The enactment of Act 1999-48 (24 P.S. Sections 12-1205.1 et seq.), or Act 48, in Pennsylvania signified a transition from optional continuing professional education to mandatory continuing professional education (CPE) for all PA certified educators. The Act 48 legislation established mandates for CPE for all certified educators. All CPE activities submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) by school districts must be aligned with the goals identified in the professional education plans and, subsequently, to their strategic plans. The intent of this study was to examine southwestern Pennsylvania public school districts' compliance with the Act 48 legislation. Compliance in this study was based on guidelines established by PDE. This study analyzed (1) the extent to which CPE activities of educators in selected school districts in Pennsylvania's Region 7 aligned with the requirements as set forth in the guidelines and (2) the extent to which the school districts' CPE activities met their strategic plan goals. The analysis was based upon the review of documents that identified the school district's strategic plan goals and the CPE activities submitted to PDE for Act 48 credit during the 2005-06 school year. Given the flexible guidelines proffered by PDE, the CPE activities as set forth by the districts could be interpreted only as compliant. After all, school districts might have viewed some criteria as optional. Only 18 percent of the districts had aligned fully their credit-bearing CPE activities and their strategic plan goals. Three factors influencing the degree of alignment included: (1) the use of language in the strategic plan goals and CPE activity names, (2) the content of strategic plan goals, and (3) the range of CPE topics approved for Act 48 credit. Though limited in scope, the study highlighted implications for compliance when guidelines are worded ambiguously. Left to interpret the guidelines as they deemed appropriate, districts endorsed a wide range of professional development activities, many of which did not complement their strategic plan goals.

Race relations in the United States have a tumultuous and painful history. The current legal battles over race-conscious affirmative action policies simply add more fuel to the fire and rekindle centuries-old racial conflicts and biases amongst many Americans. Some researchers are concerned that the current never-ending legal battles are being used to eliminate race-conscious education programs and destroy the original intent of affirmative action policies to equalize opportunities between Blacks and Whites alike. Researchers fear that the policies will be eradicated before the playing field has been leveled. This study critically examined how the race-conscious affirmative action legal debate in higher education has evolved from the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 until 2006. The researcher used two constructs of critical race theory - interest convergence and whiteness as property - to guide the study in the examination and analysis of federal race-conscious legal cases in higher education and state anti-affirmative action policies. The researcher evaluated whether the evolution of the legal debates supports white privilege. Additionally, the researcher used case study methodology to investigate whether the legal debates relate to changes in a specific race-based legal education program, the CLEO program. The researcher analyzed multiple sources of evidence inclusive of both qualitative and quantitative data. The findings in this study indicate that more reverse discrimination lawsuits are saturating the legal landscape and include multiple White plaintiffs. Concurrently, CLEO, which has assisted underrepresented racial minorities with entering and graduating law school, has experienced significant changes to its funding, programs, and the racial/ethnic and academic profiles of its students. The data support a correlation between the race-conscious affirmative action legal debates for more than 30 years, and the significant changes in CLEO's funding, the types of programs offered, and the types of students served. The findings show that an unequal and unlevel academic playing field still exists, yet the race-conscious affirmative action legal debate in higher education will continue until all policies and programs are annihilated. The findings also suggest that the evolution of legal cases and anti-affirmative action policies support the maintenance of white privilege in American society.

This study seeks to analyze the nature and extent of as well as the reasons for the private tutoring activity practiced by fifty-one Romanian secondary education teachers. The findings of my research draw to the conclusion that, although undeniably present, material self-interest does not prevail in their work as private tutors. Instead, their chief goal has been consistently to gain more professional and social status - a goal challenged by successive regimes of contrasting political hues. While identifying the ways in which their work in schools has been "proletarianized" and in which the economic and the political have pervaded their teaching activities, they understand their private tutoring work as a critical solution in a critical period of transition in the Romanian society. This practice has grown into a very well organized, hierarchical system, which aims to recuperate an ideal type of relation teacher-student and to offer them authority, autonomy, prestige and economic rewards - exactly the elements that are at the heart of their ideals of "professionalism". Besides being a subtle answer to the education policy changes, private tutoring is a momentous attempt at re-legitimating their profession and restoring their professional and social images.

