To move the field closer to untangling the charter versus public school debate, this study compared leadership practices surrounding discipline and the frequency of student misconduct between public and charter schools that reside in urban neighborhoods and serve predominantly students of color. School leadership's approaches to discipline were investigated by comparing punitive authoritarian practices such as suspensions and transfers to therapeutic and educational strategies such as positive behavior management and teacher training. Student conduct was comprised of problematic peer-directed behaviors (e.g., bullying, sexual harassment, harassment of sexual orientation, and gang activity) and authority-directed misconduct (e.g., verbal abuse of teacher, acts of disrespect towards teacher, and classroom disorder). The sample used in this analysis was garnered from a larger nationally representative pool of public school principals (n = 610) from elementary, middle, high school, and combination schools across the United States who completed The School Survey of Crime and Safety (SSOCS) during the 2009-2010 academic school year. To uncover which leadership variables could account for significant differences in student conduct across school type (public or charter) several multivariate analyses were conducted using factorial analysis, MANCOVAs, and partial correlations. The results revealed that charter schools used more Educational Discipline while public schools used more Authoritarian Discipline and Therapeutic Discipline. In addition, public school principals reported a greater frequency of Peer-directed and Authority-directed student conduct compared to charter school principals. The relationships between certain discipline practices and student conduct types were found to be statistically significantly different between school type. Several points of policy are suggested for leadership and policy makers to consider with regard to urban school reform initiatives surrounding the establishment of a supportive school climate that positively affects student conduct. / Educational Psychology

Doctor Educationis / Three questions are central to this thesis: First, can the practice of teaching be made safe from luck through the controlling power of knowledge and reason? Second, even if it can be made safe from luck, should it be? Third, if it is neither possible nor desirable to exclude luck from teaching, what knowledge and personal qualities will put practitioners in the strongest position to face the contingencies of luck and, more especially, to face those conflicts which arise as a consequence of circumstances beyond the practitioner's control? Martha Nussbaum's account of luck and ethics in Greek philosophy and tragedy prompts the questions and provides, with Aristotle, many of the conceptual tools for answering them; Thomas Nagel's work on moral luck provides the categories for a more refined account of luck and its place in teaching. With respect to the first two questions, I argue that as a human practice teaching is open to the vicissitudes of fortune and cannot be made safe from luck, except at the expense of its vitality. Like other human practices, teaching is mutable, indeterminate and particular. Both its primary and secondary agents (teachers and pupils) and the practice itself are vulnerable to luck in four categories: constitutive, circumstantial, causal and consequential. But teaching is not just a matter of luck; it is a public practice in which some people are put into the hands of others for specific purposes, usually at public expense. If we have no way of holding practitioners accountable for their actions, the practice loses credibility. Any money or trust put into it is simply a gamble. For these and other reasons, the drive to exclude luck from practice is strong. Yet strong luck-diminishment projects are themselves a threat to the vitality of the practice. During the twentieth century two strong luck-diminishment projects have been especially detrimental to teaching: one rooted in the science of management, the other in the empirical sciences. Both have resulted in a proliferation of unfruitful and often trivial research projects, to misconceived programmers of teacher education, to distorted notions of knowledge and excellence in teaching, and to self-defeating and impoverished practice. Luck-diminishment projects rooted in logic are more or less threatening to vital practice, depending on how far they are committed to instrumental reasoning and a science of measurement. These are blunt and controversial claims. A central task of the thesis is to refine and defend them. The refinement proceeds by way of a contrastive analysis of strong luck-diminishment projects and others which are more responsive to the indeterminacy of practice. With respect to the final question, I argue that there are at least three sets of necessary conditions for a flourishing practice in the face of luck. One concerns what Aristotle calls the virtues of intellect and character. Central among these are practical rationality (conceived non-instrumentally), situational appreciation, and the knowledge required for an intelligent pursuit of the definitive ends of teaching. A second set concerns enabling institutions. A third concerns the kind of community best able to nurture those qualities necessary for vital and excellent practice. All three sets are themselves vulnerable to reversal. Keeping the practice of teaching alive and ensuring that it remains true to its definitive ends is thus a matter of sustained struggle.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to use the systems theory as the analytic framework to examine student conduct systems (SCSs) in Chinese colleges and universities. analyze environmental factors that influence SCSs. and explore administrators' recommendations for improvement of SCSs. Ten public universities were randomly selected from twenty-nine four-year universities in Zhejiang province. Documents related to student conduct systems from ten universities were analyzed, and thirteen administrators and one school counselor from nine universities were interviewed. While the findings of this study supported the previous research on many points, this study differed from the current literature in three important ways. First, this study provided insight into perceptions of administrators and counselors working at the forefront of SCS at Chinese universities regarding the educational purposes of SCSs and how the campus community members attempted to make the student conduct system work to achieve those purposes. This study also provided administrators' understanding of tension between educational roles of SCSs and damaging effects of formal punitive sanctions on students. Second, this study illustrated how administrators and counselors dealt with the educational and legal nature of SCSs while handling student conduct issues. This study first showed that student rights the investigated Chinese universities accorded exceed what laws and regulations require. Meanwhile, this study suggested that administrators appeared inure practical in dealing with student misconduct: they were trying to make a balance between complying with the basic legal requirements and handling student conduct issues more effectively and efficiently. The study showed that the majority of disciplinary cases were handled through informal resolution and administrators tended not to complicated the disciplinary processes. Third, this study explored environmental factors that affected SCSs in China. This research uncovered many aspects of the social environment that influenced SCSs, including laws and regulations, traditional culture, societal change, practices of peer universities and parents and public opinion. Factors within the university system included: university administrative systems, governance practices, educational objectives, university traditions especially those involving SCS historic and current practices, and the quality of student body.

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