Though many studies address the issue of immigrants in schools, relatively little research attention has been given to the education experience of immigrants who have migrated from one developing country to another (or "South-South" migration), although this accounts for about half of all migration worldwide. The studies that do exist in this realm tend to focus on the classroom experience of immigrant students without due consideration of the policy context that influences the immigrant students' school experience. Consequently, although we are learning more about immigrant student experiences in classrooms in developing countries, to date, we lack information about the policy context in which educational stakeholders in developing countries find themselves when attempting to incorporate immigrant students into an education system that, more often than not, is struggling with issues of poverty and lack of resources. This is especially true in the African context where continental migration rates continue to increase yet immigration education policies tend to be unclear, if not altogether absent. Using the case of South Africa, an African country beset by xenophobia--most notably, the infamous xenophobic riots of 2008, this exploratory baseline sociological study sought to document how the social context of a developing country nfluences educational policy implementation and interpretation with regard to access for immigrant students. This qualitative study, which took place from December 2010 to November 2011, employed semi-structured interviews with 17 educational stakeholders at both the meso and the micro organizational levels of the educational bureaucracy as well as NGOs to better understand how policy was interpreted and implemented for immigrant students. Additionally, this study employed a reviewof existing policy documents as well as a qualitative case study using tenets of ethnographic observation. Data analysis for this study employed methods of themed coding and frequency identification. The data analysis revealed little consensus on how education policy regarding access for immigrant students should be applied, leading to disparate understandings and lack of access for some immigrant students depending on country of origin. The data also revealed that immigrant education policy interpretation was heavily influenced not only by organizational type and role, but personal experience of the actor as well. Additionally, the findings indicated that the role of the principal was paramount in how education policy was applied in schools, and because of the policy confusion, principals in some cases were able to employ innovative methods to obtain resources that aided the immigrant learners in their school. The findings also revealed that although xenophobia does exist in the South African socio-cultural fabric, it was not the primary determinant used to grant or deny access to immigrant students. The institution of South African schooling, centered around success on a final qualifying exam, emerged as the driver of educational stakeholder policy interpretation and implementation regarding immigrant student access. Overall, the data revealed that the education situation in Cape Town was the result of a combination of which policies actors used as their interpretive framework, the specialized demographics of the Western Cape polity, and the interactions and politics between the organizations of the educational institutions and immigrant service organizations in Cape Town. Study findings are discussed in detail with reference to agenda for future research and actionable recommendations for policymakers.

This study examines whether small high school reform in New York City has fulfilled its goal of providing disadvantaged students access to rigorous mathematics curricula, thereby increasing their college readiness. Between 2002 and 2010 in New York City, 27 large, comprehensive high schools were closed or downsized and replaced by over 200 new small schools (Jennings & Pallas, 2010). Although extant research indicates that these schools have produced higher attendance and graduation rates (Bloom et al., 2010; 2012), the literature on small high school reform and college readiness remains inconclusive. To address this gap in the literature, my dissertation employs a longitudinal database of New York City student and school-level data from 2000-2010 to examine the impact of small high school reform on student math course-taking for two cohorts of students (the class of 2009 and 2010). I address the threat of selection bias by utilizing several propensity score matching techniques within a multilevel modeling framework. I find a small, positive impact of attending a new, small high school on students' progress through the math curriculum (one-sixth of a year) for the class of 2009, but not for the class of 2010. Yet while students in the new, small high schools, who are among the most disadvantaged in the city, might be faring slightly better than they would have had they attended an alternate high school option, they are still failing to complete even one semester of Algebra II/Trigonometry--the lowest level of course deemed "college preparatory" by the district. Furthermore, small high schools are not equally beneficial for all types of students. Black and Hispanic students appear to do better in the small schools than in alternate high school options, while the reverse is true for whites. Meanwhile, students with initially low math achievement benefit from attending small high schools, while students with middle-to-high levels of initial math achievement are better served elsewhere. Moreover, the new, small high schools are much less likely to offer advanced math courses such as calculus or any Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate math--effectively cutting their students off from the opportunity to take these courses. Finally, my results suggest that the rigor of math courses in the new, small schools may be weaker than in the alternate high school options in New York City. Taken together with the existing research, my results suggest that the consequences of small high school reform in New York City are both more complicated and less positive than the reformers promised or district officials will admit (Gates, 2005; Walcott, 2012). While these schools are unquestionably improvements over the large, failing schools they replaced, they remain at the bottom of an intensely academically stratified school system, and they have failed to raise students' college readiness in math. Moreover, these schools are particularly under serving high achieving students by cutting them off from rigorous, advanced math courses.