Literacy education today involves more than the development of reading and writing proficiencies; literacy today also requires the augmentation of skills needed to read many forms of audiovisual text. Finding a conceptual framework for all of the different kinds of media in which people engage today, however, presents a daunting challenge to the field; seeking and finding this conceptual framework seems urgent considering that young people especially tend to draw heavily from popular music, television, film, and internet sites in their struggles to understand themselves and their world. This study focuses specifically on teleliteracy education. While good teleliteracy pedagogical frameworks exist, significant advancements in teleliteracy education seem to be mired in problems. Most notably, members of the field debate the value of engaging young people in controversial television content. Some scholars claim that this engagement "dumbs-down" learning and diminishes life; others claim that it promotes learning and enriches life when the engagement occurs in democratic learning spaces. Another problem is that existing teleliteracy frameworks seem to concentrate on helping learners to become more critically minded but perhaps overly cynical of the television content in which they engage. In an attempt to strengthen existing teleliteracy frameworks, this study presents an analysis of "Mister Rogers Talks about Learning" (1992), a theme of the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood series comprised of five one-half hour programs. In the study, the author critiques Rogers' work through a theoretical framework that merges Dewey's (1938) and Freire's (1993/1970) philosophies of what constitutes an educative experience within a mutually humanizing praxis. The author also employs Guba and Lincoln's (1989) articulation of constructivist inquiry as a theoretical framework for his methodology, drawing from Freire's (1993/1970) ideas on deconstructing a coded situation and Carby's (1993) work on decoding media text that has pedagogic intent and didactic tone. From the analysis, the author suggests that Rogers' educative and humanizing pedagogy provides insights on how young people might be invited to integrate their learning experiences into their everyday lives in order to navigate positively and confidently, but not cynically, the popular media in which they engage more broadly the challenging issues of a growingly complex world.

Organization theorists have argued that organizations in higher education have difficulty making decisions that effectively address or change their environment. They have been characterized as loosely coupled structures that have difficulty in decision making to solve problems. This study examined the decision making process of enrollment planners at a large public research university in response to an enrollment crisis in the first half of the 1990's that affected the flagship campus and many of its satellite campuses. The theoretical framework is Herbert Simon's theory of Bounded Rationality and the anarchic (or garbage can) decision making model created by James March, Michael Cohen and Johan Olsen. Simon theorized that many problems are surrounded by complex amounts of information needs and a variety of possible responses that make decision making problematic. Calculating what response or action is optimal can be unfeasible because of the degree of complexity involved. Simon called this a theory of Bounded Rationality. In a departure from more orderly models of organizational decision making, Cohen, March and Olsen suggested a more radical interpretation of organizations as organized anarchies. The "Garbage Can" model was originally formulated in the context of the operation of universities and their many inter-departmental communications problems. One of the most important factors influencing decisions is the management, dissemination and analysis of information. An intrinsic component of the management of information is communication. Analyses of the information management and communications processes were key components of this study. This research study assessed the overall quality of the decision making and suggested ways of improving the process. The study described a "real world" decision making environment in a situation affecting enrollments at a major research university. In the search of higher education administration literature on decision making, there seemed to be a paucity of case studies similar to this one. Therefore, it proffers a description of what may happen when decision makers fail to realize the complexities and limitations of human and organizational capabilities in a turbulent environment.

This study described in the narrative how women trained in a political leadership setting can create an environment where women's development is enhanced in terms of a woman's voice, her networking abilities, as well as her expectations of herself and of the program. This is the first study of its kind to study women trained in a political leadership setting. The population of this research study consisted of the Executive Director for the state of Pennsylvania in the Excellence in Public Service Series, the researcher, and the women that were participants in the 2005-2006 class in Pennsylvania. Various methods were used to gather data. The Executive Director was interviewed. The researcher provided the background on the program and her personal experiences as a participant. Finally, the participants of the 2005-2006 class answered an open-ended questionnaire that focused on three main elements: the voice, expectation levels, and networking. An analysis of the research reveals leadership skills of a woman can be enhanced by participating in a leadership training program of "all-woman" where women are exposed through knowledge, experiences, and practice. The building of trusting relationships, the increased knowledge base, and the networking helped the women to have more confidence, the ability to engage in meaningful dialogue, and to envision higher levels of expectations of themselves necessary for professional development than what was previously considered prior to entering the program. Further, for many, the program exceeded their expectations or the program was a valuable learning experience that no woman would want to miss.

