Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-315). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-315). Also available on the Internet.

This research examines the challenges and opportunities of implementing diversity and multicultural education in faith-based Catholic high schools in Ontario, Canada which meets the requirements of both the Equity and Inclusive Education (EIE) and the Catholic Equity and Inclusive Education (CEIE). The data for this research were generated through interviews and focus group discussions with stakeholders—teachers, parents, students, educational assistants and educational administrators at the Catholic District School Board and the Community of the Beloved Catholic High School. Based on data analysis and review of literature in the areas of equity, inclusive education and multicultural education, the current research identified the school culture as the most decisive component in realizing the strategy for inclusion and safe schools required both by the EIE and the CEIE. The fundamental challenge identified by this research is that multiculturalism and diversity are fairly broad sets of values, programs, and projects in Canada which offers challenges in understanding what educational strategies and approaches for realising them in faith-based schools. In addition, this research found out that Catholic schools and boards of education have become sites for conflict and tension in the understanding, interpretation and application of what different stakeholders understand and implement about equity and inclusion. The current research discovered that this tension is an opportunity for the Catholic schools to create a new identity through a greater commitment to ‘real encounters’ between teachers and students which place a greater accent on the cultural and personal experiences and social location of students. This research proposed that the separate educational system in Ontario needs to discover new ways of meeting the challenges of multicultural education. The research recommended how such new ways could draw from the rich social teaching resources of the Christian tradition with regard to options for the poor, and from recent studies and innovations in critical theories of cultures, pedagogy and educational policies and programs in pluralistic societies. Such a new approach will be broad enough to integrate diverse interpretations of diversity and multiculturalism in Canada, and specific enough to model effective pathways for meeting the needs of students and the goals and priorities of a safe schooling culture within a specific faith- based setting. / Educational Studies / D. Ed. (Socio-Education)

D.Ed. (Educational Psychology) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of segregation on the flexibility of individuals in the Negro and Anglo-American ethnic groups and to investigate the relationship between variations in flexibility and sociometric choices within the peer group.

This dissertation historicizes the formation of the school-prison nexus and its impact within the nation’s broader carceral landscape in the decades following the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown. It uses Boston as a case study to examine the fusion of law enforcement and educational policy during the postwar period. Through the legal contest over Boston Public School’s Code of Discipline in the early years of court-ordered desegregation, the project analyzes how these policies and the statistical discourses they perpetuated about Black criminality furthered the expansion of law enforcement, promoted punitive education reforms, diminished the democratic functions of schools, and facilitated untold numbers of students into under- and unemployment as well as the criminal justice system. In doing so, the work makes explicit the role of schools in spurring mass incarceration by implementing policies that unjustly targeted and punished Black youth.

This dissertation empirically studies market design based centralized school choice. Chapter 1 explores the dynamic relationship between school choices made at different educational stages and how it affects racial segregation across schools. It uses New York City (NYC) public school choice data to ask: "How does the middle school that a student attends affect her high school application and assignment?" The paper takes two approaches to answer the question. First, it exploits quasi-random assignments to middle schools generated by the tie-breaking feature of the admissions system. It finds evidence that students who attend high-achievement middle schools apply and are assigned to high-achievement high schools. Second, based on this empirical evidence, the paper develops and estimates a novel dynamic two-period model of school choice to decompose this effect and analyze the equilibrium consequences of counterfactual policies. In the model, students applying to middle schools are aware that their choices may affect which high schools they eventually attend. Specifically, the middle schools that students attend can change how they rank high schools (the application channel) and how high schools rank their applications (the priority channel). It finds that the application channel is quantitatively more important. Using the estimated model, the paper asks if an early affirmative action policy can address segregation in later stages. It finds that a middle school-only affirmative action policy can alter students' high school applications and thus their assignments, contributing to desegregating high schools. This finding suggests that early intervention in the form of middle school admissions reform can be a useful tool for desegregation. Chapter 2 studies the relationship between the popularity of selective exam schools and their academic performance measures. NYC specialized high schools are highly selective and popular among students and parents. Nevertheless, the reason why those schools are so popular compared to non-specialized high schools has not been studied yet. This paper aims to answer the question in the context of academic performance by studying the relationship among three factors: preference of specialized high schools applicants, peer qualities, and causal effectiveness of those schools. First, a unique feature of the NYC public high school admission system enables linking applicants' preferences on specialized high schools and non-specialized high schools and hence jointly estimating those using their rank-ordered lists. Next, it estimates the value-added measures of high schools and finally links them back to the estimated preference in the first step. The paper finds that the additional valuation that students/parents put on specialized high schools relative to non-specialized high schools is mostly related to the higher peer quality of specialized high schools. Chapter 3 develops a method of inferring students' preferences from school choice data. Recent evidence suggests that market participants make mistakes (even) in a strategically straightforward environment but seldom with significant payoff consequences. This paper explores the implications of such payoff-insignificant mistakes for inferring students' preferences from school choice data. Uncertainties arise from the use of lotteries or other sources in a typical school choice setting; they make certain mistakes more costly than others, thus making some preferences---those whose misrepresentation would be more costly and would thus be avoided by students---more reliably inferable than others. The paper proposes a novel method of exploiting the structure of the uncertainties present in a matching environment to robustly infer student preferences under the Deferred-Acceptance mechanism. Monte Carlo simulations show that the method is superior to existing alternative approaches.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Thesis. 1975. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / Bibliography: leaves 91-95. / M.C.P.

Not available / text