Thesis advisor: Curt Dudley-Marling / This critical policy analysis, informed by a qualitative content analysis, examines the ideological orientation of Florida’s A++ Plan (2006), and its incumbent impact upon social reproduction in the state. Utilizing a theoretical framework that fuses together critical theory (Horkheimer, 1937; Marcuse, 1964; Marshall, 1997), Bernstein’s (1971, 1977) three message systems of education and dual concepts of classification and frame, and Collins‘ (1979, 2000, 2002) notion of the Credential Society, the study examines the ideological underpinnings of the A++ Plan’s statutory requirements, and their effects on various school constituencies, including students, teachers, and the schools themselves. The study’s findings show that neoliberal and neoconservative ideological tenets buttress much of the A++ legislation, advancing four particular ideological imperatives: an allegiance to workforce readiness, a burgeoning system of standardization and accountability, the elevation of traditional values and nationalism, and the championing of individual responsibility. Through the control of Bernstein’s three message systems of education, these ideological imperatives deeply impact public education in Florida, and in particular have a disproportionately negative impact upon schools serving high-poverty, high-minority student populations. New initiatives such as the Major Areas of Interest mandate and the Ready-to- Work Program, both of which are heavily influenced by corporate interests, elevate an ethic of economy that commodifies students. At the same time, the legislation ushers in unprecedented levels of curricular and pedagogical standardization that makes comparisons between students and teachers a reality, while commensurately creating a more competitive climate between schools as a means of promoting school choice throughout the state. Further, the legislation advances a vision of society that is strikingly conservative in tenor through the deliberate manipulation of the state’s History and Health curricula, while simultaneously creating programs such as the Character Development Program that espouse a narrowly construed vision of character. Finally, each of the legislative moves described above are undergirded by an increasing reliance not upon the state, but upon the individual who comes to see her or his choices as the sole arbiters of her or his success or failure, absent any possible mitigating, external factor(s). The study concludes with recommendations for further research addressing the manifest effects of neoliberal and neoconservative axioms in education, and a call to action targeted at progressive educators to confront these types of “reforms.” It further recommends that policymakers acknowledge that handing the governance of schools and the curriculum therein over to neoliberal and neoconservative ideologues will result in schools that both overtly value instrumental, corporatist outcomes, and purposefully advance a myopic vision of our nation’s collective memory and system of governing values. The marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism is positioned as antithetical to progressive education, and stands to turn back the clock on issues of equity, social justice, and social mobility. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / 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 hiring practices of physicians’ offices as they relate to medical assistants and to gain insight into their hiring preferences. Knowing how physicians and medical office managers view the profession of medical assisting may help medical assisting professionals improve the standing of the profession and provide a consistent foundation for education programs. I surveyed 15 physicians’ practices in eight states across the country to obtain a cross-country perspective and found that many practices hire credentialed or non-credentialed individuals for clinical positions for various reasons. The reasons were minimally due to the lack of credentialed applicants and more due to personal preferences, financial decisions, and governmental regulations. This study contributes to medical assisting program directors, medical assisting professional organizations, and credentialing agencies in promoting medical assisting.

Phishing has been a big concern due to its active roles in recent data breaches and state- sponsored attacks. While existing works have extensively analyzed phishing websites and detection methods, there is still a limited understanding of the data flow of the phishing process. In this thesis, we perform an empirical measurement to draw a clear picture of the data flow of phishing from both attacker and defender perspectives. First, from attackers' perspective, we want to know how attackers collect the sensitive information stolen from victims throughout the end-to-end phishing attack process. So we collected more than 179,000 real-world phishing URLs. Then we build a measurement tool to feed fake credentials to live phishing sites and monitor how the credential information is shared with the phishing server and potentially third-party collectors on the client side. Besides, we also obtain phishing kits to analyze how credentials are sent to attackers and third-parties on the server side. Then, from defenders' perspective, online scan engines such as VirusTotal are heavily used by phishing defenders to label phishing URLs, however, the data flow behind phishing detection by those scan engines is still unclear. So we build our own phishing websites, submit them to VirusTotal for scanning, to understand how VirusTotal works and the quality of its labels. Our study reveals the key mechanisms for information sharing during phishing attacks and the need for developing more rigorous methodologies to assess and make use of the labels obtained from VirusTotal. / Master of Science / Phishing attack is the fraudulent attempt to lure the target users to give away sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details. Cybercriminals usually build phishing websites (mimicking a trustworthy entity), and trick users to reveal important credentials. However, the data flow of phishing process is still unclear. From attackers' per- spective, we want to know how attackers collect the sensitive information stolen by phishing websites. On the other hand, from defenders' perspective, we are trying to figure out how online scan engines (e.g., VirusTotal) detect phishing URLs and how reliable their detection results are. In this thesis, we perform an empirical measurement to help answer the two questions above. By monitoring and analyzing a large number of real-world phishing websites, we draw a clear picture of the credential sharing process during phishing attacks. Also, by building our own phishing websites and submitting to VirusTotal for scanning, we find that more rigorous methodologies to use VirusTotal labels are desperately needed.

