The purpose of this study is to examine the school choice process of Gentry Parents --white, middle and upper-middle class, highly-educated parents living in gentrifying neighborhoods -- to determine how, through the compounding effect of their many individual choices, a segregated urban school in a gentrifying neighborhood is able to transform into an integrated school, a process I call "tipping in." This study uses data from 52 formal interviews of Gentry Parents in three different gentrifying/gentrified neighborhoods in New York City, and data from dozens of informal interviews and observations of Gentry Parents on playgrounds, school tours, and in pre-school cubby rooms. This study found that tipping in happens through the actions and reactions of different types of Gentry Parents: Innovator and Early Adopter Gentry Parents who are willing to be the first of their peer group to enroll their child in a segregated school, and Early Majority and Late Majority Gentry Parents who will only enroll their children in a school once their peers have gone in and done the hard work of changing the culture of the school to feel "middle class." After the Innovators, each subsequent wave of Gentry Parents will only enroll their children in a school if the prior wave keeps their children enrolled. This study suggests that Gentry Parents often take their children out of a school during the tipping in process, making retention of gentry children as important to tipping in as attracting them in the first place. Attracting gentry children appears to be difficult because Gentry Parents primarily prefer schools that are diverse and progressive, attributes not typically found in segregated urban schools. Retaining gentry children appears to be difficult primarily because Gentry Parent school expectations often do not match the reality of an integrating school, and principals are described as struggling to manage the culture gap that reportedly exists between Gentry Parents and non-Gentry Parents.

This dissertation examines the relationship between the use of student-centered instructional methods in teaching mathematics and science, and achievement of fourth graders in these subjects. The context for analyzing this relationship is the post-Soviet region, with Kazakhstan selected as the main focus of the study, and the object of its in-depth qualitative case analysis. The measures of student-centered instructional methods are drawn from student surveys administered as part of the 2007 TIMSS study, while the TIMSS test scores serve as measures of student achievement. The quantitative analysis finds that student-centered instructional methods generally show no statistically significant relationship with student achievement across all country datasets included in this analysis. The qualitative case study follows up on these results in the context of Kazakhstan, and finds that while student-centered instruction is hailed as the pathway to reform of education in this post-Soviet country, the state lacks the capacity to engage in instructional reform and improvement of teacher quality, while the teachers look to the state to guide them in choosing the right instructional methods. As a result, instructional transformations take place in highly haphazard, heterogeneous ways, while teachers require direction, guidance, and support from the central state to effectively implement student-centered methods in their lessons.

A major focus of charter school research has been the potential impact of increased school choice on student sorting by race/ethnicity and socio-economic status. Researchers have argued that charter schools may increase segregation by allowing families to separate into more homogeneous school communities. Yet surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the role charter schools themselves may play in determining student enrollments. Emerging evidence suggests that charter schools may frequently take into account nearby educational and demographic characteristics when choosing school locations and avoid neighborhoods with high-proportions of at-risk students who are more costly and challenging to educate. While this behavior is not incompatible with traditional notions of how education marketplaces function, such "positioning strategies" serve as important reminders that charter schools benefit most by locating in areas where they hold clear competitive advantages, not necessarily areas of greatest demand or educational need. In this dissertation, I examined the potential for New Jersey charter schools to effectively distribute educational opportunities to all students, particularly those most frequently targeted by previous approaches to school reform, across varied and often segregated landscapes. Drawing on rational choice theory and previous research into the profit maximizing behavior of firms, I argued that charter schools have strong incentives to locate in areas that allow them to effectively balance consumer demand with the potential negative effects of increased competition in high needs areas. I used geographic information systems (GIS) and logistic regression to map the location of charter schools in New Jersey and examine potential associations with supply side factors. New Jersey's charter school supply showed two distinct clustering patterns. First, charter schools tended to circle Abbott districts or low-performing school districts in a narrow five mile band characterized by greater educational need and, presumably, consumer demand. Second, charter schools in Abbott districts tended to circle, but not locate within, neighborhoods with higher levels of educational and economic disadvantage, and particularly neighborhoods with higher proportions of African American residents. Logistic regression confirmed statistically significant associations among charter school clusters and proxies for market demand, educational need, and neighborhood diversity, although estimates for race/ethnicity were less conclusive. Further analysis indicated that observed clustering patterns were primarily driven by more market savvy or entrepreneurial schools partnered with charter management organizations (CMOs).

