Thesis advisor: Diana Pullin / It is widely accepted that school leadership has both a direct and indirect impact on student achievement. Hitt and Tucker’s (2016) Unified Leadership framework summarized a decade of work by numerous researchers identifying the five most effective leadership domains that influence student learning. Using that work as a conceptual framework, this qualitative case study analyzed one of the five interdependent leadership domains in an urban elementary school that succeeded in educating traditionally marginalized students and outperformed other schools with similar demographics in the district. This study identified and explored the actions that a principal in a high performing, urban school that served a historically marginalized population took to facilitate high-quality learning experience for students. This study reviewed documents and interviewed school and district level personnel to learn whether or not the school leader engaged in certain practices. The study found that the school leader engaged in many practices that facilitate a high-quality learning experience including monitoring instruction, assessment and curriculum, as well as maintaining a safe and orderly environment. Recommendations from this study include considering the diversity of students’ backgrounds as a source of strength and not something to be ignored. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Earning a college degree correlates with achieving financial security. Thus, improving an individual’s access to college is a key tactic used to mitigate poverty and foster intergenerational mobility. Despite the recognized value of higher education, earning a degree remains unattainable for many because of financial constraints. However, research definitively demonstrates that financial aid overcomes that obstacle. It also reveals that some program designs are more effective than others. The Kalamazoo Promise is a place-based scholarship program that offers four-year, full-tuition scholarships to residents who graduate from a Kalamazoo public high school. It is characterized by first-dollar and universal eligibility features, which are fundamental to designs that promote upward economic mobility. Leveraging a rapidly growing body of knowledge that links context (place) to upward mobility, this study examined the relationships between the Kalamazoo Promise, the place where it is based, and intergenerational mobility. My investigation focused on the interplay between the program design and its context. I examined changes, which emerged in the first five years after the program’s inception, in four Kalamazoo City characteristics that correlate with mobility. The study revealed increases in residential and school segregation by race and class, intense income inequality, elementary school quality that continued to lag behind the quality in neighboring communities despite improvements in test scores, and a reduction in family stability. These findings suggest that in the first five years the Kalamazoo Promise did not produce impacts to the context, in direction or magnitude, to improve intergenerational mobility. In the future, longitudinal research and mixed methods studies could add richness to our understanding of the people and place. In addition, changes to school assignment policies, modifications to the promise program design, and adjustments to employer recruitment/enticement programs are proposed.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Dodson / This paper explores the ways in which nine parents experience their children's high school. Although the high school is in the inner city of Boston and serves mostly children of color from working-class and poor families, the parents hold themselves to expectations based on middle-class and dominant societal norms. They experience the school as an institution that often does not live up to its responsibilities to educate and protect their children. The parents then place most of these responsibilities for their children's educations on themselves, both to ensure their children's futures and to prevent any negative judgments from being made about their parenting. This paper attempts to allow parents to tell the story of their children's school in their own voices and to begin to resist the ways that inner-city parents have been constructed in the literature in the past. In order for urban education to truly change, the voices of parents must be allowed into the conversation and this paper attempts to begin the recognition of those voices. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Thesis advisor: Curt Dudley-Marling / The central focus of this dissertation is the schooling experiences of a small group of culturally and linguistically diverse students. The problem this study addresses is the relative absence of "student voice" in broader conversations about successful teacher preparation for culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Conceptual and empirical literature on culturally responsive pedagogy, student voice and experience are reviewed as a means of situating the study. The theoretical framework incorporates sociocultural theories on teaching and learning, as well as sociological conceptions of childhood. Sixteen elementary school students attending public suburban, urban, and charter schools participated in this study. Primary data sources include transcripts from individual in-depth interviews and focus group conversations, and elicited student drawings. The qualitative research traditions of phenomenology and narrative analysis influenced data interpretation. Findings are presented thematically, and four overarching themes were identified. Each of the four findings chapters speaks to the students' experiences with learning, their peers, their teacher, and voice, both in the classroom and the research process itself. The perspectives shared by participants provide powerful glimpses into effective schooling for `other people's children' (Delpit, 1995). / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a hands-on science curriculum, which integrates mathematics and supports the development of English language skills, on third grade students' mathematics achievement - specifically the measurement subscale of the statewide assessment. The data draws from a larger 5-year research project consisting of reform-based science curriculum units and teacher workshops designed to promote effective instruction of science while integrating mathematics and supporting English language development. The third grade curriculum places a strong emphasis on developing measurement skills in the context of scientific investigations. Third grade students' performance on the measurement subscale of the statewide mathematics assessment at experimental and comparison schools were examined using a hierarchical linear model (HLM). Students participating in the treatment performed significantly higher than students at comparison schools. The results of this study provide evidence that an integrated approach to math and science instruction can benefit diverse populations of students.

The purpose of this research was to understand the relationship between urban elementary teachers’ beliefs about diversity and their selection of literacy material for instructional practices in their classrooms. Currently, the teacher population is essentially homogenous, consisting of a majority of middle-class White females, while the student population is growing more diverse. Teachers’ instructional decisions tend to reflect their own cultural background and not the cultural background of the diverse student population. This study examined urban teachers’ personal and professional beliefs about diversity and found that gender was a factor in the teachers’ diversity scores. The review of children’s literature listed by the teachers further revealed that there was a lack of representation of characters of color in the teachers’ classrooms. Finally, teachers that scored high on the diversity scale had more multicultural literature available in their classrooms.