abstract: There is a national shortage of highly qualified early childhood educators. For many early childhood educators, this career path begins with the Child Development Associate credential. Community colleges are well-positioned to award this credential and address the shortage of highly qualified early childhood educators. However, many students arrive at community colleges academically unprepared, with excessive work and family responsibilities. The purpose of my participatory action research study is to explore the impact of internships on early childhood education student attitudes towards persistence in their course of study. This study has the potential to impact strategies used with child development majors in the community college setting. Successful community college students who persist through their plan of study to graduate will experience the benefits that college completion brings. In addition to the interests of college completion, these students will enter the workforce or university setting with valuable work experience and professional credentials achieved in a supportive community. Both outcomes have the potential to positively affect the growth of the early childhood workforce. The findings of this study reveal that student interns placed in high-quality, early learning centers found support in the relationships with their mentor teachers, valuable experiences with the children in the rooms, and a new sense of self-efficacy when offered opportunities to participate in professional development activities, leading to persistence in their course of study. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2019

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis reports two tests of information-based theories of the returns to education, in the labour market for young Australians. The first is a test of whether these returns increase discontinuously with credentials such as high school graduation and university degrees. The second is a test of employer learning based upon how the returns to education, and to measures of ability not initially observed by employers, evolve with experience. These tests are conducted using a new data source which tracks individuals during the years in which they are entering and establishing themselves in the labour market, the period during which such credential and learning effects are most likely to be important. It is found that there are large and highly significant credential returns to completion of bachelor’s degrees, of 14% for males and 10% for females. For males, around 39% of the returns to 15 years of education (relative to 9 or fewer years) are attributable to credential effects, while the corresponding figure for females is 36%. These effects are stronger among workers who were recruited through hiring channels that convey less initial information to employers. There is also evidence that post-secondary admission or attendance without completion of a credential may itself have a sorting effect in the labour market. In the employer learning estimates, when parental education is used as a measure of ability observed by the researcher but not initially by employers, it is found to become increasingly correlated with wages as experience accumulates. However, no such result is found when a standardised test score is used as the ability variable – apparently because the information captured by this score is already observed by employers at the time of labour market entry. When the model is estimated separately by occupational class, the finding of employer learning holds only among white-collar workers. This may be due to the types of attributes that are reflected in parental education as a measure of initially unobserved ability.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis reports two tests of information-based theories of the returns to education, in the labour market for young Australians. The first is a test of whether these returns increase discontinuously with credentials such as high school graduation and university degrees. The second is a test of employer learning based upon how the returns to education, and to measures of ability not initially observed by employers, evolve with experience. These tests are conducted using a new data source which tracks individuals during the years in which they are entering and establishing themselves in the labour market, the period during which such credential and learning effects are most likely to be important. It is found that there are large and highly significant credential returns to completion of bachelor’s degrees, of 14% for males and 10% for females. For males, around 39% of the returns to 15 years of education (relative to 9 or fewer years) are attributable to credential effects, while the corresponding figure for females is 36%. These effects are stronger among workers who were recruited through hiring channels that convey less initial information to employers. There is also evidence that post-secondary admission or attendance without completion of a credential may itself have a sorting effect in the labour market. In the employer learning estimates, when parental education is used as a measure of ability observed by the researcher but not initially by employers, it is found to become increasingly correlated with wages as experience accumulates. However, no such result is found when a standardised test score is used as the ability variable – apparently because the information captured by this score is already observed by employers at the time of labour market entry. When the model is estimated separately by occupational class, the finding of employer learning holds only among white-collar workers. This may be due to the types of attributes that are reflected in parental education as a measure of initially unobserved ability.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Credentialing has become an established albeit voluntary—and often debated— part of the fundraising profession. Despite this, scholarly attention to the phenomenon of credentialing for fundraising professionals has been woefully lacking. While the literature has discussed what the benefits of credentialing are to fundraisers and the general public, it has failed to research how particular credentials came to be and why they were created at a particular place and time. This study analyzes the origins of the first fundraising credential, the Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE) credential, which was first awarded in 1981. While touching briefly on the phenomenon of mass philanthropy that paved the way for the birth of fundraising as a profession in the early twentieth century, the study concentrates on the way in which early practitioner associations such as the American Association of Fundraising Counsel and the National Association of Fund Raising Executives worked to establish fundraising as a legitimate profession. They fended off external threats from government regulation and capitalized on opportunities to give shape to the profession through the development of criteria for determining professional standing, codes and standards of practice and, eventually, the self-regulatory mechanism of voluntary credentialing. The principal results and conclusions of this study are: 1) while the fundraising profession has been witness to major events impacting American philanthropy in the twentieth century, including the reification of philanthropy as an economic “third sector” through the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, the fundraising profession as a whole has been largely disengaged from these events except when they have directly threatened the economic welfare of the profession; and 2) the creation of the CFRE credential was largely spurred by increased calls for self-regulation of fundraising in the late 1970s.

