The purpose of the study was to describe and examine how the constraints on urban school districts led to the establishment in 2010 of a consortium of California’s largest urban school districts that included structures of mutual accountability in response to neoliberal school reforms and top-down accountability since the implementation of No Child Left Behind. Using a qualitative case study research design and critical policy analysis as an analytical framework, this study examined how California’s CORE districts (i.e., Fresno Unified School District, Long Beach Unified School District, Los Angeles Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Santa Ana Unified School District) experienced, negotiated, and responded to the shifting landscape of education policy resulting from the expansion of privatization and neoliberal school reform. The expansion of the top-down high-stakes accountability and neoliberal school reform policies since No Child Left Behind has impeded the work of districts, by narrowly focusing their work on accountability and limiting their flexibility in determining how to allocate resources to support improvement. These top-down reform policies have also limited opportunities for collaboration and diminished ownership and responsibility at the district level. Urban district leaders not only in California, but in urban districts across the United States, have felt the impact of competing social, political, and economic forces, such as the high-stakes, top-down federal accountability of No Child Left Behind, neoliberalism, and privatization. To better understand the conditions that led to the creation of the CORE districts and their subsequent impact on urban school district leaders in California, the following research questions guided the study: 1. What social, political, and economic forces led to the creation of California’s CORE districts? 2. What are the governance and leadership models that characterize the CORE districts? 3. What impact have the CORE districts had on the urban education policy landscape in California? An examination of these questions not only helps us understand the circumstances that led to the establish of the CORE districts, but how their work impacted the policy landscape in California and supports the learning of other district leaders.

Effective utilization of instructional technology can provide a valuable method for the delivery of a school program, and enable a teacher to individualize according to student needs. Implementation of such a program is costly and requires careful planning and adequate staff development for school personnel. This study examined the degree of commitment by Texas school districts to the use of the latest technologies in their efforts to revolutionize education. Quantitative data were collected by using a survey that included five informational areas: (1) school district background, (2) funding for budget, (3) staff, (4) technology hardware, and (5) staff development. The study included 137 school districts representing the 5 University Interscholastic League (UIL) classifications (A through AAAAA). The survey was mailed to the school superintendents requesting that the persons most familiar with instructional technology be responsible for completing the questionnaires. Analysis of data examined the relationship between UIL classification and the amount of money expended on instructional technology. Correlation coefficients were determined between teachers receiving training in the use of technology and total personnel assigned to technology positions. Coefficients were calculated between a district providing a plan fortechnology and employment of a coordinator for instructional technology. Significance was established at the .05 level. A significant relationship was determined between the total district budget and the amount of money allocated to instructional technology. There was a significant relationship between the number of teachers receiving training in technology and the number of personnel assigned to technology positions. A significant negative relationship was determined between the district having a long-range plan for technology and the employment of a full-time coordinator for one of the subgroups. An attempt was made to provide information concerning the effort by local school districts to provide technology for instructional purposes. Progress has been made, although additional funds will be required in order to realize the full potential of all technologies.