School districts and states have increasingly abandoned traditional school reform efforts in favor of simply closing low-performing schools. This movement reflects growing frustration among policymakers with the disappointing effects of previous school improvement policies, and the view that some schools may simply lack the capacity to undertake meaningful improvements. This paper focuses on arguably the most aggressive school closure policies in the nation--those in New York City. Over the past decade, New York City has closed over 100 schools. Using a longitudinal database of students and schools, I explore the implementation and effects of closure and reconstitution of middle schools in New York City, and assess the links between school closure and student academic development and behavior. My descriptive findings indicate that schools selected for closure have significantly lower school-average state test score exams and lower attendance rates compared to other middle schools for several years prior to closure, and that students who attend these schools are almost exclusively Hispanic and Black, more likely to come from low-income families, and more mobile than other middle school students in the district. I also find that students enter these middle schools already at a significant academic disadvantage. I examine characteristics of the reconstituted schools that replace the closed schools, and find that in terms of demographics, reconstituted schools enroll students similar to those served by the closed schools that they replaced. However, the reconstituted schools serve higher performing students with fewer absences and tardies in the year prior to enrolling in middle school. To assess the impact of school closure on student academic outcomes, I use propensity-score matching within a difference-in-differences framework. I find a small, positive effect of school closure on student test scores and rates of absences. As a robustness check, I conduct a second set of analyses using student fixed-effects models that produced similar results: students learn slightly less at chronically underperforming schools, compared to what would have happened had they attended an alternate school. School closure appears to be a somewhat effective in improving student academic outcomes. It is not clear, however, whether the policy is efficient given the small effects and the considerable disruption associated with the policy. Future research should examine the fiscal costs associated with closure, compared to costs of other policies with similar effects.

Over the last two decades, private tutoring has emerged as an important issue in education as its demand has been growing around the world. However, the evidence of the effectiveness of private tutoring is still mixed. Using the Korean Educational Longitudinal Survey, this dissertation explores the causal impact of private tutoring in Korea on three outcomes: students' academic achievement, the quality of the learning environment in formal schooling, and educational inequality. The first set of empirical analyses explores how private tutoring in secondary schools affects students' academic achievement in both short-term and long-term aspects using Ordinary Least Squares, Instrumental Variable, and Propensity Score Matching methods. The results suggest that private tutoring in middle school, on average, has positive short-term effects on students' academic achievement in middle school, but minimal long-term effects on the university entrance examination scores. By subject area, English and math tutoring are effective in improving academic achievement in middle school, whereas verbal tutoring is not. Moreover, private tutoring in grade 7 is most beneficial for students in middle school. In terms of private tutoring in high school, only math tutoring is beneficial for high school students in improving scores on the university entrance examination. The second set of the analyses employs Ordered Logit, Propensity Score Matching, and Difference-in-Differences methods to estimate the impact of private tutoring on the quality of formal schooling. The quality of the learning environment in formal schooling is measured by students' attention to lessons in class. On average, private tutoring shows a positive influence on students' attention to lessons in grade 8, but the magnitude of its influence is not substantial. However, when differentiating the results by ability group, positive effects are detected mostly in the low-ability group, which means that low achievers pay more attention to lessons in schools if they participate in private tutoring. These results imply that private tutoring improves the overall learning environment in formal schooling, which in turn increases the overall quality of schooling. The third set of the analyses uses Quantile Regression, Two-Stage Least Absolute Deviation estimator, and Propensity Score Subclassification to estimate the heterogeneous effects of private tutoring between ability groups, which provides implications on educational inequality based on academic achievement. The overall results suggest that private tutoring in middle school exacerbates educational inequality between high and low achievers, which implies a widening of the achievement gap. In addition, enrolling in tutoring at an earlier grade level results in greater heterogeneity between high and low achievers in academic performance than enrolling in tutoring during later grade levels. However, private tutoring in high school contributes to reducing the achievement gap; low achievers benefit more from private tutoring in high school compared to high achievers. Moreover, three years of cumulative math tutoring and receiving a single year of math tutoring in grade 12 contribute to narrowing the achievement gap between low and high achievers in the university entrance examination scores.

For two decades, state financing of higher education has been on the decline and the situation has exacerbated since the onset of the economic recession, where the US state systems have resorted to a substantial cut of funding for higher education. Faced with the challenges of limited resources for financial pressure and an increasing demand, community colleges either have taken or are considering taking a series of cost-saving strategies. Some of the most prominent trends seen in the past decades include sharp expansions in distance education offerings through online coursework, an increasing reliance on part-time adjunct faculty, and a heated discussion about slashing expenditures on remedial education. Yet, many researchers argue that these strategies might be implemented at the cost of poorer educational quality and less desirable student outcomes. My dissertation assesses the impacts of several important strategies that community colleges are engaged in an era of financial constraints on student academic outcomes and educational equality. In Chapter One, Shanna Smith Jaggars and I examine the fast growth of distance education and its impacts on student outcomes relative to traditional face-to-face delivery format. Based on a large administrative data set from Washington State, we found robust negative estimates for online learning in terms of both course persistence and course grade. While all types of students in the study suffered decrements in performance in online courses, we also identified strong variations across subpopulations and academic subject areas. Chapter Two is prompted by the spiraling increase in part-time faculty hiring in open-access two-year community colleges. Based data from a large community college system, I identified a positive impact of taking one's first course in a subject area on his contemporaneous course performance but negative impacts on subsequent course outcomes and enrollment patterns. Finally, Chapter Three is inspired by the heated debate related to the effectiveness of college remediation. Exploiting discontinuities in students' probability of receiving remediation both around the college-level cut off and the cut off for short versus long sequence of remediation, I found small and insignificant impacts of remediation for students on the margin of needing remediation, but significantly negative influence on students receiving long sequence of remediation compared to those who received short sequence. These results suggest that some cost-saving strategies that colleges are recently engaged may bring negative impacts on student learning outcomes, and therefore policymakers and college administrators may need to take steps to ensure the quality of education offered to students before enacting policies that would incentivize an accelerated expansion of online enrollments, and overreliance on adjunct instructors. Additionally, the insignificant and negative impact of remediation suggests that the huge investment in remediation may not have been effectively utilized to serve its purpose and colleges will need to explore ways to improve its effectiveness.

