In the United States, teachers have been both respected and villainized in popular culture and politics. These varying and conflicting cultural ideas and representations of teachers impact policy design, shaping the distribution of benefits and burdens imposed on teachers. The media play an important role in both crafting and reinforcing cultural…

The three articles that comprise this dissertation examine different ways that current teachers can express leadership outside of their classrooms, through labor activity and within-school instructional leadership. I use descriptive and quasi-experimental quantitative analysis to examine which teachers take on these roles, their effectiveness, the…

Highlighting the relationship between the racial slavery in the formation of U.S. colleges and universities and the archive of Black student revolt, this dissertation examines one of the longest and most violent Black student strikes in the history of postsecondary education--the San Francisco State College strike in 1968-1969. Rather than…

The United States has, for the last generation, been going through a significant and highly contested period of change in its schools. A bipartisan consensus around a reform agenda of accountability and choice was rolled out nationwide, with promises of closing achievement gaps and raising standards, all without the infusion of new resources. This…

From April 2010 to March 2011, the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) underwent a two-phase strike sequence against neoliberal austerity measures. Altogether, that process resulted in the eventual concession of all of the students' main demands, an unprecedented feat at the UPR, and a rare one in Puerto Rican history in general. In this dissertation…

The purpose of this study was to identify the status and challenges of online distance education programs in post-secondary institutions in Ghana. This study was a replication of a similar study conducted in Kenya in 2009, at the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University. This present study was conducted with an online survey using Google…

For the first time in the history of collective action, the offline world has experienced a virtually organized and enacted union strike. While this was the first publicly noticed political action in a virtual world, others have been going on for several years now. As virtual worlds continue to grow in popularity, this type of protest of action…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the strength of correlation between union-administrator relationships and principals' opportunities to create a positive school culture for learning during intent to strike conditions. The goal of this positivist study was to allow for an exploration of the extent to which…