<p> According to higher education policy experts, &ldquo;Campus threat assessment is not merely a recommendation, but an emerging standard of care.&rdquo; However, despite evidence of the emergence of this standard and the consistency of recommendations that comport with those made by the Virginia Tech Review Panel, college campuses continue to vary significantly in their approaches to threat-assessment protocols. This study examines the extent to which campuses in the state of Illinois do vary and seeks to understand better the reasons for that variation. This research also examines the status of threat-assessment policies and protocols being conducted on three campuses and how the implementation of recommendations that followed Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois shootings have contributed to the creation of more optimally safe campuses. The study also examines the prevalence and consistency of the barriers that impede institutional efforts to detect and mitigate campus threats of violence. </p><p> Research sites included Northern Illinois University, where an incident of violence occurred in 2008, and the University of Illinois&ndash;Chicago and Illinois State University, where an incident of such magnitude has not yet occurred. The findings suggest that in states where the implementation of threat-assessment protocols and policies has been mandated by state law, campus leaders perceive these required measures to increase the preparedness of the campus environment. The research also suggests that even in Illinois, a state where such policy schemes are mandated, variation in the application of these policies and protocols persists. Findings suggest that even in states where policies are legislatively mandated, campuses continue to experience barriers to full implementation of recommendations that might lead to greater preparedness, including ambiguity regarding how best to balance the obligation to protect individual privacy and community security and to address self-harming behaviors and suicidality, the limited utility in zero-tolerance standards, institutional constraints in policy adoption and participation by the campus community, and insufficient dedication of institutional funding and support. The most significant barrier, however, was the unrealistic expectation that campus personnel be able to predict future behavior and events.</p><p>

<p> Many institutions of higher education are facing significant financial challenges, resulting in diminished economic viability and, in the worst cases, the threat of closure (Moody&rsquo;s Investor Services, 2015). The study was designed to explore the effectiveness of competitive strategies for small colleges in terms of financial performance. </p><p> Five research questions related to small, accredited, private, non-profit, four-year colleges were addressed in the study. 1. What were the range and variance in the Composite Financial Index (CFI) for small colleges in FY2010 to FY2014? 2. What competitive strategies were employed and with what frequency by small colleges in FY2010 to FY2014? 3. What relationships existed between the employed strategies and the related perceived institutional financial performance, as assessed by college leaders? 4. What relationships existed between the employed strategies and the documented institutional financial performance, as measured by the CFI? 5. What relationships existed between the perceived institutional financial performance resulting from the employed strategies and the documented institutional financial performance, as measured by the CFI? </p><p> This quantitative, multi-method, causal-comparative study collected data on a nationwide random sample of small colleges (<i>N</i> = 251). Five years of ex-post facto data on the Composite Financial Index (CFI) were used to determine documented institutional financial performance. Inventory data, collected from vice presidents of finance (<i>N</i> = 51), were used to determine the strategies employed by colleges and the resulting perceived institutional financial performance. </p><p> Based on the CFI scores, many small colleges (46%) were identified as seriously or severely under-performing financially. The most frequently employed strategies (&ge;76%) were: new marketing procedures, new undergraduate programs, tuition discounting, restructured debt, and new or renovated facilities. Significant correlations (<i>p</i>&le;.05) were found between 34 of the 39 strategies employed (87%) and perceived institutional financial performance. No significant correlations were found between strategies employed and documented institutional financial performance or between perceived and documented institutional financial performance. </p><p> The conclusions and recommendations deal with the need for small college leaders not to seek easy solutions, but to apply strategic planning in the selection of strategies to employ; to identify indicators that relate employed strategies to financial performance; and to test their perceptions of financial performance against documented evidence.</p><p>

