding model to analysis of the social uses of Channel One, rather than to the content of Channel One. In doing so, I expand the model to integrate political economic determination of the encoding/decoding process, by treating this as a distinct "level of preference" to be explored within a qualitative research design. The findings of the audience study are examined against the backdrop of the overall cultural context within which Channel One has emerged. I argue that Channel One is an exemplary "post-Fordist" cultural form that arose in response to both a crisis in capital accumulation and a crisis in symbolic overaccumulation in contemporary U.S. culture. Its fundamental role amidst these crises is to reassert control over an increasingly fragmenting semiotic landscape, and thereby to recapture an increasingly fragmenting media audience. The audience study finds that Channel One is profoundly hegemonic in its attempt to police and control audience interpretations of its social use as a media form and as an 'official' educational tool.

A significant development in education is the guidance movement. This paper is an outgrowth of a belief in a guidance program for students of high school age. It is an age in which many questions of vital importance to the individual arise. These questions have to do with meeting and solving educational, vocational, and civic-ethical-social problems. / Typescript. / "August, 1951." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: H. A. Curtis, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 52-53).

Text in Afrikaans and English. / Includes bibliography. / In the face of negative criticism from the neo-Marxists' school of sociological analysis, Hargreaves (1981) suggested that the ethnographers should adopt what he termed a 'split-level' model. This approach entailed a close scrutiny of societal controls and structures in which education took place so as to give meaning to the 'situational structures' where teachers and pupils interacted in classrooms. He advocated that ethnographers locate their work within some context. This investigation will follow Hargreaves' advice but the model will be modified somewhat. There will be a focus upon the 'structural societal relations'; this focus will also encompass an investigation of the saturation of these relations by an ideology which permeates the provision of education. The proposed modification of Hargreaves' model happens where the shift from 'societal structures' to 'situational structures' occurs. The writer proposes that an intermediate stage needs to be inserted, at the level of the school, as a mediating agency of the structural relations.

Due to the patriarchal and racial hierarchies that structure education, girls, and specifically girls of color, occupy a marginalized space within it. This is in contrast to boys, who are considered more intellectually gifted, yet held to lower academic and behavioral standards. This study explores the impacts of gender, racial, and ethnic stereotypes perceived by 30 white, Black, and/or Latinx women (ages 18-22) during their experiences in U.S. public middle schools (grades 6-8). Participants were surveyed to ascertain general information about them and their middle school experiences, then invited to participate in focus groups to share their individual narratives. In total, seven focus groups were conducted with 17 women. Utilizing intersectional feminist and constructivist grounded theories as frameworks, this mixed methods research concentrates on the multiple, intersecting barriers, including complex expectations regarding their academic and social-emotional performance, that challenge girls in education compared to boys generally. The survey results suggested a positively correlated relationship between girls' socioeconomic status and perceived positivity of middle school experience. The coded data procured by the focus groups, once organized into categories and analyzed for themes and subthemes, indicated girls' propensity to monitor perceptions of themselves by eight mechanisms: limiting their self-expression, seeking to please others, trying to fit in, worrying about what others think, self-inflicting pressures, struggling with identity, avoiding getting in trouble, and seeking to appease their families. Advancing the representation of girls' internalization of these individually and institutionally conveyed stereotypes is a primary aim of this thesis.

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