Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Implementation Fidelity And Outcomes Of School Discipline Policy: Three Studies From Arkansas, Kaitlin Anderson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, exclusionary discipline, including out-of-school suspension (OSS) and expulsion, is disproportionately administered to students of color and special education students. Exclusionary discipline is associated with lower academic achievement and higher risk of dropout, grade retention, and involvement in the juvenile justice system, but there is little causal evidence on this topic.

This dissertation reports on three analyses on school discipline, using administrative data from Arkansas public schools. The first study estimates racial disproportionalities in the use of exclusionary discipline. Controlling for reported behavior and student characteristics, my co-author and I find that Black students are 2.4 times …

The Diffusion Of Veterans Treatment Courts: An Examination Of Political, Social, And Economic Determinants At The County Level, Eric D. Button

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 2008, leading U.S. counties adopted innovative treatment courts specializing in the unique needs of veterans with substance abuse and other legal issues. Since then, pro-veteran advocacy has aided in the continued diffusion of additional veterans treatment courts (VTCs), with more than 300 county and state-level VTCs currently operating in 46 states across the country. Though the lens through which veterans are viewed may be positive in the public eye, institutional support for these wayward veterans appears to vary across levels of government; therefore, while some posit the increased social utility of budget-friendly VTCs, others suggest that VTCs offer favorable …

Arkansas Teacher Salaries, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

This brief examines teacher salaries in Arkansas. Using data publicly available from the Arkansas Department of Education, we examine how teacher salaries compare to the nation and surrounding states. Further analyses examine differences in teacher salary within and between the regions of Arkansas. We identify the district factors most related to and make recommendations for utilizing this information.

Comprehensive Analysis Of Arkansas Teacher Salaries: State, Region, And District, Katherine M. Kopotic, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Arkansas Education Reports

School funding has been an area of contention in the courts of nearly every state. Many of these court cases have challenged the constitutionality of state funding formulas, arguing the funding system was inadequate or inequitable because poor urban or rural districts often faced a disadvantage in garnering tax dollars for education. Specific to Arkansas, in the 1983 decision Dupree v. Alma School District, the Arkansas Supreme Court declared the state’s funding system was not meeting its constitutional requirements.

Spatial Analysis Of U.S. Terrorism Incidents, Summer Jackson, Katie Ratcliff, Brent L. Smith

Research Projects

This research brief represents an overview of basic spatial patterns across a sample of terrorism incidents in the United States. While research concerning characteristics of incidents has received some study, the geospatial patterns of these incidents remains largely unexamined. Logically, different ideological categories of terrorism may lend themselves to different spatial patterns and preferences for target distance. In addition, the distance required to perpetrate an incident may affect the success rate of an attack. Terrorists who must travel further to engage in preparatory activity such as surveillance or transporting weapons may stand an increased chance of failure due to human …

Alternative Measures Of Noncognitive Skills And Their Effect On Retirement Preparation And Financial Capability, Gema Zamarro

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

Social science, more than ever, is drawing upon the insights of personality psychology. Though researchers now know that noncognitive skills and personality traits, such as conscientiousness, grit, self-control, or a growth mindset could be important for life outcomes, they struggle to find reliable measures of these skills. Self-reports are often used for analysis, but these measures have been found to be affected by important biases. We study the validity of innovative, more robust measures of noncognitive skills based on performance tasks. Our first proposed measure is an adaptation, for the adult population, of the Academic Diligence Task (ADT) developed and …

Charter School Funding: Inequity In New York City, Larry D. Maloney, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

Charter schools have been a part of the educational landscape in New York City since the first New York charter school opened in Harlem in 1999. We define a charter school as any school that (1) operates based on a formal charter in place of direct school district management and (2) reports its finances independently from the school district. We define all other public schools as district schools. According to the New York State Department of Education (NYSDoE), New York City was home to 1,575 district and 183 charter schools in Fiscal Year 2014 (FY2014). Seven percent of all public …

The Academic Effects Of Private School Choice: Summary Of Final Year Results From Experimental Studies, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

Study overview

The Urban Morphology Of Northwest Arkansas: A Geospatial Analysis, Jason Mccollum

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on the impacts of transport infrastructure is limited, and most of it is either focused on

rural areas or on developed areas before modern geospatial technologies were available. This study aimed

to fill this gap in transport research by providing a holistic look at the regional changes that occurred due to

new transport infrastructure construction in Northwest Arkansas between 1980 and 2011.

The National Land Cover Database was used to create a time-series of land cover across the

region between 1992 and 2011. These data were then used to predict future growth in the region.

Additionally, growth patterns of …

Simulation Modeling Approach For Evaluating A Solution Designed To Alleviate The Congestion Of Passenger Flow At The Composure Area Of Security Checkpoints, Maria Luisa Janer Rubio

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In a previous study, we found that replacing the exit roller of a security checkpoint lane for a continuously circulating conveyor could potentially increase the throughput of passengers by over 28% while maintaining the TSA security-waiting time limit (Janer and Rossetti 2016). This study intends to expand this previous effort by investigating the impact of this circulating conveyor on the secondary screening related processes. Leone and Liu (2011) found that imposing a limit on the x-ray screening time, and diverting any item exceeding this limit to secondary screening, could decrease the waiting time by 43%. Our objective is to verify …

The Bicycle, The Unsuitable Substitute:A Feasibility Study Based In Fayetteville, Ar Using A Bicycle As A Year-Round Replacement For An Automobile, Jamey Voorhees

