William Allen High School (WAHS) was once a pillar of success. From a growing student body to a successful vocational wing, the high school was the epicenter of the district and the city for over a century. Today, however, WAHS evokes a different image. Between 1960 and 2020, WAHS evolved from a predominately White and high-achieving institution,…

This dissertation project used an interpretivist qualitative research design to study how the right-to-read claim made by seven teenagers attending Detroit public schools in 2016 reflects, addresses, or describes contemporary discussions about educational access. Using situational analysis (SA) as a theory/method, the entirety of the claim…

"Shakespeare Fixes: Equitable Approaches to Shakespeare Pedagogy in U.S. High Schools" examines the world of Shakespeare professional development and pedagogy for high school teachers. Shakespeare's works occupy a unique place in U.S. schooling, where, due to both the entrenched status of his works in U.S. curricula and the challenging…

Secondary social studies education in Missouri has played a crucial role in shaping students' cultural awareness, values, social identities, and civic engagement. Missouri's public high schools have been vital in preserving and disseminating culture, holding significance for a democratic society. This study surveys the historical development of…

Beginning with a brief historical analysis of how the education system came to be and an analysis of culture, themes came forth demonstrating the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) roots of education no longer align with the diversity of society. Parental engagement in education has been veered as a pillar of overall success; however, it was…

Male students of color often receive harsher disciplinary consequences than their same age White peers. Disproportionate discipline practices have existed within the education system for years, primarily due to a historical systemic issue of implicit bias due to race. One intervention used to quell some of these disparities is Restorative…

This qualitative study examines the Black college tours implemented at Inkster High School which exposed high school students to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) throughout the Midwest, South, and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. While there is substantial grey literature that describes the Black college tour…

This dissertation examines the early history of St. Patrick's High School, an all-boys Catholic secondary boarding school located in the west-Kenyan town of Iten. While an institutional history, this work is primarily concerned with people - the students, teachers, coaches, administrators, and staff who populated St. Patrick's during the 1960s and…

This dissertation contains three chapters, each investigating a question in American economic history. The first chapter is co-authored with Ran Abramitzky, Santiago Perez, and Joseph Price. In this work, we conduct a large-scale digitization of historical college registers, encompassing 2.7 million students at 65 elite US universities. We use…

This dissertation was a comparative study of computer science in secondary schools in both Ireland and the United States. Computer science was a new subject compared to more established subjects in both Ireland and the United States. This dissertation looked at how this subject could be accessed by students in both countries. I used a document…

This critical historical narrative sought to understand how secondary and postsecondary educators can best engage community partners in providing access to a college education--and the opportunities associated with it--for students who have been systemically excluded. Based on extensive archival research and 21 oral history interviews with Upward…

In 2010, Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana opened its first Excel Center adult high schools aimed at assisting adults in obtaining a high school diploma and transitioning those adults into higher education, industry certifications, and the workforce completely tuition free. MERS Goodwill, the largest Missouri branch of Goodwill (excluding…

This mixed method sequential explanatory study provided analysis of North Carolina (NC) school leaders' dispositions in eliminating opportunity gaps, outlined in NC's strategic plan. The study's quantitative phase used descriptive and correlation analysis of eight Likert subscales around four tenets of transformative leadership (Shields, 2011) and…

East High School was opened in 1926 to over nine hundred students from the surrounding neighborhoods. At that time, East High School was an all-White suburban school in comparison to its identity today as the most diverse high school in the state with over forty languages and countries represented in its population. During the first decades of its…

Advocating for the laboratory method was a distinguishing feature of textbooks as "physics" displaced "natural philosophy" in American schools during the second half of the nineteenth century as the dominant tradition of teaching physical science. This dissertation examines digital editions of textbooks in common use during the…