Increased public scrutiny and outcry over police shootings of unarmed Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to name just two, forced a greater awareness of societal demonizing and criminalizing of Black and Brown people due to racial stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination. This examination of American…

The Working Group on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and Learning Differences was launched in 2021 as an initiative of the Global Cities Education Network (GCEN). Fourteen school districts each worked to implement a unique action plan designed to strengthen SEL supports in their district, including for students with learning differences. Districts…

Purpose: System reforms ask educators within and across organizational levels to interlace their individual practices into a collective practice so they can enact a different, more equitable schooling system for students. System reforms require educators to coordinate their work with their colleagues in ways they are not trained, incentivized, or…

The academic success of historically and systematically excluded (HSE) students, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, low-income, multilingual learners, and students with learning differences, remains impacted by social position and identity factors. Despite numerous education reform efforts, equity in education continues to be a pressing challenge…

The purpose of this capstone was to explore the processes in attempting to design a culturally relevant, high-quality digital mathematics curriculum (DMC) and to provide recommendations for a strategic plan to evaluate the design and revision processes. The DMC initially aligned with three foundational frameworks, addressing the challenge of…

This quantitative correlational study accessed publicly available Oklahoma archival data to analyze the strength of the relationship between one dependent variable, the 1:1 technology score of 203 school districts, and four independent variables (socioeconomic status, community type, school district size, and school district funding sources) and…

All students attending public schools should receive the best educational experience no matter their academic, social/emotional and/or physical need. School districts have a responsibility to deliver on the promise of an equitable and excellent education for all students including for those students who require more. Systemic structures, policies…

Leadership gurus often put creating a "shared vision" at the top of their pyramid of what successful leaders do. These visions are best when they are an anchor or a North Star -- unwavering goals that the district works toward. Author Jon Saphier proposes this North Star for districts: Make every school an engine for continuous…

Charter school authorizers shape which charter schools open, where they open, and who they serve. We draw on principal agent theory to investigate how the priorities and practices of nine authorizers intersected with charter school applications' attention to the needs of historically marginalized students. Using data from interviews and…

This study aims to better understand how teacher leaders influence the detracking of secondary school schedules through the following research questions (a) How and to what extent do teacher leaders have influence on the detracking of the school schedule? (b) What influences teacher beliefs around tracking and how does professional development…

This qualitative study explores the ethical dilemmas felt by teachers as they transferred from hard-to-staff to easy-to-staff schools within a large urban school district. According to these teachers' accounts, many were motivated by a notion of craft conscience and felt a professional responsibility to leave schools where they were prevented from…

An Ethnohistorical Exploration of Educational Technology Implementation in Metropolitan Omaha Area Public Schools is a written account of the evolution of 1:1 program in five public school districts. These metropolitan Omaha area districts share their journey in developing programs that provide equity in accessing educational technology to all…

The authors argue that from the perspective of distributive justice, school district fragmentation--meaning both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones--produces three distinct injustices. First, it undermines racial solidarity and the bonds of community.…

The achievement gap has a long history in the United States of America which is demonstrated by inequitable graduation rates. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2019, the continued genocide and murder of countless Black and Brown people, civil unrest demonstrated by protests nationally after the execution of George Floyd and countless others,…

In this paper the author compares the impact of two proposals: one in the Shapiro administration's budget plan and one by the PA Schools Work (PASW) campaign for a down payment on fair and full funding of K-12 schools regarding how far they go in reducing the state's inequitable and inadequate school funding for school districts on the basis of…