The purpose of this study was to better understand educators' perceptions of testing accommodations decision-making practices at New York area independent schools. Through the analysis and coding of questionnaires, interviews, and documents, this study explored perceptions and descriptions of testing accommodations decision-making procedures as…

School superintendents make many decisions throughout their careers in an attempt to educate students. Many people, both inside and outside of education try to influence the decisions made by superintendents. Many of these influences are political in nature. This study looks at the history and levels of political influence in education, identifies…

Teacher attrition, or teachers voluntarily leaving the field, has been a persistent problem in United States public schools and serves as one of the primary drivers of the urgent teacher shortage crisis. Mitigating teacher attrition requires a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of why teachers leave the field. This dissertation employs three…

This dissertation is about North Dakota's political structures and culture spanning the past 30 years through a case study approach examines the modern identity of politics that derive meaning into how policies are decided upon, and ultimately, the dynamics of those policies for the state's system of higher education. Individual interviews and…

COVID-19 changed the world including the decision making of academic nurse leaders. Crisis management became the norm. Nursing academic leaders were in crisis management mode with or without experience in academic crisis management decision making during the pandemic thus reflecting on actions taken during the onset of the pandemic March 11, 2020,…

This study applies the policy process framework and bounded rationality theory to look at a specific program, about specific stakeholders, within a policy process, and during a specific timeframe. The purpose of this study was to document the process of establishing and describing how the program's stakeholders navigate, collaboratively, through…

Campus administrators and practitioners must make sense of state policy and system-level initiatives for successful implementation. This qualitative study examined campus administrators' and student health and well-being practitioners' sensemaking of the University System of Georgia's (USG) Mental Health Initiative (MHI) through interviews with…

This qualitative study explores teacher enactment of education policy, specifically Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), in a large suburban Midwestern high school. Participating educators constructed policy meaning while they sought to understand it, over a multi-year rollout process. Data were gathered using five teacher and…

Technology use has been identified as a key contributor to the decrease in youth mental health (Children's Bureau, 2019; Lebrun-Harris et al., 2022; Dwyer, 2022; Mojtabai et al., 2016; Yasakci, 2019; Odgers & Jensen, 2020). The purpose of this qualitative instrumental case study was to investigate how school district administrators are…

Recent teacher supervision and evaluation system (TSES) reform efforts have resulted in wide adoption of policies targeting improvements in teaching quality and student outcomes; however, impact of these policies has been inconsistent (Hazi, 2019; Stecher et al., 2018). Failure of TSES efforts to realize their intended outcomes is the result of…

Between the decades of 1970 through 1999, there were major shifts in higher education in New Jersey. Utilizing a grounded theory approach this dissertation created a database of legislation, hearings transcripts, and education reports. Searching this database for commonly used terminology, this dissertation was seeking a pattern in language use…

Native Hawaiians have long been underrepresented among Hawai?i's university graduates, yet there is a dearth of studies that explore factors that have contributed to these disparities. My dissertation investigated how multiple factors: prejudices among education administrators, erasures of early advocates from dominant narratives, and failures to…

This study investigated the determination eligibility practices for Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) within Mississippi school districts, framed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 2004 (IDEA) and Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) guidelines. A survey of 139 educational professionals in Mississippi offered insights into…

In this dissertation, I study some of the factors that determine schooling decisions in middle-income economies in Latin America. In the first chapter, I examine the impacts of a large-scale program in Colombia that installs water treatment facilities in rural schools. To identify causal effects on student and community outcomes, I leverage…

This qualitative study applied the concept of Institutional Neglect to a higher education setting and explored how federal Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) requirements, along with the implementation choices at a public university, facilitated Institutional Neglect for financial aid dependent students, especially Students of Color. This study…