Students attending charter schools, including those with learning disabilities, are subject to policies set by individual charter management organizations. One practice used within some charter schools is grade-level retention, or having students repeat a grade level. Literature overwhelmingly indicates that retention is associated with negative outcomes, yet the practice continues to be used. One particular charter school that uses a strict retention policy and retains students with learning disabilities was studied to understand how the process unfolds. Using the conceptual frameworks of critical disability theory and critical pedagogy, the study draws inferences regarding how this phenomenon blends with ableism and power imbalances. Six teachers (four general education and two special education teachers) participated in interviews for this qualitative case study. Through triangulation of findings from individual and group interviews, trends were identified. A major finding showed that although retention is conceptualized as beneficial for the school to threat unmotivated students, for students with learning disabilities, retention is still regarded as highly ineffective and harmful. Decision making factors used with students with disabilities include particular individual characteristics, such as abilities and parental support. Discussion into participants’ perception of students with disabilities as inferior, and how retention as punishment asserts the school’s power, follows a review of concepts, effectiveness, and decision-making factors related to retention. Implications for educators to improve inclusive and fair school policies, in addition to rethinking traditional methods of analyzing school practices are discussed. Further research in various educational initiatives and areas of study are summarized.

Charter schools attempt to write a new narrative in how America serves its children in public schools. While some charter schools in urban areas serving low-income students of color have shown promising routes to academic achievement, in some cases they have not confronted the inequitable patterns of discipline they perpetuate. In this project I explore two small urban charter schools that are academically successful and do not suspend or expel their students, specifically their African-American and Latino male students. I filter this exploration through my own perspective as the former principal of a small urban charter school like the ones I study in this project. I synthesize a protective resilience frame with an organizational framework used to examine districts in order to organize and frame findings. Ultimately this dissertation and its findings should be useful for teachers and leaders in small urban charter schools seeking to organize in such a way as to limit exclusionary discipline.

High-stakes testing is currently the primary measure of student success in the United States. Based on this measure of student performance, closing the achievement gap in test scores between Black and Latinx students and their white peers has become the main indicator of success for schools serving Black and Latinx students. When schools are unable to close the achievement gap, one possible consequence is closure and replacement by a new school. This process is referred to as reconstitution. Though reconstitution was developed to provide Black and Latinx students with a more equitable educational experience, these schools often cannot raise high-stakes test scores or their efforts to raise scores have negative implications on their Black and Latinx students. Based on this context, I wanted to learn how the Black and Latinx staff of a reconstituted school describe and understand success through their lived experiences, rather than through state exam outcomes. For my dissertation, I used a qualitative case study that explored the way one founding principal and six founding teachers at a reconstituted school, the Bronx Promise Academy (a pseudonym), described and understood success for their school community and for their Black and Latinx students. I used counterstorytelling, a methodology based on Critical Race Theory, that centered the understanding of success on the experiences and stories of the Black and Latinx staff member participants of my study. After using purposeful sampling to identify the participants, I conducted one interview with each participant and one focus group with all of the participants. Overall, I found that the principal’s counterstory to student success had a direct influence on how her staff viewed the importance of high-stakes exams and understood success for their school community and their students. First, I found that the principal, Ms. Jean-Baptiste, had a counterstory to the traditional view of student success that her teachers also adopted. Ms. Jean-Baptiste and the six teacher participants believed that student success should not be based on high-stakes testing outcomes but instead should be based on students developing real-world skills and navigational capital, or the ability to adapt and thrive in a variety of situations. These skills involved perseverance, critical thinking, and independency. Next, I also found that Ms. Jean-Baptiste’s counterstory for school success prioritized building a strong culture at the Bronx Promise Academy that fulfilled the needs of her students rather than raising test scores. Her counterstory was shared by all of the teacher participants. Since their students went through a traumatic experience at a closing school, the participants considered themselves successful because they collaboratively constructed unique routines, traditions, and structures for their school community. They considered this new culture as a success because they said it provided students with a sense of community, care, and joy that they needed in order to succeed academically at school. My findings, on both this holistic view of success and the use of counterstorytelling, have implications for district and school leaders, policymakers, and education leadership researchers.