Shortages in the teaching subfields of math, science, special and bilingual education have been one of the most persistent problems in teacher labor markets. This problem is in part due to the single salary schedule by which most public school teachers are paid, and which usually only gives pay increases for years of experience and additional credentials. However, in recent years, to combat shortages a minority of school districts have begun to offer additional financial incentives to teachers in shortage-fields. However, there has been little rigorous empirical evidence on whether these incentives are effective for changing labor market outcomes. Utilizing an Instrumental Variables Difference-in-Differences model with a novel instrument, I estimate whether districts that provide such incentives report better recruitment conditions and experience higher rates of retention of shortage-field teachers than comparable districts that do not offer incentives. I find positive and statistically significant impacts on retention. Findings are discussed in terms of estimated incentive magnitudes, as well as in light of a document review of collectively bargained contracts from districts that provide shortage-field incentives.

This dissertation was designed to provide an example of an application of the ingredients method of cost-effectiveness analysis of Talent Search, a nation-wide federally-funded program that targets low-income students who promise to be the first generation in their families to attend college. The program serves students in grades 6 to 12 to increase the rates of high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment. Because Talent Search is a multi-site and a multi-output program, the analyses allowed for the exploration of two complexities in conducting cost-effectiveness analyses: site-level variation within a program and combining multiple outcomes to evaluate a program's efficiency. My results show that variation in costs, cost-effectiveness ratios, and benefit-cost ratios was wide across sites. This suggests that future work should include site-level analyses to provide a range for a program's costs and cost-effectiveness and to provide policy relevant site-level examples of the resources utilized to implement a program. Because the outcomes of Talent Search have monetary values in the labor market, I combined the program's impacts on high school completion and postsecondary enrollment to estimate the additional income generated by the program. These findings suggest that the benefits of Talent Search outweigh the costs on average. However, the variability I find across sites illustrates that more investigation and development is needed to improve the productivity of the program and to reduce inequities across sites. Four important contributions were made with this work: it provides an in depth example of applying the ingredients method to a complex program, it suggests that future work should include site-level analyses, it indicates that retrospective work is limited and future work should be devoted to incorporating the ingredients method contemporaneously into impact evaluations, and it informs policymakers about the cost-effectiveness of Talent Search and the ways in which cost-effectiveness varies across sites.

Decision making is the essence of an administrator's job. While planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting and budgeting are the basic traditional "functions" of management, each of these clearly involves decisions---decisions as to which plan to implement, what goals to pursue, and how best to achieve the desirable ends. / Empirical findings support the hypothesized relationship between perceived external environments by individual school administrators and the types of decision-making models they adopted in schools. In particular, the level of perceived constraint from the external environments' 'linguistic orientation' and 'resource policy' greatly influences the types of decision-making models chosen by individual administrators in schools. Furthermore, the pattern of adopting decision models in a perceived less-constrained environment (i.e., demography and resource policy) correlates with the pattern in a perceived highly constrained environment (i.e., social values, funding, and linguistic orientation), except for the environment of 'control'. This suggests that the decision-making experience gained from a less-constrained environment can serve as a reference frame for the highly constrained environment. Supplementary interview data support the validity of the self-reported decision-making questionnaire. / Given the fact that little is known about how issues arising from external constraint affect the administrative decision-making process, this study focuses specifically on their intricate relationships to broaden our understanding on the ever-expanding arena of administrative decision making in a turbulently growing working environment. / In the past, schools were instrumental in maintaining the existing social order, and as such, they were kept in status quo. However, the globalized reform movement has vastly reshaped schools' external environment, compelling the whole education system to undergo radical change as well. In this context, school administrators have to be more proactive to the changing environment to ensure the viability of their schools. / This research investigates the relationship between the perceived external environment by individual school administrators and the decision-making models they adopted in schools. This study adopts the construct of Lam (1985) which delineates the perceived external environment into four domains: political, economic, social, and cultural domains. Factor analysis on local data yielded six external variables, namely, demography, funding, linguistic orientation, social values, control, and resource policy, and these were perceived to exert varying degrees of constraint in the operation of schools. Issues arising from these external variables were identified. The conceptual rationale and procedures of resolving the issues constitute the basis of pinpointing the decision-making models that school administrators adopt. / Law Chan Fai. / "November 2005." / Adviser: Nicholas Sun Keung Pang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4053. / Thesis (Ed.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-217). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

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