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The achievement gap has been identified as a significant challenge faced by school districts across the nation and has been an item on the national agenda for quite some time. Students that are part of the identified disaggregated groups are not achieving at the same rate as their White and Asian counterparts. While urban schools have had to deal with disparities in student achievement across racial lines for decades, suburban districts are now faced with greater numbers of students who are not demonstrating success and achievement academically. As a result, school districts are challenged to design programs to meet the needs of students that have fallen into the gap; and they must come up with ways to fill the academic gaps that individual students have in order to demonstrate progress. In response to the achievement gap, districts are designing interventions and programs that specifically address the needs of these students. Data driven decision-making is a direct result of the progress that school districts and schools must show for every student and student group. This study identifies how the Ganton School District, a suburban district outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is addressing the achievement gap through district-level and building-level leadership. Efforts evidenced through programs and initiatives are identified that are having an impact on the success and academic achievement of black students that have fallen into the gap in the Ganton School District. / Educational Administration

This study examined the differences in teacher racial ideology among white teachers in urban, suburban, and rural areas. This study advances the scholarship on the ideological frames used by teachers in urban, suburban, and rural areas through an examination of the differences in teachers’ discourse and racial ideology. Using contact theory, this study employed interviews to examine teachers’ discourse related to racial inequality in education to determine whether there were similarities in teacher discourse within and across urban, suburban, and rural areas with differing racial compositions. Interviews were conducted with 42 teachers in urban, suburban, and rural school districts during the 2014-2015 school year. There were three major findings in this study. First, four original frames of color-conscious racial ideology were present in data across urban, suburban, and rural areas. Second, teachers across all areas employ the systemic responsibility frame to talk about the achievement gap, and the cultural racism frame to talk about increased violence in urban areas, revealing that teachers frame some topics similarly across areas of differing racial composition. Third, analysis of teacher racial ideologies using the eight frames of color-conscious and color-blind racial ideology reveal that teachers within Lincoln City, Gresham, and Arcadia employ specific frames within each area to talk about racial inequality in education. Further, teachers in Lincoln City and Gresham framed racial inequality in education more consistently using color-conscious frames than teachers in Arcadia, indicating that contact with outgroup members also shapes teacher racial ideology. / Urban Education

My dissertation, "Covering Suburbia: Newspapers, Suburbanization, and Social Change in the Postwar Philadelphia Region, 1945-1982," uses the Philadelphia metropolitan area as a representative case study of the ways in which suburban daily newspapers influenced suburbanites' attitudes and actions during the post-World War II era. It argues that the demographic and economic changes that swept through the United States during the second half of the twentieth century made it nearly impossible for urban daily newspapers to maintain their hegemony over local news and made possible the rise of numerous profitable and competitive suburban dailies. More importantly, the dissertation argues that, serving as suburbanites' preferred source for local news during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, enabled the suburban newspapers to directly influence the social, cultural, and physical development of the suburbs. Their emergence also altered the manner in which urban newspapers covered the news and played an instrumental role in the demise of several of the nation's most prominent evening papers during the 1970s and early 1980s, including Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin. This dissertation contributes to the growing body of innovative scholarly studies examining the development of America's suburbs during the post-World War II era; works which have placed suburbanites at the center of national debates regarding public housing, integration, and urban sprawl, but, to this point, have ignored the central role that suburban newspapers played in influencing how people who had only recently moved to the rapidly growing suburbs understood and reacted to these issues through their coverage of local events. In its totality, my dissertation provides a counter to the prevailing scholarly emphasis on the mass media's power and argues that local suburban newspapers played a primary role in shaping suburbanites' ideals, attitudes, and actions during the postwar era. / History

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Recent research has provided empirical support for counseling guidelines for pediatric gun safety and has demonstrated that some parental behaviors increase children's risk of gun injury. However, few data exist on patterns of gun-injury risks, especially for children younger than age 10, children from middle-class and non-urban families, and children of non-gun-owning vs. gun-owning parents. Part I of the study presents data on gun injury risks in a middle-SES sample of rural and suburban gun-owning and non-gun-owning parents and their 5-8-year-old children (N=60). Gun-owners (38.3% of the sample) endorsed an average of 10.57 out of 21 assessed gun injury risks, and evinced variable patterns of gun injury risks. Gun injury risks were much lower among non-gun-owners. However, a small number of non-gun-owners reported their children to have gun exposure risks more typical of gun-owners' children (e.g., child goes hunting/shooting). Part II of the study presents data on the children's responses to a crisis scenario involving a threat associated with defensive gun use (home intrusion). Children's crisis response plans were categorized as competent, passive, bold, or aggressive/gun. Competent plans were common (38.6%). However, most children generated non-competent crisis responses, including passive plans (21.1%), bold plans (19.3%), and aggressive/gun plans (21.1%). These results may help to identify styles of crisis response for targeted preventive interventions and emergency response training. The common theme in these results is that encouraging safe behavior, whether by young children responding to a crisis or by parents who own guns, requires an understanding of motivations for unsafe behavior and barriers to safer behavior. / Ph. D.