This capstone examines how a newly formed senior-level team worked together to complete a complex task, while driving towards a larger goal of becoming a learning organization. For the 2014-2015 academic year, central office leaders in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) worked to develop a new approach to the execution of their strategic plan, “Impact Learning. Impact Lives.” In a continued attempt to decrease SFUSD’s persistent achievement gap and to increase academic performance of all students, district leaders renewed their commitment to deeper levels of implementation for the strategic plan. During a series of senior-level team meetings in the spring of 2014, central office leaders realized that a number of district departments were inadvertently working at cross-purposes or duplicating efforts. Likely reinforced, in part, by previous and current SFUSD organizational systems and structures, district departments had become accustomed to working in silos, which, in turn, required limited system-level interdependence. Given the SFUSD senior leadership’s desire to shift their organizational culture to one of learning together, this capstone explores the district’s transition from silo driven work to cross-departmental teaming. The research section of this capstone outlines the principles of effective strategy execution and teaming. The analysis section describes the impact of the district’s organizational culture on the application of these principles. The implications section identifies important components - communication plans, cycles of inquiry, teacher and leader voice that are needed to ensure effective strategy execution in large, urban school systems. This capstone concludes with an acknowledgement of the challenges associated with organizational change and calls for continuous reexamination of strategy execution guided by research and reflection.

Amid a growing debate over the use of standardized test scores, states and districts across the country have begun using alternative measures of school quality, including surveys of students and teachers. As a result, many schools now have access to troves of diagnostic data on student and teacher perception. However, with few established practices for analyzing or planning with survey data, there has been wide variation in how schools actually use their results. I completed my residency at UChicago Impact, a non-profit connected to the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute. UChicago Impact administers the 5Essentials Survey, based on the research in Organizing Schools for Improvement (Bryk et al, 2010), in nearly 5,000 schools nationwide. My strategic project was to design and pilot a series of workshops to help teams of teachers and administrators use their 5Essentials data to improve the organization of their schools and, ultimately, student outcomes. My research identified two core problems that often prevent practitioners from using survey data effectively: (1) the complex social problems rooted in survey data require brave conversations, unintuitive planning, and collective action, making the data hard to influence; (2) the infrequent administration and release of survey data make it difficult for schools to collect new data and adjust their actions accordingly. I found that as a result of attending the workshops, most teams were able to have productive conversations about their schools and coalesce around a plan for improvement. However, when it came time to implement their plans, the teams faced obstacles around accountability, coherence, and assessment of impact. Moreover, it is unclear that any of the actions that teams did implement will lead to improvements in student outcomes. Given the relatively limited nature of the this intervention – eight total hours of workshops – these findings suggest that the analysis of student and teacher survey data may be an effective way to help schools begin to build trust between stakeholders. However, in order for survey data to drive sustained, measurable improvement, the reporting infrastructure needs to become more nimble, and leaders have to balance support and accountability, while integrating survey data with other data sources and initiatives.

In 2014, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his commitment to provide free public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) to all of New York City’s four-year-olds. With “Pre-K for All,” New York City has undertaken the most ambitious pre-K expansion in the country. The Division of Early Childhood (DECE) in the New York City Department of Education is responsible for implementing Pre-K for All. Now in its second year of expansion, the DECE has shifted its focus from infrastructure development to quality improvement and sustainability. In my Residency, I worked to develop a quality improvement mechanism called the “Foundational Support Visit” (FSV), a new process for diagnosing need across every Pre-K for All program. The DECE used findings from the FSV to inform the allocation of coaching supports to all pre-K programs. As part of the FSV initiative, I worked closely with the Division’s 125 Early Childhood Social Workers, the DECE’s largest team of school-based support staff and one of two teams responsible for conducting Foundational Support Visits at Pre-K for All programs. In my Capstone, I describe the evolution of the Foundational Support Visit, from design to implementation, and analyze how the process impacted Social Workers’ perception of their evolving role during Pre-K for All’s expansion. I explore the question of how a growing organization can support people on the ground to adapt to be effective during a period of rapid change and argue that the FSV process generated important losses for the DECE’s Social Workers. I describe my efforts, as a developing leader, to restore Social Workers’ confidence in their value through the creation of a feedback mechanism and a monthly working group meeting. In my analysis of my own leadership, I consider my initial struggle to diagnose the losses at stake for the DECE’s Social Workers, and I explore how leaders can approach organizational change in a way that acknowledges loss and helps people adapt to new environments. I conclude with a series of implications for my own leadership, for the DECE, and finally, for the education sector.