This study examined the effects of one particular piece of legislation on California's nonclassroom-based charter schools. In 2001, the California State Legislature passed SB 740, a bill designed in part to limit funding of nonclassroom-based charter schools to instances when the State Board of Education has made a determination of funding. The determination of funding is based on prescribed spending levels as outlined in regulations governing the implementation of SB 740. The literature on charter schools contains very few studies on charter school expenditure levels. This study provided an important addition to the literature on charter school spending. This study's literature review included such topics as charter school autonomy and charter school accountability, home schooling, school choice, charter school legislation, policy implementation, and charter school spending patterns. 10 administrators, who were in nonclassroom-based leadership positions before, during, and after the implementation of SB 740, were interviewed. The researcher compiled and analyzed the results to find themes that emerged from the administrators' insights. Results and conclusions included: (a) the respondents perceived that SB 740 successfully purged the non-classroom based charter school movement of many schools that were engaged in abusive fiduciary practices, (b) the respondents thought the regulations were overly constricting, especially in the areas of facilities costs and reserve funds, (c) the respondents voiced concern that small schools attempting innovative practices and programs may have been forced to close due to their inability to meet the SB 740 funding determination guidelines, and (d) unexpected consequences of SB 740 included division between the ranks of classroom-based and nonclassroom-based charter schools, the formation of a nonclassroom-based advocacy group, and increased teacher salaries.

In the opening decades of the 21st Century, a movement towards parental choice in public schools has taken flight. One of the choices becoming more readily available to parents of young children is charter schools. Charter schools are expanding across the United States and Central Florida is representative of this growth. Parents are faced with more choices as they make decisions on their children's educational future than ever before making the availability of quality, accurate information about local schools paramount. While scholarly work on charter schools, the effects of media coverage on public opinion, and how parents make choices for their children exists, in many cases the research offers inconclusive results and rarely was there an attempt to connect all three. This paper, written from a parent's perspective, analyzes research, newspaper articles, interviews, and surveys of Central Florida's media outlets, public school representatives, and parents of young children to determine the types of information on charter schools available to parents of young children in Central Florida. The purpose of this thesis will be to investigate the information available to parents when considering a charter school for their young children by comparing the stated opinions of the local media, district school boards, and the charters themselves. It also identifies who is responsible for disseminating this information, and how the parents choose to gather and use this information.

The advent of charter schools has been one of the biggest reform initiatives in the history of schooling in the US: charters have significantly altered the landscape of many of our country’s largest public-school systems (Bracey, 2002; Hassel, 2009; Hill, 2006). Recent studies have examined a number of aspects of charter school leadership; however, there has been little research on charter school chief executive officers (CEO). The CEO is a relatively new role that oversees the entire charter school or network and is almost always independent of the principal. This mixed-methods study examined the organizational dynamics of Philadelphia Charter School CEOs by using a survey, personal interviews, and quantitative data analysis to obtain information regarding all CEOs of Philadelphia. Interviews were focused on the CEO job role and day-to-day duties, CEO successes and struggles, and what prior experiences prepared CEOs for this role. The quantitative findings show two correlations: suggesting that male CEOs and CEOs of stand-alone schools are in charge of schools with higher school performance. Five common themes emerged across CEOs during interviews: loneliness, overconfidence, under preparedness, non-traditional career path, and having a prior work experience in the field of education was crucial to success. Lastly, it was discovered that certifications and prior education experience were not commonplace for current CEOs, 19 of the 64 CEOs in this study did not have prior education experience. / Educational Leadership

