School districts have been encouraged to integrate health and learning services in an effort to best support the whole child. To provide guidance for this integration, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) created the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole…

This dissertation consists of two chapters on topics in Industrial Organization. In Chapter 1, I discuss a central question of the policy debate on public education: how to get more for less. Charter schools have been a tool in this arena to pressure traditional public schools to improve or lose students to them. Moreover, charter schools…

Higher education institutions face heightened accountability for student success. As such, higher education relies heavily on big data to predict student outcomes. This process is problematic because predictive models are developed on historical data, are deficit based, and are focused on student factors, neglecting institutional factors. The…

The study explores the implementation of teacher evaluation models and federal education policies, particularly AchieveNJ, in an urban public school district in New Jersey. It focuses on principals' experiences and perceptions, uncovering their challenges and thoughts on the policy's effectiveness in enhancing teacher performance and student…

This dissertation consists of three essays in development economics. The first chapter studies the effects of migrant remittances on economic development and education investments. The second chapter examines the drivers of charitable donations on an online charity platform. The third chapter studies the political economy of education in…

School climate is a well-studied issue in educational research. However, surveys of school climate tend to be analyzed using item-centered as opposed to person-centered methods. The current study evaluated the 2018 South Carolina School Climate Survey using advanced applications of mixture modeling in an attempt to identify latent profiles at the…

Educational reforms have occurred throughout the history of public education. In 2009, the federal Race to the Top initiative was born and included many educational reform models. To have these reform models gain traction at the state level, a call was made by the U.S. Department of Education (Race to the Top Program Executive Summary, 2009) for…

In the wake of the French Revolution and the failure of subsequent governments to enact humanistic reforms, Schiller observed in frustration that "a great moment has found a little people…" As we emerge from a once-in-a-century pandemic, navigating crisis after crisis amidst uncertainty and instability, it is easy to sympathize with…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if the outcome of two different types of referendums, operating fund and construction, could be more accurately predicted by using certain predictor variables. Furthermore, if the outcome could be more accurately predicted, which predictor variables were statistically significant in that…

A predictive model of undergraduate graduation rate at the institutional level is important and useful to researchers, administrators, and policy makers in higher education. Graduation rate is a key indicator for higher education institutional performance. This study aimed to replicate, revise, and validate the model of Institutional Performance…

The accountability movement in education since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has produced value-added evaluation policies in the United States that have resulted in discord and undesirable responses among many teachers. Despite investigations into the validity of value-added evaluation policies and descriptive reports of teachers' responses…

Community colleges, which are public, two-year institutions of higher education, have become a major provider of education and training that directly leads to a job in a particular occupation. To help community colleges build capacity to provide job training, the federal government has funded several grant programs over the past 15 years. Recent…

This research examines the interaction between international governmental organizations (IGOs) and national governments around the development of secondary social studies curriculum in post-genocide contexts, with a special focus on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) involvement with secondary social…

As globalization allows multinational corporations to shift production to cheaper markets, educators across the globe struggle to meet the changing demands required to attract the foreign direct investment (FDI) needed to raise their country's standard of living. Few countries have been more successful attracting and leveraging FDI than Ireland.…

In this dissertation, I will identify and analyze the serious problems that have arisen in the Caribbean due to the imposition of European colonial languages as languages of instruction in the education systems of those territories of the region where the majority of the population speak a creole language. I will also identify and analyze the…