In the three essays in this thesis, I explore the effect of school discipline policies on the suspension of public-school students, in an urban setting. In the first essay, using aggregate data, I investigate the effect of zero-tolerance disciplinary polices on secondary-school students. Capitalizing on a natural experiment, I used a “differences-in-differences” analytic approach to explore any benefit of a hypothesized deterrent effect and to estimate the impact of the abrupt expansion of zero-tolerance policies in one large urban school district. I found that Black students were suspended from school more often following the policy change, while suspensions of White students remained unchanged. In addition, expulsions from school, following the policy change, more than doubled for Black students, compared to only a small increase for White students. In the second essay, and the same urban setting, I employed continuous-time survival analysis in a student-level event-history dataset to estimate the risk of middle-school students’ first suspension of the school year. I found that this risk differed by three factors: (a) when the suspension occurred, (b) student grade-level, and (c) student race. At the beginning of the school year, this risk of first suspension for eighth-grade students was double the risk for sixth-grade students, although this difference diminished over time. Additionally, the risk for Black students was more than ten times the risk for White students. In the third essay, I extended my work further, using repeated-spells survival analysis to describe the timing of suspensions over the duration of the students’ entire middle-school careers. I found that—once a student had been suspended from middle school for the first time—the median time until a second suspension was less than one school year, and the median time until a third suspension was about one semester. These risks also differed substantially by gender, race, and poverty level. The risk of a first suspension for boys was substantially higher than for girls. This risk was also higher for poor students than for non-poor students. However, the risks of both a first suspension and subsequent suspensions were substantially higher for Black students, compared to White students, even after controlling for differences in poverty among the groups. Taken together, these analyses underscore disparities in school disciplinary practices, based on important student demographic characteristics, while providing an updated and more methodologically sound way of describing these effects.

Many education organizations are committed to diversity, but few achieve it in their staffing. Organizations typically recruit from the professional networks of their existing staff. Selection processes can be influenced by evaluation bias, and interview experiences can be impacted by stereotype threat. Without focused attention to hiring practices, predominantly white organizations often maintain a predominantly white demographic profile despite a desire to diversify. TeachingWorks, an organization at the University of Michigan (U-M) dedicated to improving teacher education, engaged in an effort to try out a set of practices for hiring for diversity and excellence.  This effort intersected with an ongoing conversation about how to make explicit the ways in which our mission to advance justice through teacher education shape our work. Guided by recommendations from the U-M’s Committee on Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence, the team implemented practices designed to reduce evaluation bias and stereotype threat. During my residency at TeachingWorks, I coordinated our team’s effort to implement and learn from these practices. While we worked hard to implement the recommended practices, we also struggled to navigate tensions between the work the recommendations demanded and the timeline and design of the grant for which we were hiring. While our initial implementation did not change our organization’s demographic profile, it did lay a foundation of knowledge, practices, and tools that will better position us to hire for diversity and excellence in the future. In this paper, I will document our implementation, and suggest five areas of work that emerged as having been underdeveloped in this hiring process and may be opportunities for growth in the future. These areas of work include: developing a shared definition of and rationale for diversity; continuously developing the applicant pool; monitoring the diversity of the applicant pool; refining the way we use shared criteria to evaluate candidates; and interviewing candidates who decline our offers to identify ways to make our offers more attractive, especially to candidates of color. Our experience may be useful for other predominantly white organizations seeking to define diversity and achieve it through hiring.

