The purpose of this two phase policy alignment analysis is to evaluate the degree to which the Interstate Compact on Educational Opportunity for Military Dependent Children has been aligned in the Virginia Compact statute and the degree to which three school divisions heavily populated by military dependent students have aligned local school policy to the statute. The Interstate Compact was intended to mitigate the transitional challenges military dependent students experienced as they navigated a patchwork of local policies through the establishment of aligned state statute in all states to add a layer of uniform policy in each school system. School personnel rely on local school policy to provide uniform guidance for student records and enrollment, placement and attendance, eligibility, and graduation. This qualitative approach used document analysis to first compare the content of the Interstate Compact to the Virginia statute, then second, analyzed local school division policy documents using priori codes derived from the Virginia statute to determine the degree of alignment to the Virginia statute. The findings reveal a loose coupling of state statute to local policy impacting military dependent students. The Compact was developed collaboratively at the national level, however gaps in policy alignment at the local level may continue to hinder school personnel from providing uniform guidance according the data from this policy analysis.

The 2009 Ley Orgánica de Educación (the "Organic Law of Education," hereafter "LOE") of Venezuela is a recent foundational document that represents goals of the Bolivarian Revolution within the educational sector. Passed ten years into the administration of President Hugo Chavez, this document articulates a vision of the educational provisions for Socialism of the XXIst century. While many tenets of the law support international declarations of educational targets and development milestones, such as Education for All, democratization, national sovereignty, and indigenous rights, the mechanisms for achieving these goals are highly contested within the Venezuelan higher education community. Additionally, they counter many recommendations of Northern aid and lending organizations, which have imposed goals of privatization, decentralization, and competition upon higher education in the Global South as conditionalities of funding, yet have arguably exacerbated inequalities in beneficiary societies. The LOE embraces a radical model of educational inclusion and governance influenced by the anti-colonial principles of Venezuela's national hero, Simon Bolivar, who serves as a symbol for national sovereignty, regional solidarity, anti-imperialism, and valorization of cultural identity. This study examines the language, provisions, and ideologies that construct the LOE through critical discourse analysis to determine how it is intended to implement the process of decolonization. Through an analytical framework of liberation theory, I link the discourse of the LOE to the societal goals of the Bolivarian Revolution including "participatory, protagonistic democracy" and national self-determination that counter the guidelines of the Washington Consensus toward education. In addition, I examine the implications it presents for redefining the nature of higher education in Venezuela in particular and in the Latin American region in general.

Children are conceptualized many ways by economists—as sources of utility for their parents, investments, recipients of care, and public goods. Despite the understanding that children are also people, the economic literature is lacking in analysis of children as actors, making choices with consequences for economic development. Using a capability-driven approach and an emphasis on co-evolutionary processes of institutional and individual change, with mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, my dissertation analyzes the role of children in long-term economic development at the community level. I use a case study of community-based, out-of-school time (OST) programs for low-income youth funded through the 21st Century Community Learning Center (21st CCLC) to analyze the role of youth in economic development. OST programs provide community-level benefits such as reductions in juvenile crime and foster economic development by creating linkages between the state, the market, the community, and the family. My study contributes to the body of interdisciplinary research on OST programs, and is situated in the middle ground between case studies with very small samples and quantitative studies with a narrow focus on academic performance as measured by grades. The 21 st CCLC programs in New York State are unique in their emphasis on partnerships between schools and community-based organizations. An analysis of the costs and benefits of OST programs shows that the benefits of programs such as 21st CCLC substantially outweigh the costs. Using Geographic Information Systems and statistical analysis, I examine the relationship between eligibility for 21st CCLC funding, demographic characteristics related to the need for free or low-cost OST programs, and the presence of 21st CCLC programs, and find that the presence of these programs cannot be explained solely through the characteristics of people who will be served by them. Additionally, it is clear that there are not enough 21st CCLC programs to serve all eligible communities, raising questions about the scale of funding as well as its distribution.

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