For two decades, state financing of higher education has been on the decline and the situation has exacerbated since the onset of the economic recession, where the US state systems have resorted to a substantial cut of funding for higher education. Faced with the challenges of limited resources for financial pressure and an increasing demand, community colleges either have taken or are considering taking a series of cost-saving strategies. Some of the most prominent trends seen in the past decades include sharp expansions in distance education offerings through online coursework, an increasing reliance on part-time adjunct faculty, and a heated discussion about slashing expenditures on remedial education. Yet, many researchers argue that these strategies might be implemented at the cost of poorer educational quality and less desirable student outcomes. My dissertation assesses the impacts of several important strategies that community colleges are engaged in an era of financial constraints on student academic outcomes and educational equality. In Chapter One, Shanna Smith Jaggars and I examine the fast growth of distance education and its impacts on student outcomes relative to traditional face-to-face delivery format. Based on a large administrative data set from Washington State, we found robust negative estimates for online learning in terms of both course persistence and course grade. While all types of students in the study suffered decrements in performance in online courses, we also identified strong variations across subpopulations and academic subject areas. Chapter Two is prompted by the spiraling increase in part-time faculty hiring in open-access two-year community colleges. Based data from a large community college system, I identified a positive impact of taking one's first course in a subject area on his contemporaneous course performance but negative impacts on subsequent course outcomes and enrollment patterns. Finally, Chapter Three is inspired by the heated debate related to the effectiveness of college remediation. Exploiting discontinuities in students' probability of receiving remediation both around the college-level cut off and the cut off for short versus long sequence of remediation, I found small and insignificant impacts of remediation for students on the margin of needing remediation, but significantly negative influence on students receiving long sequence of remediation compared to those who received short sequence. These results suggest that some cost-saving strategies that colleges are recently engaged may bring negative impacts on student learning outcomes, and therefore policymakers and college administrators may need to take steps to ensure the quality of education offered to students before enacting policies that would incentivize an accelerated expansion of online enrollments, and overreliance on adjunct instructors. Additionally, the insignificant and negative impact of remediation suggests that the huge investment in remediation may not have been effectively utilized to serve its purpose and colleges will need to explore ways to improve its effectiveness.

Shortages in the teaching subfields of math, science, special and bilingual education have been one of the most persistent problems in teacher labor markets. This problem is in part due to the single salary schedule by which most public school teachers are paid, and which usually only gives pay increases for years of experience and additional credentials. However, in recent years, to combat shortages a minority of school districts have begun to offer additional financial incentives to teachers in shortage-fields. However, there has been little rigorous empirical evidence on whether these incentives are effective for changing labor market outcomes. Utilizing an Instrumental Variables Difference-in-Differences model with a novel instrument, I estimate whether districts that provide such incentives report better recruitment conditions and experience higher rates of retention of shortage-field teachers than comparable districts that do not offer incentives. I find positive and statistically significant impacts on retention. Findings are discussed in terms of estimated incentive magnitudes, as well as in light of a document review of collectively bargained contracts from districts that provide shortage-field incentives.

This dissertation was designed to provide an example of an application of the ingredients method of cost-effectiveness analysis of Talent Search, a nation-wide federally-funded program that targets low-income students who promise to be the first generation in their families to attend college. The program serves students in grades 6 to 12 to increase the rates of high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment. Because Talent Search is a multi-site and a multi-output program, the analyses allowed for the exploration of two complexities in conducting cost-effectiveness analyses: site-level variation within a program and combining multiple outcomes to evaluate a program's efficiency. My results show that variation in costs, cost-effectiveness ratios, and benefit-cost ratios was wide across sites. This suggests that future work should include site-level analyses to provide a range for a program's costs and cost-effectiveness and to provide policy relevant site-level examples of the resources utilized to implement a program. Because the outcomes of Talent Search have monetary values in the labor market, I combined the program's impacts on high school completion and postsecondary enrollment to estimate the additional income generated by the program. These findings suggest that the benefits of Talent Search outweigh the costs on average. However, the variability I find across sites illustrates that more investigation and development is needed to improve the productivity of the program and to reduce inequities across sites. Four important contributions were made with this work: it provides an in depth example of applying the ingredients method to a complex program, it suggests that future work should include site-level analyses, it indicates that retrospective work is limited and future work should be devoted to incorporating the ingredients method contemporaneously into impact evaluations, and it informs policymakers about the cost-effectiveness of Talent Search and the ways in which cost-effectiveness varies across sites.