This thesis explores the meaning of sustainability, in both philosophical and practical terms, as it applies to community design. It clarifies the meaning of "sustainable development" and discusses the philosophies of certain landscape design paradigms associated with postmodern environmental ethics and the concept of eco-development. Information from the literature is synthesized into design goals and objectives grounded in postmodern environmental ethics and eco-development These objectives are used as criteria with which to determine the relative sustainability of selected urban fringe communities: Cerro Gordo, Oregon; The Fields of Long Grove, Illinois; Golden, Colorado; Kentlands, Maryland; Laguna West, California; Village Homes, California; and The Woodlands, Texas. In addition, the philosophies, goals, and characteristics of the community design strategies associated with each of these projects are reviewed. A rating system is developed and employed in the community design evaluation process. / Master of Landscape Architecture

In the United States, the living urban environment in the last two centuries has almost completely disappeared. Dense urban environments as viable and normal places to live have become a thing of the past. Living in the suburbs has become the trend and everyone has looked to the outskirts of the city to live. Downtown areas have become a place to work, and the suburbs a place to live. Downtowns have become ghost towns during the evenings, while little communal interaction can be found in the suburbs due to its inhuman scale and automobile dependence. Developers have marketed suburban living for their profits, offering no other alternative housing between suburban and urban living cores as they exist today. This thesis will explore an alternative prototypical housing type to promote vitality and livability in urban environments today. / Master of Architecture

Haruki Murakami is no stranger to criticism in Japan, having been described as 'Westernized' by Japanese critics for much of his career. The heavy use of Western culture in his novels seems to suggest that Murakami writes without attention to his nationality, as his books are devoid of references to Japan's popular and artistic canons, and his writing style and the genres he works within owe much to Western origins. Despite these characteristics, I argue in this thesis that Murakami has been unfairly labeled by scholars and critics and seek to show how the author deals directly with Japanese issues of national identity, middle-class disillusionment, and historical memory through his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami's importance as a Japanese author lies in his progressive outlook for Japan, in which he challenges loss of individuality under Japanese nationalism and pushes for a nation more in tune with the outside world. / Master of Arts / In this thesis, I address the popular claim that Murakami has ignored his Japanese identity by describing how Murakami works through various issues related to Japan in his novels. In my first chapter, I show how the author returns to the mindset of Japan's Meiji Era---an era in which Western themes and forms were incorporated into Japanese society while retaining 'Eastern spirit'---by his use of what Donald Keene calls Japan's 'virtuoso approach.' In my second chapter, I discuss the similarities between John Updike's Rabbit, Run and Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to argue that Murakami uses characteristics of Western suburban literature to better express his thoughts on the tensions those in Japan's middle-class face under the nation's corporate environment. In my final chapter, I analyze Murakami's reception in Korea through a film adaptation of his short story "Barn Burning" and look at the ways he confronts Japanese history in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to show that Murakami acts to the outside world as a forward-thinking voice for Japan. I suggest that the significance of Murakami to the nation can be found in his attempt to confront and diversify Japan's narrowly-defined national identity and controlling structures.

Perennial concern about racial inequities in US K-12 schooling has intensified since the pandemic and racial reckoning of 2020. In suburban school districts, which have become more racially diverse (Chen et al., 2021), school board members play a pivotal role as policymakers whose choices affect the education of minoritized students. Drawing on the sensemaking perspective from sociology (Weick, 1995) and social construction of policy targets from political science (Schneider et al., 2014), this multiple case study explores how school board members in three suburban New York districts make sense of changing student demographics and develop related policy. I find suburban school board members’ expressed support for equity, aligned with institutional expectations, coexists in tension with negative ideas about minoritized students and limited understanding of racism. Combined with institutional ideas about the narrow role of the board and heightened attention to actual and potential feedback from white groups, this results in limited benefits to the education of minoritized students. The state’s Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework (2019a), intended as a guide, has little impact in these settings.