This dissertation presents work on gerrymandering in American legislative districts and on school competition and school choice. The work on gerrymandering analyzes how to measure gerrymandering and investigates some of its causal effects. The analysis of how to measure gerrymandering is presented in Chapter 1 and in the first half of Chapter 2. The context is the following. Legislative maps are often evaluated along dimensions of proportionality (the alignment between parties' seat shares and their state- or nation-wide vote shares) and competitiveness (the fraction of contests with uncertain winners). Since a map is intended to be used for multiple elections, policy-makers want to accurately predict how it will perform on these dimensions in the future. Doing this is difficult because future elections will differ from past ones due to changes in the demographic composition of the electorate and as a result of electoral shocks to preferences and turnout costs. Citing this uncertainty, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that the judicial system is incapable of adjudicating claims of partisan gerrymandering. The first contribution of the dissertation is to develop a method for predicting the uncertainty in a map's performance due to electoral shocks and changes in demographics. The method relies on a structural voting model, which describes the preference and turnout decisions of a potential voter. The model decomposes an election into (i) a set of candidate qualities and (ii) individual-level utility parameters. I assess map performance in two steps. First, I examine the effect of electoral shocks by simulating alternative values of the candidate qualities and utility parameters. Second, I investigate the influence of demographic changes by re-running the simulations using different electorates. I apply the method to rich data from the 2008 to 2018 general elections in North Carolina and show that it allows credible and precise evaluations of maps. I also show that the method is better than existing approaches at predicting gerrymandering outcomes in excluded elections. The remainder of Chapter 2 concerns the causal effects of gerrymandering. Specifically, I examine whether the probability that someone turns out to vote is influenced by the competitiveness of his or her legislative districts. I do this by comparing outcomes over time for individuals in North Carolina who were placed into more or less competitive districts in 2011 as part of the decadal ``redistricting" process. I compare individuals who shared the same districts in each legislative chamber (U.S. House, NC Senate, NC House) before redistricting and who differed in districts for only one chamber after redistricting. Within these comparison groups, I match individuals on demographics and history of turnout and party registration. I find that being placed into a less competitive district reduces turnout. Effects grow over time and exist in both midterm and presidential elections. By 2018, having been placed in a district in which one party is always predicted to win versus one in which the parties have an even chance of winning reduces turnout by 1.9 percentage points for U.S. House districts and 1.4 percentage points for NC House and NC Senate districts. These results highlight the importance of considering district competitiveness when drawing legislative maps. Chapter 3 is work that is joint with Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Miguel Urquiola. It examines how schools' incentives are influenced by the way in which households make school choice decisions. A summary is as follows. Recent work examines whether households choose schools based on school value added (Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2020; Beuermann et al. 2019). Given that value added is difficult to observe, households' choices are likely to depend on both (i) how much they care about value added and (ii) how well informed they are about which schools have high or low value added. We examine this concern using administrative data, a survey, and an experiment in Romanian high school markets. Using the survey, we can explain households' preferences based on their beliefs about school traits, rather than on the values of these traits that are measured by researchers. In the administrative data, we find that households' choices are better explained by measured values of peer quality than by measured values of value added. By contrast, in the survey data, we find that households' beliefs about value added and peer quality have equal explanatory power for their choices. This motivates an experiment in which we provide households with information on school value added. We find that the information has a positive but heterogenous effect on the extent to which households prioritize value added in their school choices. Effects are largest for households who were initially less certain of their choices and for households with low-scoring students.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and examine some of the factors affecting pupil-parent evaluation of a Florida high school system for white children in a conservative county. The problem will be handled in such manner that it is expected that a group of valid findings and conclusions will emerge. It is hoped that the findings and conclusions will be of such nature that they will prove helpful to administrators and officials in this school system, and systems in other conservative counties, in formulating future plans and policy. In addition, it is expected that data will emerge that will indicate to some extent the degree to which the parents and pupils agree with the findings and recommendations of the latest evaluation of their school by an Evaluating Committee representing the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. / Advisor: Virgil E. Strickland, Professor Directing Paper. / "June, 1953." / Typescript. / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science." / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 81).

The primary grade teachers of the Cache, Logan, and Box Elder School Districts were used in this study. A questionnaire was developed that would be an effective measurement of the information needed to evaluate or substantiate the hypothesis which was: It is believed that less than 50 percent of the primary grade children have poetry read to them daily as part of the curriculum. Furthermore, it is believed that much of the poetry read does not meet the standards of "good poetry for children" as measured by experts in this field of learning. The study revealed that only 11 percent of the children were read to daily. However, the majority of teachers were reading from approved literature for children.

This study examined the effectiveness of an educational service district's programs and services as perceived by various educator groups. The population of the study included certificated public school employees and school board members. A sixty-two item survey instrument was used to obtain information from the study population. Of the 1507 survey instruments distributed, 769 instruments were returned for a response rate of 51%. Four main research questions were posed: (a) Is Educational Service District 112 perceived as an effective educational component of the Southwest Washington public education system? (b) Are the programs and services provided by Educational Service District 112 perceived as effective by the educational community the regional office is designed to serve? (c) Are Educational Service District 112's services and programs perceived as effective by different characteristic, or demographic, groups? (d) What characteristics, both personal and professional, might influence differences in perceived program effectiveness? Data were reported in terms of frequency distributions and means and were statistically analyzed using ANOVAs, ANCOVAs, multiple comparisons, and the Chi square test of significance. The findings show that: (a) Educational Service District 112 is perceived overall as an effective organization. (b) Individual Instructional and Curriculum and Special Services programs and services are perceived as effective. (c) The vast majority of ESD 112's patrons do not have enough knowledge of individual programs and services to rate their effectiveness. (d) When grouping the respondents by different demographic characteristics, all characteristic groupings perceive ESD 112 as effective. (e) When the mean responses of position groups were found to differ significantly, the teacher group always rated ESD 112 as less effective than the group with which they differed, while the board member group always rated ESD 112 as more effective than the group with which they differed. (f) When various county location groups were found to differ significantly, Pacific County always rated ESD 112 as less effective than the group with which they differed. (g) Position appears to be the most influential characteristic affecting the patron's effectiveness rating of ESD 112's programs and services.

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