This study elucidates the history and program structure of an urban out of school time program designed for liberatory education for K-16 students. This study aims to define the Catto Freedom Schools Way and examine the extent to which it is being followed at the Hamer-Still Freedom Charter School. This study contributes to what we know about school design and ethnic studies as a strengths-based approach to educating youth of color. A review of the literature reveals that Freedom Schools have been in existence since African people came to the Western hemisphere and The Freedom Schools Way has meant different things to each entity over that time (Countryman, 2006; Du Bois, 1903; Garvey, 1923; Payne & Strickland, 2008; Williams, 2005; Woodson, 1933). Findings suggest that The Catto Freedom Schools Program (CFSP) Way is a combination of two complimentary elements: learning about Black history and culture (Asante, 1980; Carr, 2009; Diop, 1996; Gay, 2000; King, 2005; Murrell, 2002; Myers, 1997; Nobles, 1976) and chain mentorship (Andrews, 2001; Olson, 2008; Welty, 2000). Learning about Black history and culture consists of reading and writing about Black history and culture and assuming African values and customs. Chain mentorship consists of looking up to older people for direction and guidance as well as stepping up in service to give younger people guidance. Hamer-Still Freedom Charter School (HSFCS), a school designed on the CFSP model, is experiencing the most success in implementing reading and writing about African history and culture and having accessible adult role models on whom the students, also known as Servant Leader Scholars, can rely on for academic and personal support. In order for HSFCS to embody the CFSP Way, it needs to strengthen opportunities for its students to step up and provide service for younger children as well as fully develop a spirit of positive peer pressure throughout its upper school. / Urban Education

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

This multiple-bounded case study explored charter-school music teacher practitioners’(MTPs’) and instructional leaders’ (ILs’) perceptions of professional development (PD) in four charter management organizations (CMOs). The purpose was to provide a rich description of these practitioners’ professional development, with the goal of spurring policy conversations and further research on music teachers and their experiences in the charter domain. Over two months in the fall of 2023, the researcher conducted one-on-one interviews with eight participants, which focused on ways of making change, methods of delivery, beneficial components of the methods of supporting music literacy, and forms of PD assessment from the perspectives of MTPs and ILs. In addition to holding two focus groups (one with each case), the researcher conducted four classroom and debrief observations. The interviews and observations were analyzed using the participants’ words as first-cycle analysis themes; these were then filtered through the study’s conceptual framework of Desimone’s (2009) core elements of effective professional development: content focus, active learning, coherence, sustained duration, and collective participation. The findings illustrate the participants’ experience with the professional development phenomenon through a series of main themes: instruction is classroom management, except PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN CHARTER SCHOOLS when it is not, (b) the many moods of instructional coaching and workshops, (c) content expertise via cycles of inquiry, and (d) reflection is essential. Implications include framing future empirical research in this usually guarded sector as a partnership to identify best and emergent practices for practitioners that directly affect students and families. Framing research in this manner may resonate with charter management organizations that adhere to more formative professional development practices. Additionally, cycles of inquiry in which self-reflection can occur may be a way forward for myriad non-content-expert instructional leaders who support the professional development of music teacher practitioners in charter schools or traditional public schools. Further suggestions for future practice include hosting charter-specific sessions at music education conferences, which could be framed as dialogic sessions to foster collegial inquiry concerning practices at both charter and public schools. Because CMOs’ system structures are different, practitioners there experience some aspects of teaching and professional development differently than their traditional public counterparts. Offering sessions specifically tailored to charter practitioners’ needs could help ensure that their needs, as well as those of the ILs that support them, are met. Keywords: Professional Development, Charter Schools, In-Service Music Teacher Practitioners, Instructional Leaders, Instructional Coaching, Mentors, Workshops.

The need to spur innovation and improve student performance initiated the formation of, under different legislative acts, charter schools that include variations of traditional public schools. With the enthusiasm and level of investment going into the formation of charter schools, it is necessary to explore whether these schools have achieved their objectives. This study explored whether Texas open enrollment charter schools perform bettered compared to Texas public schools. The study applied a causal comparative quantitative research design. School data on graduation and dropout rates, college preparation, attendance rates, and overall performance were analyzed quantitatively. Student achievement data available for statistical analysis includes student performance on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) state assessment from 2007 to 2011. Data analysis for race, special programs, at risk, economically disadvantaged, and limited English proficiency was incorporated. Descriptive statistics and analysis of variance techniques were included in the data analysis. The analysis extended to post hoc tests to determine variables that caused variation. The study found Texas open-enrollment charter schools had more African American students but fewer Whites compared to public schools. Students in public schools performed better than those in charter schools, and Whites yielded the best performance. Charter schools had high dropout rates, low attendance, and low graduation rates, while public schools had low dropout rates, high attendance, and high graduation rates. Finally, public schools had more students ready for college than charter schools.