In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics advocated for a reform mathematics approach to mathematics education. Teachers in a large suburban school district in the southeastern United States are expected to use strategies that are consistent with reform mathematics. It is not known whether faculty members of a large elementary school in that district have adopted reform mathematics teaching strategies. Reform mathematics is an endeavor to move away from the traditional, direct instruction approach of the teacher as the sole provider of information toward the teacher as a facilitator of knowledge. Reform mathematics allows students to construct their own understanding through experience. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of reform mathematics through teachers' self-report of current practices and classroom observations. A quantitative survey study design was used that included data collection from a self-report survey and teacher observations. Thirty-one teachers responded to the survey, and 15 of the teachers were observed. The survey results showed overall positive agreement (M = 4.54 on a 6-point Likert scale) with reform mathematics. The observation results revealed that teachers were using reform mathematics strategies in their classrooms. Nonetheless, the results indicated room for improvement. A staff development project was designed to provide teachers with targeted training to implement reform mathematics strategies more fully. This study will initiate social change by introducing and reinforcing current, data-driven teaching techniques to affect positive future student achievement and success.

The 1996 welfare reforms were part of a bipartisan consensus led by Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress about the downfalls of the existing United States welfare system. Under these reforms, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was an entitlement program that had been in effect since 1935. Similar to AFDC, TANF intended to serve as a safety net that provides cash assistance to needy families, but it also aimed to reduce government dependence by attempting to instill values in welfare recipients through stricter work requirements and eligibility criteria. The goals of TANF included promoting job preparation, reducing the incidence of births to unmarried mothers, and increasing the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. Many of TANF’s goals were driven by the theory that family structure is important for economic and social stability, but states have a lot of freedom in how they choose to distribute TANF funding and implement the program. This research examined TANF funding allocation and social outcome differences between predominantly Republican (red) and predominantly Democratic (blue) states in order analyze TANF’s ability to reduce out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce rates. There was limited, but interesting, evidence that there were differences in how red and blue states were funding TANF programs. On average, red states allocated greater proportions of their funding to categories that were inconsistent with the purposes of TANF than blue states. Most states provided very little funding to goals associated with family structure. So, while out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce rates were different in 1996 (pre-TANF) and 2016 (post-TANF), these changes are unlikely associated with the program. Similarly, blue states had significantly less divorces than red states, but it is unlikely that TANF is responsible for this difference.

In an era of comprehensive school reform, it appears that the voice of teachers is seldom solicited or recognized in the process of planning and implementing school-wide reform. The primary purpose of this study was to report the lived experiences of teachers at Timberton North High School (pseudonym) as it related to the Smaller Learning Community (SLC) reform initiative. Research questions addressed how the faculty experienced the SLC initiative and how their experiences were different from their perceived notion of what SLCs were trying to accomplish and in what ways SLCs initiated a socially constructed understanding of educational purposes. This study utilized a social constructivist lens to identify the nuances of reform and the interplay of effects upon the social, historical, and cultural constructs as they existed on the Timberton North campus and in the minds of the faculty members who participated. The lived experience of the faculty members who participated in this study could be summed up in terms of frustration. The concept of frustration was manifest throughout the data as a unifying thread of a socially constructed understanding. Members of the faculty who formally and informally participated cited various evidences to substantiate their position of frustration, which proved invaluable to the success of this research. The theme of frustration, coupled with disaggregated subthemes, offers a hermeneutic understanding as to what was experienced on the Timberton North Campus. An additional theme of “hope” emerged from the data, as each of the faculty members expressed, in one way or another that something good would come as a result of their SLC efforts in the future. There is considerable attention given in this study to the way the SLC concept was first articulated by the school and district and what was actually realized on the Timberton North campus. This further situates the lived experience within the context of the themes. The themes that were derived in this study have also been situated into the current literature that elaborates on issues of teacher emotionality, educational policy, administrative leadership, and educational reform in general. This particular study is primarily beneficial to those who participated. However, this piece of research will provide some breadth to the growing body of research that involves how teachers influence comprehensive high school reform agendas.

