Over the past 40 years, a variety of school improvement initiatives have been designed and implemented in low-performing schools across the country, mostly with disappointing results. One potential explanation for the poor track record is that school leaders have too often designed improvement strategies without taking the time to understand the…

Charter schools exist under the umbrella of public education, but are not subject to the same level of public oversight or accountability measures as traditional public schools in North Carolina and many other states (BiFulco and Ladd, 2006, Bettinger, 2004). There is a lack of easily accessible efficiency data on charter schools. The primary aim…

Significant emphasis is currently placed on STEM education as a vehicle to encourage American youth to enter science, technology, engineering, and math-related professions. Gifted students are a natural resource of future innovators for these fields; however gifted programs are largely overlooked for program support. Since 1973, the Virginia…

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficiency of Texas public school districts through Data Envelopment Analysis. The Data Envelopment Analysis estimation method calculated and assigned efficiency scores to each of the 931 school districts considered in the study. The efficiency scores were utilized in two phases. First, the school…

The present study examined the stability (i.e., 4-month and 12-month test-retest reliability) of six selected school-based indices of adequate reading progress. The total sampling frame included between 3970 and 5655 schools depending on the index and research question. Each school had at least 40 second-grade students that had complete Oral…

This dissertation investigates the prevailing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate as an effective platform to improve schools. The data compiled for use in this study represented 426 high schools in Pennsylvania and were retrieved from publicly accessible, state-sponsored sources. The statistical methodologies from the Pennsylvania Value-Added…

This exploratory and descriptive qualitative interview study examined the postsecondary experiences of three Salvadoran-American women with learning disabilities (LD) living in the District of Columbia in the 3 years since graduating from high school. This research analyzed the young women's experiences in employment, education, community…

For several decades, researchers have searched for school-level properties that can overcome the negative consequences of student SES on school effectiveness. Two promising constructs that have been identified are collective teacher efficacy (CE) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). This study examined the relationship between these two…

This qualitative study identified the best practices utilized by community colleges to achieve systemic and cultural agreement in support of the integration of institutional effectiveness measures (key performance indicators) to inform decision making. In addition, the study identifies the relevant motives, organizational structure, and processes…

The research for this study describes the organizational characteristics and the personnel behaviors distinctive to high-achieving rural school districts. A comparison between two rural school districts, one high-achieving and the other low-achieving was completed using a survey instrument. The Baldrige National Quality Program instrument was…