<p>This dissertation examines the interplay between school district assignment and reassignment policies and the elementary public school parents select for their children. The sample in all chapters includes the third and fourth grade students in a subset of growing North Carolina school districts from 2003/04 to 2010/11. The data are derived from historical, longitudinal secondary data sources containing student, school, and district records. All chapters employ quantitative longitudinal data analysis methods. Chapter 1 identifies the groups of students who do not comply with their school assignments. Chapter 2 identifies the groups of students who are reassigned to different schools, and to schools of varying quality, when school districts enact reassignment plans. Chapter 3 identifies the groups of students who do not comply with school reassignments. Together, the chapters demonstrate the interplay between residential decisions, school choices, and the resulting educational opportunities of observably different students. Consistent with existing bodies of literature, the findings demonstrate unexplored processes through which advantaged families maintain the most desirable educational opportunities for their children. Policy implications of these findings are also discussed.</p> / Dissertation

Spatial analysis for optimization of student assignments in cartography Abstract The aim of the diploma thesis is to perform a multi-criteria analysis of large spatial data, which will result in the identification of a predetermined number of the variants of the territory, which are optimal for creating the student assignments. The main part of the thesis is to design and to calculate the spatial evaluation criteria. In the theoretical part, a theory of multi-criteria analysis and examples of its use in general in geoinformatics and assessment of landscape potential are presented. The practical part is devoted to the design of own methodology for assessment of the territory from the point of view of suitability for processing of student tasks, including its application over the territory of the Czechia in order to obtain information about the territory. Multi-criteria analysis was divided into two steps: pre-selection of the territory based on Boolean evaluation and subsequent sorting of the variants from the most suitable to the least appropriate using the TOPSIS method. The scales of the individual criteria were determined by the scoring method. The main result of the thesis is a new set of the variants of the territory, which are comparable with their processing demands. Keywords Spatial analysis,...

Educational systems are complex adaptive systems (CAS). The macroeffects of an educational policy emerge from and depend on individual students' reactions to the policy. However, educational policymakers traditionally rely on equation-based models, which are deficient in reflecting the work of microbehaviors. Using inappropriate tools to make policies may be a reason why there were many unintended educational consequences in history. A proper methodology to design and analyze policies for complex educational systems is agent-based modeling (ABM). Grounded in the theories of CAS and computational irreducibility, ABM is capable of connecting microbehaviors with macropatterns. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the application of ABM in educational policy analysis by constructing an agent-based overlapping generations model with hypothesized inputs to qualitatively represent the environment of the Taipei School District. Four research questions explored the effects of Taipei's 2016 student-assignment mechanism and its free tuition policy on educational opportunity and school quality under different assumptions of students' school-choice strategies. The simulated outputs were analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired samples t tests. The findings, which could hardly be revealed by traditional models, showed that the effects were complex and depended on students' strategies along with the number of choices students were allowed to make; the assignment outcomes for elite students were robust to the mechanism, and the free tuition policy worsened school quality. Although exploratory, these findings can serve as hypotheses and a guide for Taipei's policymakers to collect empirical data in evaluating their 2016 mechanism and tuition policy.