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The economic prosperity of a nation is a complex function of many factors, including its culture, geography, history, legal origins, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, resource endowment, leadership and religious homogeneity. However, economic prosperity is most robustly related to the quality of a nation’s institutions under which its resources are put to productive use. Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions. Fundamental economic institutions, like property rights and the rule of law, structure the incentives that affect a nation’s productivity. Since at least the early 1990’s, economists have quantified economic institutions and policies by aggregating economic policy variables into economic indexes. Of these indexes, the most popular is the Economic Freedom of the World, which measures the consistency of a nation’s institutions with the principles of economic freedom. After decades of study, we know that economic freedom is positively related to income, gender equality, civil liberty and happiness among other desirable economic outcomes. Despite the benefits of simplifying institutions into a single number, the implicit assumptions required to do so are costly. By summarizing institutional quality as a single quantity, scholars assume that the underlying institutional structure of two economies are identical as long as their summary scores are identical. This assumption is often false, and this research examines the costs of this assumption for modeling economic growth. The common methodology for measuring institutional quality ignores both institutional volatility and institutional imbalance. This research shows that both measures are robustly and negatively related to economic growth rates. Therefore, models that simply a nation’s institutions to a single value at a single period of time are assuming away valuable information that helps explain a nation’s prosperity or lack thereof. In addition to examining the costs of these false assumptions, this research also examines the institutional trends among U.S. states since 1981. Despite declining economic freedom in the United States relative to other nations, state and local governments in the United States are liberalizing in recent decades. This phenomena is driven by increasing labor market freedom among states.

The principal objective is to study the impact of the land reform program in Iran on rural-urban migration, primarily on landless peasants who consist of more than 2/3 of the rural population. The interrelationships between economic, political, and social factors are stressed.

Education reform has grown into a major policy issue at the state and national level in the United States and for that matter around the world. The purpose of this study was to determine the political and social forces supporting, the rationale behind, and the growth and impact of education reform policies in the K-12 public education system of the United States from 2001-2011. Through mixed-methods data analysis a descriptive and analytical picture of education reform was able to be concluded. The results of the analysis showed that with an increase in education reforms from 2001-2011, legislators, predominantly Republican, created state level education reforms which fell in line with both neoliberal economic (market based policies) and neoconservative political (smaller government and increased individualism) ideals. With a focus on accountability, achievement, and choice, reformers, proliferated in profiles of corporations, PACs and other organizations outside the realm of traditional public education, school systems in the United States continued on similar paths of education reform as other post-industrialized countries that have grown out of an economically globalized world.

The manual labor movement generally has been regarded as a failed attempt to improve the educational prospects of the antebellum laboring class by enabling students to pay tuition in cash or kind. This dissertation argues that between 1820 and 1860, the movement accomplished a rather different objective on behalf of learned, not laboring, Americans. By inviting indigent youths to exchange work for education, manual laborism subordinated a portion of the laboring class’s productive power to learned-class interests. Steered by a graduate clergy who associated economic dependency with intellectual servitude, the movement constructed a national network of private academies that afforded the antebellum learned class a degree of freedom from market prerogatives. Many of these colleges remain in operation, forming laborism’s most durable legacy: a mechanism for endorsing the learned class’s rational autonomy from market constraints and thereby regulating access to moral and intellectual authority in a capitalist economy. Earlier studies of manual laborism have struggled to account for the movement’s concurrent popularity among abolitionists, slavers, evangelicals, religious traditionalists, trade unionists, merchant capitalists, and utopian reformers. Some scholars have regarded manual laborism as a democratizing movement that was infiltrated by reactionary forces, while others have seen in it a social control program that was undermined by egalitarian insurgents. By contrast, “In Cash or Kind” anchors manual laborism in the relatively stable interests of a geographically diffuse, ideologically diverse, but materially unified learned class. In so doing, this project traces important continuities between seemingly antagonistic reform movements, political persuasions, and religious traditions. Situated at the confluence of intellectual and labor history, “In Cash or Kind” presents an institutional account of learned-class formation in the antebellum period. It compares manual laborites’ memoirs, manifestoes, and school constitutions with student demographics and college financial reports to interrogate the gap between the movement’s stated agenda and its eventual outcomes. In that gap, “In Cash or Kind” locates the material origins of an American learned establishment that continues to stand in a vexed relationship with working people.

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