This dissertation defines early commitment scholarship programs and their theoretical impact on college enrollment and outcomes in general. In addition, it analyzes the effects of one state-wide early commitment program for low-income students, Oklahoma's Promise. The impact of the expansion of Oklahoma's Promise on college enrollment rates and college level educational outcomes will be reviewed. When compared with all US states, many of which were also implementing programs to increase college enrollment, Oklahoma's Promise was not found to have any significant effect. However using the preferred control group, results show the program increased college enrollment among low-income youth by 4.4 percentage points when compared to states with no scholarship program. In regards to college level educational outcomes, Oklahoma's Promise increased the probability of earning a college degree in five years or less, in not dropping out of college, and of earning a two-year college degree compared with students that signed the pledge and enrolled in college without the scholarship. The program was also found to have increased the state-wide, low-income, Associate's degree attainment rate by 4.5 percentage points. A benefit-cost analysis of the program shows that the net present value of the benefits to the taxpayer of the program for just the 2003 cohort was at least $88 million. Over the life of the program, the benefits are expected to be much more. The benefits of enrolling in college through the program far exceeded the costs to the students, regardless of whether or not they ultimately earned a degree.

New-teacher induction programs are widely used as non-monetary interventions, with the reduction of teacher turnover being one of their purposes. During the last three decades, states have been active in legislation to mandate induction programs for new teachers in public schools. Motivated by the discrepancy of the estimated program effects on teacher turnover in the existing literature, this study attempts to examine whether analytical methods used to address the endogeneity of induction-program participation matter in explaining this inconsistency in the estimation of the effect of new-teacher induction programs and how mandatory induction legislation and/or policy are linked with new-teacher induction programs and teacher turnover. Specifically, three key research questions are examined, including what are the determinants of new teachers' turnover, whether new-teacher induction programs have effects on teacher turnover, and whether state induction legislation and/or local mentoring policy have effects on teacher turnover. Two main sources of data are employed, including multiple cycles of Schools and Staffing Survey and Teacher Follow-up Survey, the largest nationally representative sample surveys on teachers and their schools in the United States, as well as New York City Department of Education administrative data, the longitudinal data concerning public school new teachers and their job status in the largest public education system in the United States. In order to address the potential endogeneity problem that may be associated with the induction program participation, this study employs identification strategies such as propensity-score matching, instrumental variable, and difference-in-difference methods. Particularly, in estimation, the difference-in-differences strategy is incorporated with the instrumental variable method as well as nonlinear models. The current study finds that, after addressing the endogeneity problem, new-teacher induction programs hardly have any effects on reducing teacher turnover, which is different from what most previous studies have found. It is also implied that if a mandatory induction/mentoring law/policy does not encourage new teachers' participation in a comprehensive induction/mentoring program, it may not work in terms of reducing teachers' exit turnover at best. This study contributes in literature on new-teacher induction programs and teacher turnover in terms of analytical methods, generalizability of findings, understanding of induction legislation and policy, and proper research design considerations for future studies.

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of international school headship transitions in order to identify potential sources of unwanted turnover. Anecdotal evidence from the past two decades suggests that the short tenure of international school heads (average = 3.7 years, Benson, 2011) is unwanted by international schools, a result of up to 70% of heads either volunteering to leave their schools prematurely, being fired, or failing to have their contracts renewed. This qualitative multi-case study dissertation analyzes the experiences of twelve second-year international school heads guided by the use of a theoretical framework grounded in the literatures of leadership and governance in international schools, non-profit organizations, U.S. school districts, and charter schools in order to determine the factors that heads identify as affecting their transitions to work and life abroad. Findings from this study suggest that the headship transition process proceeds in three phases, with heads identifying specific factors affecting transition experiences at each respective phase. Organizational recruitment and selection, contract negotiation, and personal motivation affect heads during the acceptance phase, or the period between the job search and formally accepting an offered contract to become a head of school. Work transition supports (realistic job previews), relocation supports (i.e. locating housing and medical care), and work role spillover (i.e. exiting one job while preparing to entry another) impacts heads during the anticipation stage between hire and their first day on the job. Managing board relations, personal/familial satisfaction in living abroad, and unforeseen incidents (i.e. illness or civil strife) affects heads during the adjustment phase in the first year on the job. This dissertation contributes to the limited literature concerning leadership and governance in international schools while extending the more robust education leadership and expatriate adjustment literatures.