The most recent development in the field of Item Response Theory (IRT) has been the evaluation of IRT models as multilevel models, known as Multilevel IRT models (MLIRT). These models offer several statistical and practical advantages over ordinary IRT models. However, models such as 2-PL MLIRT models have not been studied yet. This dissertation consists of two studies, a simulation and a substantiation for an urban school district dataset. The simulation study tested the performance of twoparameter (2-PL) MLIRT models with predictor variables under various conditions that included 3 test lengths (15, 30, and 60 items), 4 sample sizes (200, 500, 1000, and 2000), 2 correlation conditions between the predictor variable and the ability (or attitude) parameter (rpb=.35 and .8), and 4 binomial distributions of the predictor variable (p=0.1, 0.25, 0.4, and 0.5). The bias and Root Mean Square Deviation (RMSD) values of the item parameters indicated that the distribution of the predictor variable and the correlation between the predictor and the ability (or attitude) parameter did not affect the estimates of 2-PL MLIRT models. These models performed well for sample sizes as low as 500 and test lengths as low as 15 which is lower than the required sample size for ordinary IRT models. Even for a sample size of 200, sufficiently accurate estimates were obtained with more than 300 iterations. The second study investigated the characteristics of the items that measured urban teachers’ perceptions of cultural awareness and beliefs about teaching African American children and tested whether these perceptions were influenced by the teachers’ gender, ethnicity, or teaching experience. Teacher beliefs about teaching African American students, culturally responsive management, and cultural awareness factors were influenced by the ethnicity of the teachers. Culturally responsive management, home and community support, and curriculum and instructional strategies factors were influenced by the teaching experience of the teachers. Items that were biased based on ethnicity or teaching experience were identified. None of the items exhibited gender bias. The study identified items that could be used over other items when the need for a shorter instrument or more informative categories arises.

Over the last century, people have questioned the ability of African American cultural knowledge to facilitate academic achievement among African American students. The cultural understandings of this group are often positioned as incompatible with the beliefs, practices and values that produce mainstream and school success. The spirituality of African Americans is a significant, yet often overlooked, component of African American culture and life. Through group interviews, in-depth interviews, personal narratives and participant observations, this dissertation explores the role of spirituality in the school experiences of African American female adolescents. Spirituality is defined as the conglomeration of beliefs, practices and values that connect an individual to an unseen force(s) and/or a non-material realm. Cognitive, behavioral and affective school outcomes are products of spiritual and personal development. Thus, this study pays particular attention to the processes and factors that cultivate the spiritual identities of this group. Family and religious organizations commonly initiate the spiritual awareness of African Americans. Lived experiences in contexts shaped by intersections of racism, sexism, classism and heterosexism facilitate their development of individualized spiritual self-understandings, expressions and practices. To privilege the perspectives of African American femaleix adolescents, Black feminist epistemology and critical youth studies guided this project’s design and methods of data collection and analysis. Additionally, this work builds upon the relational framework for the study of spirituality and religion in the lives of African Americans to explore this group’s spiritual development, understandings and school outcomes. This dissertation suggests that the theological perspectives of African American female adolescents directly impact their academic beliefs, behaviors, and school experiences. Understandings of God and employment of spiritual practices may act as protective factors that cultivate the educational resilience and academic self-confidence of this group. Additionally, African American female adolescents may employ spiritual beliefs to promote unity and build community on their school campus. / text

This dissertation examined how identity was negotiated through dance and how African dance pedagogies challenged colonial legacy and decolonized the body from cultural and political oppression. To explore this topic, I examine two distinct dance contexts, one in Kampala, Uganda (East Africa) and the other in Tucson, Arizona (United States). The Kampala Study focused on the dance practices of a young man named Mugisha Johnson. Johnson was a member and dance teacher for Umbanno, a Rwandese cultural organization that formed as a consequence of the 1990s genocide; they taught Rwandese youth their cultural dances, songs, music, and language in Uganda. The Tucson Study took place in Tucson, Arizona and highlighted the work of the Dambe Project, a nonprofit organization that specialized in African performing arts education. More specifically, it examined the dance program at a local high school and focused on the experiences of the dance students.Four common threads ran through each of the research studies. First, both studies dance pedagogies derived from community-based organizations doing dance education. Second, both organizations served youth populations. Third, the organization both promoted dance expressions that had been historically oppressed. Lastly, my research positionality as a dance student in the Kampala Study and as a dance teacher in the Tucson Study provided a holistic ethnographic picture of an overarching autobiographical narrative about African dance of the diaspora.This research adds to the professional literature an examination of a bodily discourse as emphasized by Desmond (1994); it considers the way dance helps people shed the negative cultural and psychological effects of colonialism.The methodology used was dance ethnography, which looks at the body experiences and "treats dance as a kind of cultural knowledge and body movement as a link to the mental and emotional world of human beings" (Thomas, 2003, p.83). Data was collected through participant- observation, interviews, personal dance study and performance, video recordings, and photography. The research found in two separate ethnographies, dance pedagogies stimulating identity work that challenged colonial power by affirming an indigenous body practice and knowledge.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Christine D. Thomas, committee chair; Jennifer Esposito, Janet Burns, Pier Junor Clarke, Draga Vidakovic, committee members. Electronic text (159 p. : col. ill.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 10, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-146).