This is a study of teachers' experiences in organizations. In particular, this study explores the experiences that prompted Black male teachers to consider a career in teaching, the organizational conditions that influenced their workplace experiences, and the organizational dynamics that affected these teachers' decisions to stay or leave their current schools or the profession. Drawing on interviews from 27 Black male teachers across fourteen schools in Boston Public Schools, this study found that an early experience teaching influenced participants' decisions to enter the teaching profession. Findings from this study also suggest that the number of Black men on a school's faculty influenced participants' workplace experiences. Participants who were the only Black men on the faculty, or whom I describe as "Loners," faced greater challenges in navigating the organization when compared to participants in schools with many more Black male teachers, or "Groupers." Moreover, there was a relationship between the reasons participants cited for leaving, participants' actual decisions to stay or leave, and organizational characteristics. Loners stayed. Groupers moved to other schools and some left teaching altogether. Loners cited the school's overall working conditions as their reason for staying, while Groupers described administrative leadership as their reason for leaving. This dissertation builds on the nascent literature that explores how organizational conditions, characteristics, and dynamics in schools affect the pathways into the profession, experiences, and retention of Black male teachers.

In the midst of market-based school reforms urging choice, competition, and high-stakes production of test scores, the complexities of pedagogy and its relationship to culture, power, and student learning are often overshadowed. While research on teaching in culturally diverse contexts has contributed to the development of inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy (Banks et. al, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Gay, 2000), the fate of these practices in the face of market pressures require critical examination by those concerned with equity in schools serving disadvantaged children (Buras, 2010; Macrine, 2009; Picower, 2011). Based on a year of extensive interviewing with twenty-two instructional leaders across an urban market of charter schools, as well as interviews and participant-observations with twenty-eight teachers in four purposefully selected charter schools, this study explores whether and how school leaders and teachers make sense of competition and student culture as resources for learning in classrooms, particularly in a predominantly low-income, black/African American, and Latino community in New York City. The study also made use of school documents and reports compiled overtime by schools and charter authorizers at the city and state level. Findings indicate that a heterogeneous charter sector of independent charter schools shifted overtime to reflect homogenizing tendencies associated with the rise and concentration of schools managed by an influential bloc of private charter management organizations (CMOs). At the intersection of such shifts were teachers and instructional leaders, many of whom describe 'trading-off' on inclusive and diverse approaches to teaching in an effort to yield more tangible and marketable outcomes in the form of test scores. Case studies in four schools, however, revealed important distinctions, as differently managed schools negotiated differently the degrees to which social and cultural boundaries were formed between schools, students, and the surrounding community in which it operated. These negotiations shaped different approaches to teaching and learning and outlooks on competition. The significance of the study is its negation of a culture-free and/or value-neutral assumption about market policies, primarily by illuminating the tension and impact of such policies on specific pedagogical forms and goals. More importantly, market policies are examined in light of social (re)production theory and the extent to which deregulation disrupts or perpetuates unequal social and cultural relations of power between schools and traditionally marginalized communities.