This dissertation uses survey data and administrative data to explore persistent barriers in access to education. The first chapter explores how constraints on credit supply can impact the level and distribution of higher education, including access to selective and 4-year colleges. I exploit a 2003 Texas constitutional amendment that provided plausibly exogenous variation in access to home lending markets for Texas homeowners, without affecting credit access for renters, or homeowners in other states. By comparing outcomes between groups, I show that this led Texas homeowners to send their children to more selective colleges and spend $4,500 more in tuition (net-of-aid) per line of credit. In the presence of college supply constraints, homeowners’ increased demand for institutions higher in the college selectivity hierarchy forced some renters to attend less selective colleges, and others to forgo college altogether instead of attending less selective colleges. In addition, selective colleges capture some of the private credit supply shock through price-discrimination, raising tuition and shifting aid towards remaining renters. On net, the availability of home equity financing reinforced gaps in access to higher education. These results inform our understanding of how inequality in college access is generated and transmitted from parent to child: the availability of home equity credit reinforces gaps between homeowning and renting families, and it does so through two distinct mechanisms. First, constraints in credit access are relaxed for homeowners, allowing them to ascend the college quality hierarchy. Second, due to college supply constraints, the gains to homeowners crowd out some renters from making otherwise privately optimal investments. By documenting important distributional effects on renters, this paper informs our interpretation of previous research: increases in college choice for one group may come in part at the expense of another group. The results of the first chapter also demonstrate how the more selective colleges are able to capture some of the gains from cheaper credit by price-discriminating by homeownership status. The net effects of subsidized home lending markets and federal aid policy on college access are not immediately clear: on one hand, homeowners are sending their children to better colleges, but they are paying higher net prices at these colleges than they would in the absence of the private credit supply shock. On the other hand, tuition increases for renters who remain enrolled at selective colleges are offset by increases in institutional aid, but some renters are pushed down the college quality hierarchy and displaced from college altogether. The relationship between housing markets and access to higher education is also explored in chapter three, which examines the effect of metropolitan house price shocks on college enrollment patterns across cities. This chapter begins by presenting a simple theoretical model to illustrate the mechanisms through which parental housing wealth can ease educational borrowing constraints for their children. The model highlights how house price growth can reinforce inequality in future generations: increases in the value of parental housing collateral can ease educational borrowing constraints for children, but the indivisibility in owner-occupied housing limits exposure to this externality to higher-income families. The second part of this chapter presents estimates of the relationship between house price shocks and changes in college enrollment at the MSA level. The empirical results confirm that house price growth leads to higher college enrollment rates (and vice versa for declining house prices), but these effects are concentrated in metropolitan areas with lower house price levels. There is only weak evidence that house price growth leads to increases in housing-related employment among college-aged individuals. The second chapter of this dissertation examines the effect of policies used to reclassify non-native English speakers (English Learners, or ELs) in the Oakland Unified School District into mainstream classes. Despite a heightened policy debate surrounding appropriate instructional policies for the large and growing number of non-native English speaking students nationwide, policymakers have limited causal research available on the effects of reclassification policy. This paper addresses some of the gaps in the empirical literature on reclassification by exploiting exogenous variation in the probability of reclassification introduced by the multiple criteria students must meet to be eligible for reclassification. It begins with a conventional regression discontinuity (RD) design that estimates the short and long-term effects of reclassification for non-native English speakers who have met all reclassification criteria except potentially one. These students exhibit large jumps in the probability of reclassification around relevant test score cutoffs. The RD estimates suggest that reclassification has very limited effects on students at the margin, but that the timing of reclassification may indeed matter, though not necessarily through effects on student learning. There is some suggestive evidence of increases in SAT-taking and four-year college enrollment, but limited statistical power prevents definitive conclusions regarding small changes in long-term outcomes. Motivated by the limitations inherent to RD designs that estimate treatment effects for students at relevant cutoffs, chapter two also presents an extension to the conventional RD design in order to draw conclusions about the effects of reclassification for students whose reclassification scores place them well above the cutoff. The framework we present exploits the fact that some students who meet the first cutoff will remain untreated due to being below the cutoff for a second running variable. These untreated students provide additional information on the relationship between reclassification test scores and outcomes, which can then be used to inform our expectation of counterfactual outcomes for reclassified students in the absence of reclassification. More specifically, we can use this information for EL students who were not reclassified to estimate outcomes for reclassified students in the absence of reclassification under a straightforward separability assumption that can be examined in the data. We show this assumption holds in the data, before estimating the relationship between outcomes and reclassification test scores for non-reclassified students and then using these estimates to predict outcomes for reclassified students in the absence of reclassification. Estimates of the effect of reclassification for any score above the cutoff can then be obtained by comparing the prediction to the observed value for reclassified students. Beyond the immediate application to reclassification policy in Oakland Unified, the framework we introduce for estimating treatment effects above the cutoff can apply to any setting where treatment status is based on multiple criteria. The resulting estimates imply that for all students in elementary school who were above the cutoffs, the average effect of reclassification into mainstream classes on English language arts (ELA) scores is a 0.182 standard deviation increase in their ELA score in the following year. These results imply that the CST ELA cutoff should not be raised for students in grades 3 through 5, as benefits accrue to students above the current cutoffs and in mainstream classrooms. Without knowing how students below the current cutoff are impacted by reclassification, however, we cannot say whether policymakers should consider lowering the criteria.