Recent research on data-based decision making (DBDM) shows that while DBDM has been widely embraced, its use in practice is more complicated than simple models of data use would suggest. The question of how districts can effectively use DBDM is particularly critical if DBDM is going to be a major part of instructional improvement. This dissertation extends DBDM research through a case study of a district-level team of Data Inquiry Facilitators in a large city in the northeastern United States. The Inquiry Facilitators coached teams of teachers as they integrated the Data Wise Improvement Process into their practice. The first paper turns a critical lens to a key element of Data Wise and other DBDM processes: discussion protocols. I find that discussion protocols offer helpful structure for conversations but can restrict creativity, and that aspects of individuals’ personal and professional identities may intersect with their attitudes towards protocols. The second paper describes how the Inquiry Facilitators changed their theory of action about their work with school teams. They realized that data coaching alone was not sufficient and needed to be paired with content and pedagogical content knowledge coaching in order to improve instruction. The need for instructional support was particularly acute as teachers implemented the Common Core State Standards for the first time. The third paper focuses on the Inquiry Facilitators’ own use of data as a central office team. I find that in contrast to prior literature on district teams’ data use that has found it to be unsystematic, superficial, and subject to political pressure, this team was able to achieve double-loop learning through their data use process. I explore the habits of mind and structures that supported their organizational learning. Implications for supporting DBDM at the system level, the field of professional development, and DBDM research are discussed.

<p> Two of the most significant changes in higher education over the last decade have been the reconceptualization of faculty scholarship and the increase in the hiring of adjunct faculty, yet these topics rarely merge together in the literature. The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry was to understand how adjunct English faculty conceive of and engage in scholarship within their discipline at a large university in the southwestern United States. The research questions focused on understanding how adjunct English faculty conceptualize and understand scholarship within their discipline, engage in scholarly activities, understand and believe their reasons for engaging in scholarly activities, and experience, interpret, understand, and navigate obstacles to engaging in scholarship. Twelve adjunct English faculty were interviewed for this qualitative narrative inquiry. The theoretical framework of Ernest Boyer&rsquo;s model of scholarship was utilized in this study. The data were analyzed using descriptive and pattern coding techniques, thematic analysis, and general narrative analysis. The theoretical implication of this study is that adjunct English faculty and those without terminal degrees are mostly engaged in <i>the scholarship of teaching and learning</i> and scholarly activities that fall into that category, and adjunct faculty members want support and resources to engage in scholarship. Additional research is warranted on support systems for adjunct faculty to engage in research, teaching, and service.</p><p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to understand and perceive how student leaders, and specifically student body presidents, navigated social power and used influence with institutional leaders in the higher education decision-making environment to achieve the goals and objectives of their presidencies. The foundational texts of higher education governance and the literature on decision-making are unclear about or do not acknowledge the role of students as leaders. Meanwhile, the popular press makes it clear students are playing a role in decision-making, and there is growing student consumerism and activism within institutions. The contrast between the foundational texts and the literature on decision-making versus what is occurring with respect to student leader involvement describes the problems of practice and research this study addressed. </p><p> This study applied French and Raven's (1959) bases of social power to the experiences of student leaders, and specifically student body presidents, and situated these experiences in the higher education decision-making environment. The primary research question for this study was: How do former student body presidents at colleges and universities perceive navigating social power and using influence with institutional leaders to achieve the stated goals and objectives of their presidencies? There were two secondary research questions: 1) What do former student body presidents perceive to be the principal sources of support in achieving their stated goals and objectives? 2) What do former student body presidents perceive to be the principal sources of challenge to achieving their stated goals and objectives? </p><p> The conclusions of this study related to: (a) the utility and accessibility of, and relationship between, the various bases of power with respect to the ability of the former student body presidents to navigate power and use influence to achieve their goals and objectives; (b) the availability and impact of support on the ability of the student body presidents to achieve their goals and objectives; (c) the impact of challenges on the ability of the student body presidents to achieve their goals and objectives. Along with these conclusions, the study provided recommendations related to theory, practice for both institutional leaders and student leaders, and future research.</p><p>