The Principal is arguably the most influential person on a school campus. If a unified school district employs principals, they have a centralized support system to assist them in their quest to advance the community they serve. This work uses a phenomenological approach to investigate the perception principals have towards the support systems in…

School district takeovers--when a state education agency (SEA) assumes control of a low-performing district--are the most aggressive accountability intervention available to SEAs. Much of the scholarship on takeovers has been skeptical on both normative and pragmatic grounds, but these analyses don't wrestle with what else to do when students'…

City Colleges of Chicago undergo policy changes. In 2010, a reform sought to install accountability and transition City Colleges of Chicago into compliance with government funding requests through Reinvention. Reinvention, in the public view, was hailed as a necessity for a system that could not sustain on its own. It used a shock-system…

Through the use of the Program for International Student Assessment's (PISA) Global Competence results, the Economic Intelligence Unit's (EIU) Democracy Index ratings, and centralization-decentralization spectrum rubrics, this dissertation shows the association between level of democracy and education system, and the association of these variables…

Transfer students have an expectation to finish a?bachelor's?degree program in the industry standard, four years. The purpose of this study is to help?create?viable?academic partnerships with surrounding technical colleges to produce clear articulation agreements, ensuring all technical college transfers graduate with a baccalaureate degree in the…

This qualitative phenomenological study explored the barriers, solutions, and drivers of change for the inclusion of students with disabilities in Catholic elementary schools from parents' perspectives. Eight open-ended interviews were conducted with the parents of students with disabilities who attended Catholic or public elementary schools,…

Conservative estimates rank medical error attributed to ineffective collaboration among health care team members as the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Recognizing the dual concerns for patient safety and cost-containment the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (42 U.S.C. § 18001 seq., 2010) catalyzed innovative health care…

Post-secondary education is essential to the development of our nation (Miller, 2006; The White House, n.d.). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States already faced a college attainment gap (Miller, 2006; Jenkins, 2011; Welton & Martinez, 2013). The fallout from the pandemic has caused additional issues related to higher education…

Research suggests that academic advising has great significance for students' personal, academic, and social lives in the U.S., and advisors impact first-year students' social integrations and retention. Although the ratio of advisor to student remains low, scholars assert that if advising programs succeed, they increase the number of graduates.…

The question guiding this inquiry considered an anticipated relationship between teacher autonomy and centralization and their contribution to an explanation of school effectiveness. This study examined surveys from 109 public schools in North Alabama to see whether the variables of teacher autonomy and centralization of authority were predictors…

The purpose of this study was to explore the student experience, in a One Stop Center at a public comprehensive community college located in the Mid-Atlantic region. This study utilized an explanatory sequential mixed methods analysis to assess the perceived impact of the centralization of functions on student satisfaction. Using expectation…

This study explores the effect of economic and military crises on federal policy growth in higher education from 1932 to 1963. By analyzing federal records, campus materials, newspapers and educational association journals, the papers demonstrates that economic crises led the federal government to institute decentralized state building efforts to…

Facing a declining K-12 student population and rising education costs, Vermont lawmakers approved Act 46 in 2015. This legislation has the potential to consolidate school districts that have fewer than 900 students. The law aims to significantly reduce the number of districts in the state by using tax incentives as a carrot and forced…

There is increasing pressure on the central office, particularly in large school districts, to improve student outcomes across schools and to close large achievement gaps between groups of students based largely on race and income (Louis, 2008; Honig 2012). Reforms intended to "raise the bar and close the gap" in student achievement are…

Management of large enterprise and Internet service provider networks is a complex, error-prone, and costly challenge. It is widely accepted that the key contributors to this complexity are the bundling of control and data forwarding in traditional routers and the use of fully distributed protocols for network control. To address these…