The dissertation departs from the premise that the materiality of living organisms, usually studied by the biological sciences, is essential to the social sciences in order to understand how nature is transformed by, and also transforms the distinctly different materiality of social relations. Agricultural plants are an excellent illustration of this, because how societies produce with them coincides materially with how plants reproduce, i.e., with their various living processes. Despite these deep connections, the disciplinary divide between the natural and the social sciences has generated no conceptual tools for studying the materiality of living nature in the social sciences. To address this problem, the dissertation develops an original analytic framework that captures the transformations in living organisms through spatiotemporal categories. These are used to analyze the transformation of agricultural plants in three major contexts: Peasant farming, Mendelian genetics and molecular genetics. Spatiality and temporality serve as research tools for approaching the research material, consisting of scientific papers, handbooks and government documents that document the transformation of agricultural plants, spanning three centuries. The spatiotemporal concepts are shown to be versatile categories, appropriate for understanding the transformations in living nature, from molecules to agroecosystems. Moreover, they are also suitable for describing social processes, in particular the practices and strategies through which peasant farmers on the one hand, and scientists on the other, have transformed plants. The spatiotemporal categories therefore result in a common perspective for showing specific mechanisms that bridge societal relations and non-social materialities. Significant insights are gained about society's relationship to agricultural plants by specifying how - rather than only recognizing that - the materiality of living plants shapes and is shaped by societal relations. These include the important role of recurring material forms such as plant seeds, creating a hiatus in the transformation of an otherwise perpetually changing materiality that results in a `fulcrum' to their transformation; the spatiotemporal stabilization of plants as a material basis for dominant forms of organizing production in various periods; or the consequences associated with practical redefinitions of living processes that abstract widely from how plant materiality has been reproduced historically. The long-term perspective used to study the transformation of agriculture is also particularly useful for understanding contemporary transformations through molecular techniques beyond plants. Of particular interest is the `fluid' relationship between human labor and the living processes of microorganisms for their potential to transform the materiality of contemporary production.

This dissertation examines the increasingly prominent and expansive role of student learning outcomes and student learning outcomes assessment in bachelor’s degree-granting institutions. As higher education institutions integrate assessment into the curriculum, the voices of faculty remain largely unheard. Therefore, this study sought to reveal their voice, and in so doing, try to understand why collective faculty response to student learning outcomes assessment like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) varies among undergraduate institutions. In asking this question, I wanted to understand how faculty perceive assessment impacting their professions, their identity as professors, and their role in the institution. Using a multi-case study, qualitative design, I selected four small, private institutions. The fifth institution that participated in my study was a mid-sized, public institution. Participants consisted of faculty and administrators in each institution involved in governance, curriculum, and assessment. The primary method of data collection was semi-structured interviews. In this age of student learning outcomes assessment, my research showed that faculty are navigating, negotiating, and renegotiating their position and role within the institution; grappling with defining how, and if, assessment is part of the professorial role; and working in concert, and sometimes in conflict, with administrators to establish the jurisdiction of assessment. This study fills a gap in the professionalization literature by addressing more fully the interaction of professionalized roles in organizations and the interaction of professional groups within an organization. I also offer directions for further research.

This study builds on an emerging literature within the effects of schooling tradition by extending the seasonal perspective to a class-based investigation of parenting logics and home influence. Using data from qualitative interviews conducted over the course of a twelve-month period that includes both the school year and the summer months, this dissertation examines possible linkages between home influence and summer learning, and tests the longstanding assumption that home influence acts in a constant and continuous way throughout the year. In particular, I investigate the expectations and beliefs that parents hold for their children during the long summer break from schooling and examine how summertime expectations and family practices differ from those during the school year. I find evidence that home influence changes across seasons, and that the availability of economic resources plays an important role in shaping seasonal change. Specifically, my data suggest that mothers’ attitudes and expectations vary by season, as do household rules around bedtime and screen time. I identify mechanisms that facilitate summer learning loss, including a “carry-over” effect, and I present evidence that the neighborhood context seems to take on outsize importance during the summer months. I also find that two sub-groups – children with disabilities and dual-custody families – seem to experience greater seasonal variation than the general population. My findings suggest the need to modify the assumption that home influence acts in a constant way and to develop a more precise understanding of home influence, one that takes into account the likelihood of seasonal variation, particularly by class and by subgroup.

Pricing practices of firms are an important yet little studied aspect of the price phenomenon in sociology. This study asks the question: Why do different firms, even in the same market, tend to use different pricing practices--value-informed, competition-informed, or cost-informed pricing--to set prices? To answer this question, this study builds a dynamic flocking model of pricing to investigate the inter-dynamics among pricing practices and various market uncertainties. The model shows that each pricing practice is only viable under certain combinations of levels of different market uncertainties. Supporting evidence, theoretical innovations, and practical implications of the model are discussed. Contrary to common intuition, uncertainty, conceptualized as some cognitive tolerance interval, is akin to lubricant, making the otherwise rigid, brittle, and friction-fraught system more smooth, robust, and error-tolerant under certain circumstances. Therefore, uncertainties, and the inter-dynamics among them, should be treated as an endogenous and integral part of the social mechanism at issue, rather than some amorphous “other” external to it.

