Education Commons^™

"The Lady From North Carolina": The Perils And Limitations Of External Expertise, Aprille J. Phillips, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This paper examines a state department of education’s (SDE) decision to contract a consultant to “turnaround” schools, per a logic of outsourcing for external expertise. Our ethnographically informed case study explores whose knowledge had the most worth in diagnosing areas for improvement and identifies this case as part of a trend to rent competencies, under a neoliberal guise of efficiency, but at the expense of system capacity or learning.

Post-Program English Language Learners: Successful Learners Or Struggling Learners?, Tianna Bankhead

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As an educator in the field of English Language Development, I have chosen to explore the experience of four participants that have exited their ELL program within the last 1 - 2 years in Lincoln Public Schools. I wanted to capture the first-hand experience of secondary students by exploring where they are finding successes since being formally considered proficient in English and where they are struggling. I interviewed these students and explored their academic world as well as the social world within the school setting. At the conclusion of the study, I found that students are academically achieving success in …

De Las Escuelas De Estados Unidos A Las Escuelas De México: Desafíos De Política Educativa En El Marco De La Gran Expulsión [From Us Schools To Mexican Schools: Educational Policy Challenges In The Context Of The 'Great Expulsion'], Víctor Zúñiga, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This Spanish-language chapter, drawn from a larger book intended to advise Mexico's new national leadership on various issues related to migration, focuses on the steadily growing, overlapping populations of US-born and US-school-experienced children in youth now enrolled in Mexican schools. It notes that that population, numbering more than 600,000, is enrolled all across Mexico, albeit not equally distributed, with municipios (counties) with high international migration rates also hosting high return rates. Moreover it notes that this population's US school experiences were highly varied not only because of their different durations, but because schooling in urban Southern California varies from that …

When Policy Is Practice: Sde Effort To Help/Transform/Label Low-Performing Schools, April (Aprille) J. Phillips

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Policymakers have long been infatuated with education reform (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Stein, 2004), including at the state level (Lusi, 1997). Consistent with this longer tradition, the Nebraska State Legislature (a.k.a. the ‘Unicameral’) passed Legislative Bill 438 (LB 438) in 2014, providing a statutory outline for a new education accountability system for the state that authorized the State Board of Education (SBOE) to intervene priority schools through the work of an intervention.

This ethnographically informed, exploratory policy implementation study (Creswell, 2013; Hamann & Rosen, 2011; Levinson & Sutton, 2001; Patton, 2002; Schwandt, 2001; Shore & Wright, 1997; Stake, 1978) examines …

What Did You Learn In School Today?: The Recursive Relationship Between Media Coverage Of Public Education And The Crafting Of Education Policy, Elisabeth Reinkordt

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

How does the public learn about issues in contemporary education policy? While changes in the economics of the media industry have shifted the mass media landscape, local communities continue to receive information about the state of their local schools primarily through local newspapers or television stations. It is arguably the most important task of a local paper to provide education coverage, as the schools are often the primary beneficiary of local tax revenues. This thesis reviews the literature surrounding the interface between education reporting and the crafting of education policy, examines the way in which education stories are framed by …