The accountability mandates of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have changed the relationship between schools and data. State assessments provide new sources of data and the high - stakes associated with these tests have increased the pressure on schools to use this data to drive instructional decisions. Under NCLB, accountability is based on overall student performance and achievement of designated subgroups of students. Within this system, the existence and needs of low-performing students who do not comprise a subgroup for accountability purposes could be concealed in a school with high overall levels of student achievement. This study examined the use of data by sixth-grade and seventh-grade reading teachers in three high-performing middle schools to improve the reading achievement of low-performing students. The selection of schools was based on the achievement levels of eighth-grade students on the 2004-05 Reading PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment). Each of the middle schools involved in the study scored in the top 10 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, based on the percentage of students at the advanced or proficient levels. Data was collected through a teacher survey and teacher interviews. While teachers in each school reported use of data to identify low-performing students, identify the reading strengths and weaknesses of low-performing students, and monitor students' reading progress, the data used differed among the schools and teachers within the schools. The variation in data use was related to the grade level of students taught, the placement of students in regular education or special education reading classes, the number of low-income students in the school, and the resources provided by the school and/or district to facilitate data use.

This study examined the current decentralized system in Indonesia for increased disparities in educational expenditures across districts. It also examined the impact of these on the quality of education at public junior secondary education. The study used the most recently available data from the Ministry of National Education (MONE) and Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) covering 1999/00 and 2002/03. These data measured district level school expenditures, demographic and socio-economic variables. The study found that the current decentralized system in Indonesia increased fiscal capacities for education at districts. Unfortunately, increases in the fiscal capacities for education led to increased disparities in education expenditures per student, creating growing gaps in fiscal capacities for education across districts. Districts which received larger general allocation funds (DAU) per capita were also more likely to allocate more funding for education, whether or not they were poor or wealthy districts. This fact was reflected by the finding that district GRDP per capita in sub-national regions of Java-Bali and Sumatera had no impact on districts education expenditures per student. In addition, the sub-provincial districts of the Kota (more urban) and Kabupaten (less urban) also differed in the way that they allocated funding for education. The Kota in the Sumatera region tended to allocate significantly more for education than did the Kabupaten. At the same time, the Kota in Java-Bali did not allocate significantly more for education than the Kabupaten. Teacher compensation was national, so funding variance was measured by locally controlled variables. The most significant impact on student achievement were teaching and learning process expenditures (textbooks, libraries, labs, field trips, etc.). The study concluded that increased funding, combined with more efficient budget allocations, were keys to quality improvement. Policy recommendations include: a) targeting DAU transfers to reduce the gaps in fiscal capacity for education across districts; b) rewarding districts with effective budget allocations that support improved student achievement; and c) placing education closer to the center of development and security policy. Better government monitoring and district transparency is needed for this major investment. Improved policy research and reporting capacities are needed, including annual reports on decentralization policy implementation.

The use of data-driven decision making processes has created a new sense of awareness among school administrators and teachers throughout the country. Data from frequent formative assessments assists teachers in providing meaningful instruction based upon the strengths and weaknesses of the student. In the process of acquiring data, administrators are developing methods to encourage collaboration and the use of researched instructional strategies. The purpose of this study is to combine research related to data collection, the use of data, building capacity among faculty groups, and sustainability of academic programs. This literature presented throughout the study is intended to illuminate connections between the requirements No Child Left Behind and a renewed sense of urgency among administrators and teachers to utilize the best possible instructional methods to address the needs of all students. It is the assumption of this researcher that as teachers become more focused on the needs of their students by carefully examining data through a structured format, student achievement will improve. Pedagogy will also improve as teachers research instructional strategies related to student deficiencies. This study attempts to use quantitative research methodology to measure changes in teacher attitudes as they disaggregate student data to refine and improve instructional methods. Bernhardts system of data analysis provides the foundation for which the teachers create lessons based upon student need.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this qualitative study was to focus on elementary school principals using the walkthrough model and to evaluate how the walkthrough model improves student learning. The goal was to identify the key indicators of success from elementary principals that used the Walkthrough Observation Tool from the Principals Academy of Western Pennsylvania. The research questions investigated elementary school principals perceptions of the impact of the classroom walkthrough model. Participants were selected because of their involvement and experiences with the walkthrough model developed by Joseph Werlinich and Otto Graf, Co-directors of the Principals Academy of Western Pennsylvania. Methods of data collection were face-to-face semi-structured interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and content analysis was used to identify consensus, supported, and individual themes. Key findings of this study indicate that the classroom walkthrough did affect instructional practices and student achievement from the perspective of the elementary school principals. The study showed that teachers are sharing and more aware of best practices, principals are more aware of what is occurring in the classrooms, principals have meaningful data to share with teachers, and principals are better-informed instructional leaders.