This dissertation deals with the understanding of policies and interventions that foster human development, with a focus on children and youth, and to build a link between human development and a learning society by using an interdisciplinary approach. This thesis studies how individuals develop their learning capabilities as well as their creative, entrepreneurial, and socio-emotional skills. The dissertation is structured in three main chapters in addition to this brief introduction. The first chapter, "Affective Neuroscience meets Labor Economics: Assessing Non-Cognitive skills on Late Stage Investment on at-Risk Youth,” studies the role of a program designed to foster entrepreneurial and self-confidence through learning by failure using insights from micro-econometric, behavioral economics and applied neuroscience. The second chapter, "How Much Should We Trust Self-reported Measures of Non-cognitive Skills?,” explores the relation between transient emotional states and self-ratings on self-reported measures of socio-emotional skills using a behavioral and a neuro-physiological experiment. This chapter also works as a “proof of concept” of the methods —e.g. emotion-detection theory and lab-in-the-field experiments implemented on chapter 1. The third chapter, “Can Art-based Programs Nurture Human Capital? Evidence From Public Schools in Chile,” studies the impacts of an art-based program in high school in Chile following a quasi-experimental design using propensity score matching techniques.

This thesis is concerned with an initial assessment of the implementation of Studio Schools, a novel and highly flexible model of secondary education, in England. Responding to the methodological challenges towards evaluating a 'standard' national social programme that is encouraged to be adapted to context by local schools, the thesis also reports the development, operationalisation, and testing of a new approach towards the concept of implementation fidelity for evaluation science. The thesis commences by presenting the modern-historic foundations and challenges of the current English secondary education system that gave rise to Studio Schools, and describing the nature and objectives of the schools. This is followed by a discussion of the general challenges involved in the development and evaluation of complex social interventions and the specific challenges presented by the case of Studio Schools. The remainder of the thesis reports the development, use, and assessment of methods to overcome these challenges - with particular focus on evaluating implementation as part of process evaluations - as well as the current state of implementation in the schools. Delphi-inspired consensus methods were used in order to develop an explicit programme theory for Studio Schools where none previously existed, involving stakeholders in the theory specification process. The process demonstrated that stakeholders without a background in programme evaluation can agree to a specific and explicit theory of change after a programme was designed but prior to its evaluation. Next, a novel conceptual approach towards defining and measuring implementation fidelity was developed to translate a standard programme theory into flexible implementation measures. This approach focuses on the functions - or targeted change mechanisms - of a programme alongside its form of a given set of activities. Implementation measures were developed in the form of quantitative, paper-based questionnaires that were used to rate form- and function- focused fidelity of implementation of project-based learning (PBL) and personal coaching in schools on ordinal Likert scales. These measures were piloted and refined, and subsequently tested for their psychometric properties through the use of factor analysis in addition to established methods for determining the reliability of instruments in terms of internal consistency and inter-rater agreement. Findings show that it is feasible to monitor programme functions alongside form in process evaluations, and that the validity and reliability of measures based on this approach can be established using common psychometric methods. The measures developed earlier in the thesis were used by the doctoral candidate as well as teachers and students to rate the current state of implementation practices of PBL and coaching in Studio Schools was monitored over a period of four months in four participating schools. Ratings were based on observations made in-vivo or based on video- and audio recordings made during repeated visits to the schools. Quantitative implementation scores were calculated per rater group for PBL and coaching by aggregating ratings given to individual sessions, and were compared within and between schools. Spearman's correlation coefficients were calculated to assess correlation between form- and function-focused fidelity scores. The results of this study imply that implementation in Studio Schools likely varies substantially between individual schools and can be improved in all of them, but also suggest that the model could be evaluated for its effectiveness as long as implementation and process are carefully monitored. The additions of this thesis to the evaluation literature are considered, as well as its strengths and limitations and implications for practice and research.