Following the introduction of Performance Management in schools in 2000, the rate of increase in attainment from 2001-2005, as measured by the GCSE 5A*-C percentage pass rate, is noticeably higher than in the five years prior to its introduction. The aim of this research is to consider the impact of the national policy for Performance Management (PM) of teachers on standards of attainment in secondary schools. The thesis attempts to locate and explain a potential causal link between PM and the rate of increase in attainment at GCSE. It does this from within a Transcendental Realist philosophical framework incorporating a Critical Realist sociological perspective. An extensive literature survey on both Performance Management and its precursor, Appraisal, revealed a potential for research on the link between PM and standards of attainment in schools. In considering prospective strategies for such a study, a comprehensive range of methodologies and research methods are explored and the Critical Realist perspective using a case study design was considered to be a reasonable approach in that it appeared not to have some of the weaknesses exhibited by some of the other methodologies reviewed. The Case Study was completed through a series of forty four structured interviews in schools with ‘Challenging Circumstances' (an Ofsted indicator of the demographics of a school) and with two policymakers from the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE). The structured interviews based upon an analysis of PM national policy revealed a positive response to the effect of PM on standards of attainment. This was also coherent with a wider literature survey of the effects of the various PM policy dimensions at one level and a conceptual abstraction of the policy at another. However, PM policy was introduced as part of the Standards Framework (DfEE 1998), which provided for the introduction of a plethora of policies aimed at raising standards. These, together with a number of other contextual factors, were considered to add to the complexity of the final causal analysis. It is argued that Critical Realism has the potential to provide a useful and penetrative starting point in the analysis of such complicated contexts.

Decision making is the essence of an administrator's job. While planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting and budgeting are the basic traditional "functions" of management, each of these clearly involves decisions---decisions as to which plan to implement, what goals to pursue, and how best to achieve the desirable ends. / Empirical findings support the hypothesized relationship between perceived external environments by individual school administrators and the types of decision-making models they adopted in schools. In particular, the level of perceived constraint from the external environments' 'linguistic orientation' and 'resource policy' greatly influences the types of decision-making models chosen by individual administrators in schools. Furthermore, the pattern of adopting decision models in a perceived less-constrained environment (i.e., demography and resource policy) correlates with the pattern in a perceived highly constrained environment (i.e., social values, funding, and linguistic orientation), except for the environment of 'control'. This suggests that the decision-making experience gained from a less-constrained environment can serve as a reference frame for the highly constrained environment. Supplementary interview data support the validity of the self-reported decision-making questionnaire. / Given the fact that little is known about how issues arising from external constraint affect the administrative decision-making process, this study focuses specifically on their intricate relationships to broaden our understanding on the ever-expanding arena of administrative decision making in a turbulently growing working environment. / In the past, schools were instrumental in maintaining the existing social order, and as such, they were kept in status quo. However, the globalized reform movement has vastly reshaped schools' external environment, compelling the whole education system to undergo radical change as well. In this context, school administrators have to be more proactive to the changing environment to ensure the viability of their schools. / This research investigates the relationship between the perceived external environment by individual school administrators and the decision-making models they adopted in schools. This study adopts the construct of Lam (1985) which delineates the perceived external environment into four domains: political, economic, social, and cultural domains. Factor analysis on local data yielded six external variables, namely, demography, funding, linguistic orientation, social values, control, and resource policy, and these were perceived to exert varying degrees of constraint in the operation of schools. Issues arising from these external variables were identified. The conceptual rationale and procedures of resolving the issues constitute the basis of pinpointing the decision-making models that school administrators adopt. / Law Chan Fai. / "November 2005." / Adviser: Nicholas Sun Keung Pang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4053. / Thesis (Ed.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-217). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

No description available.

Thesis (D.Min.)--Liberty Theological Seminary and Graduate School, 2007.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 1953. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-71). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1939. / Vita. Published also as Teachers college, Columbia university, Contributions to education, no. 784. Bibliography: p. [257]-278.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2009. / Title from title screen (site viewed February 25, 2010). PDF text: ix, 157 p. : col. ill. ; 2 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3379029. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.