This dissertation examines philanthropic foundation grant making for early childhood and K-12 education policy in the period 1988 to 2005, focusing on how grant making changed as a result of the Charlottesville Summit in 1989 and the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. Using a rational choice frame, I specifically ask if foundations responded to changes in the education policy environment that resulted from those 2 events by changing the levels of government that they target in their education policy grant making. Then, using an institutional frame, I ask if foundation capacity, as measured by their asset size and board size, increases the likelihood of being a foundation that focuses on policy grant making for education and increases the speed of response to changes in the field of foundations and the broader policy environment. Lastly, I employ the organizational ecology frame to ask if foundations have responded to changes in the organizational field of foundations, as the result of the entrance of new foundations that are influenced by broad changes in the business world, to focus their grant making increasingly on advocacy and other policy work. I find that there are a number of foundation characteristics that are associated with the odds of being a policy foundation and with the proportion of grants that policy foundations make for policy activities. I find that overall, following the Charlottesville Summit state targeted grantmaking decreased while nationally (affecting many if not all states) and federally targeted grantmaking rose. And, following the implementation of No Child Left Behind, locally targeted, state targeted and federally targeted grantmaking all increased as a percentage of total policy grantmaking, while nationally targeted grantmaking declined. However, these overall trends obscure important differences between the largest and non-largest foundations. Lastly, I find that grant recipient types also varied by foundation asset size. I conclude that while there is evidence to suggest that foundations behave as rational actors, to some degree, they are less responsive to isomorphic pressures from within the field of foundations than I would have expected. Additionally, rather than seeing tremendous change among the older foundations, the entrance of new foundations into the field of education philanthropy seems to be responsible for the perception that the field has changed dramatically.

This project uses a mixed methods approach to analyze the communication of metaphors about educational equity and adequacy, between co-equal state supreme courts in education finance litigation (1971-present). Evidence demonstrates that a number of pervasive metaphors about students and educational opportunities (“sound basic education,” “marketplace of ideas,” students as “competitors in the global economy”) have been shared and conventionalized within judicial networks, with significant implications for how courts interpret educational rights under state constitutions. The project first conducts a qualitative discourse analysis of education finance litigation in New York State (four cases) using Pragglejaz Group’s (2007) Metaphor Identification Procedure, to identify micro-level examples of metaphor usage in actual judicial discourse. Then, it performs quantitative and qualitative social network analysis of the entire education finance judicial network for state supreme courts (65 cases), to analyze two different “relations” between this set of actors: shared citation (formal relation) and shared metaphor (informal relation). Data analysis shows that there exist both formal and informal channels of judicial communication—communication we can “see,” and communication we can’t—and commonalities in discursive strategies (informal ties) are, in some ways, potentially more cohesive than direct, formal ties. The project also finds that courts looking to break with existing state precedent are more likely to turn to inter-court metaphors to validate their holdings. This project seeks to describe how metaphors become diffuse within judicial networks, and more generally seeks to enhance understanding of the ways in which political viewpoints on public benefits and rights are communicated through elite channels.

The issue of low community college retention and completion rates has become an important concern in recent years. The lack of persistence among college students has led to a variety of institutional initiatives including first-year experience courses, intrusive advising, and other innovative approaches. Among these approaches, First-Year Experience (FYE) courses are consistently supported as a promising retention strategy. To that end, the purpose of this mixed-method study was to investigate the motivation and first-year experience of students who participated in a Grit and Growth Mindset themed FYE course and persisted beyond the first year. Survey data were collected from 122 students and focus group interviews were conducted with 10 students at a large community college in southeast Florida. The survey data analyses using Independent Samples T-test, ANOVA, and Correlation showed that female students and older students reported a higher level of motivation than male and younger students, but there was no statistically significant difference in their motivation level by race/ethnicity. The focus group interviews revealed that students found three aspects of the FYE course influential to their motivation: (1) short-term and long-term goal setting, (2) self-reflection, and (3) support and resources. They also reported that time management strategies and supports from professors, peers, and family helped them overcome their challenges associated with balancing jobs and coursework, as well as anxiety and nervousness about their ability to complete college. An important implication of this study is for community colleges to continue emphasizing FYE courses to ensure that incoming students feel confident about their ability to achieve success during the first year and persist by overcoming obstacles. In addition, colleges should continue to equip students with practical tools and resources, such as time-management and the SMART goal framework, that support their competence and autonomy in charting their path to success. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education. / Spring Semester 2019. / March 14, 2019. / Community Colleges, First-Year Experience, Grit, Growth Mindset, Motivation, Retention / Includes bibliographical references. / Motoko Akiba, Professor Directing Dissertation; Stephen D. McDowell, University Representative; Ayesha Khurshid, Committee Member; Stephanie Simmons Zuilkowski, Committee Member.

Thesis (M.Ed. (Education Management and Policy Studies))-University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed Dec. 5, 2007). PDF text: 151 p. ; 7 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3275078. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on December 13, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.