Digital credentials enable users to perform secure interactions by proving either their identity or that they posses certain attributes. Special care is taken to protect these credentials and their associated private keys during transaction time. However, protection of these items outside of the transaction is often delegated to a secure credential repository. A mobile environment creates significant challenges for secure repositories. We examine these challenges with respect to existing repository practices and produce a set of requirements that a repository must meet in order to cope with the harshness of a mobile environment. We also present the design and implementation of Thor (The hybrid online repository), a system that fulfills these requirements. Thor leverages preexisting local and remote repositories and enhances their usability and security through centralized management, credential context subsets, and credential identifier obfuscation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the phenomenon of institutional credential devaluation and the impacts on internationally-trained social workers in Canada. International social workers are recruited to immigrate to Canada based on their credentials and experience but some discover after immigrating that their qualifications are devalued which limits or prohibits their ability to engage in professional practice. This experience is recognized within the literature in other professions; however, there has been insufficient attention given to it within social work itself and to the various stakeholders involved. Using critical theory and interpretative phenomenological analysis, semi-structured interviews were conducted with internationally-trained social workers to gain insight into their experiences of devaluation and graduate degree repetition in Ontario universities. Extensive exploration of the institutional stakeholders in credential assessment, the field of social work and universities was also undertaken and provides systemic context to the experiences of international social workers. While internationally-trained social workers have high views of Canada prior to immigrating, these perspectives change upon encountering systemic devaluation and discrimination post-immigration. They describe confusion, frustration and powerlessness as they navigate through social work systems in seeking to gain recognition of their credentials in order to practice. When they eventually decide to return to Ontario universities to obtain the recognition they need/deserve, they experience continued devaluation. Instead of identifying different or better social work education in Ontario, they describe repetition of what they learned in their countries of origin, raising questions about the similarities and differences in international social work education. The personal costs and psychological impacts of these experiences are shared by the participants. The practices of social work and post-secondary institutions in creating systemic barriers to internationally-trained social workers are examined with recommendations for further research and policy and practice changes that will lead to greater justice and equity. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

Discourse and Disconnect: Black Teachers and the Quest for National Board Certification Paula J. Leftwich ABSTRACT Black teachers have been under-represented proportionate to their presence in the teaching population in both the application for and achievement of certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. This study sought to explore the possibility of a disconnect between the discourses of Black teachers and the discourses of the National Board Certification process. Further, it was designed to investigate the effectiveness of targeted mentoring strategies to increase the participation rate and achievement rate of Black teachers in this complex and lengthy process. Using procedures for the definition and analysis of discourse outlined by Gee, the author dissected document-based and process-embedded data to define the discourse of accomplished teaching embodied in the National Board and its disseminated philosophy and process for identifying and awarding credentials to National Board Certified Teachers. Participant data was gathered using a qualitative research design and a heuristic phenomenological approach. Discourse information gleaned from participant-produced process documents and interview transcripts were analyzed using Gees methods. Field notes and recordings from direct observations were analyzed using Hycners approach for the interpretation of phenomenological data. Deleuze and Guattaris rhizomatic analysis was applied to the overlaid, separate discourses. Specific areas of both congruence and disconnect were clearly identified. Participant checks and inter-rater reviews of data and confirmed the findings and validated the conclusions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for the findings for the National Board, potential candidates, and advocates for each.