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Can a bicycle can be used in place of an automobile for everyday transportation and commuting needs? Fayetteville, Arkansas is a bicycle friendly and they plan continue to expand the current trail system improve other components in the future. Alternative transportation forms like the bicycle are important but only if bikes are integrated into traffic which needs to be done in some way that all involved understand their place in the system. By actively participating in this system I have attempted to show that a bicycle is just not feasible as a form of daily transportation in a city like …

Evaluating The Policies That Lead To Stem Educational Attainment At The University Of Arkansas For Transfer Students, Bryan Hill

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The US has a critical need to produce more STEM graduates and that need is exponentially more critical in Arkansas. Arkansas currently ranks last in the percent of STEM degrees conferred compared to overall degrees awarded. Students intending to pursue a STEM four-year college degree who start at a two-year college are significantly less likely to succeed in earning that degree. Arkansas passed Acts 672 and 182 aimed at strengthening the success of students who transfer from two-year colleges into four-year institutions. This study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the Acts by determining if the University of Arkansas (UA) …

Swedish Social Welfare And Its Application To American Welfare Systems, Ben Wilson Galloway

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Swedish Social Welfare and its Application to American Welfare Systems concerns itself with the issue of determining the origins of the modern Swedish social welfare system. Additionally, the causes behind the formation of the system are evaluated for their relevancy concerning the formation of the American welfare system. Multiple areas of study are considered, including racial impacts, economic factors, sociological impactors, and demographic variables.

Essays On Common-Pool Resources: Evaluation Of Water Management And Conservation Programs, Kuatbay K. Bektemirov

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three essays that examine water management and conservation programs through the context of sustainable development. These essays are distinct case studies of national, state and local policies. Their common approach is that they all use common-pool resources theory to generate specific recommendations for policymaking and water management.

The first essay explores opportunities for developing policy measures to prevent the collapse of the vital irrigation infrastructure in the Aral Sea region. The paper looks at the economic efficiency of various policy options, impacts on the country’s agricultural sector, and the regulations needed to make the cost-sharing …

Understanding Discourse Transition, Taylor Weeks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work is intended to explore and analyze the process of transition from one discourse to another different discourse.

2016 Northwest Arkansas Education Report Card, Sarah Mckenzie, Gary Ritter

Education Report Card

This report card presents a regional overview of districts in Benton and Washington counties as well as key performance indicators for each of the 15 traditional public school districts and 5 public charter schools.

You Can’T Always Get What You Want: Using “Broken Lotteries” To Check The Validity Of Charter School Evaluations Using Matching Designs, Leesa M. Foreman, Kaitlin P. Anderson, Gary W. Ritter, Patrick J. Wolf

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

We consider situations in which public charter school lotteries are neither universally conducted nor consistently documented. Such lotteries produce “broken” Randomized Control Trials, but provide opportunities to assess the internal validity of quasi-experimental research designs. Here, we present the results of a statewide charter school evaluation using a broad-based student matching evaluation design, and run two additional analyses using the charter application wait-lists as robustness checks. Our additional models, which address concerns of self-selection by using only charter applicants as matched comparison students, yield similar effect estimates and thus provide support for the use of matching designs in charter school …

How Has The Louisiana Scholarship Program Affected Students? A Comprehensive Summary Of Effects After Three Years, Jonathan N. Mills, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

School choice reforms comprise a broad category of policies aimed at improving public education through the introduction of market forces that expand customer choice and competition between schools. Here we summarize our research to date on the effects of a large statewide school voucher initiative, the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), and draw the following conclusions: • Overall, participating in the LSP had no statistically significant impact on student English Language Arts (ELA) or math scores after using an LSP scholarship for three years. • The subgroup of students who were lower achieving before applying to the program did show significant …

The Effects Of The Louisiana Scholarship Program On Student Achievement After Three Years, Jonathan N. Mills, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly-funded vouchers to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line, allowing them to enroll in participating private schools. Established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012. This report examines the experimental effects of using an LSP scholarship to enroll in one’s first choice private school on student achievement in the three years following the program’s expansion. Large negative achievement effects in the first year of the program appear to have been followed by improvement in the …

Supplying Choice: An Analysis Of School Participation Decisions In Voucher Programs In Dc, Indiana, And Louisiana, Yujie Sude, Corey A. Deangelis, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

Since school voucher funds are public, policymakers fiercely debate how those funds should be spent. A goal of many decision-makers is to ensure that every private school option is “highquality” through program accountability regulations. Private schools, however, have a say in the matter. They can decide whether or not to participate in a private school choice program and likely factor the type and level of program regulations into that decision. We examine the impacts of private school regulations on the supply-side of voucher programs in D.C., Indiana, and Louisiana. Private schools value their autonomy. Therefore, we expect that regulatory burden …

Special Education Identification In The Louisiana Scholarship Program, Sivan Tuchman, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

The debate over school vouchers continues as more states offer government dollars to fund private schooling for students as a method of improving choice and quality in K-12 education. Previous research in the charter school sector has found that special education enrollment discrepancies between charters and traditional public schools is likely due to a mixture in parental choice making, differential identification practices, and the removal of special education labels. This study is the first experimental analysis of the impact of a enrollment in a private school choice program on special education identification and de-identification. Using data for almost 2,000 students …

Outstanding Educational Performance Awards: Highlighting High-Growth Arkansas Schools, 2017, Charlene A. Reid, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Arkansas Education Reports

This section highlights [middle] schools across the state whose students demonstrated high growth on the Arkansas ACT Aspire exams. The ACT Aspire was administered to students in grades [5] through [8] in April 2017 in Math and ELA courses which include English, Writing, and Reading. Each table in this section presents the Top 20 schools for the noted subject area and school level. In addition, these tables include the region in which the schools are located, the grades served at the school, the weighted achievement score, and the content growth score in that particular subject. The level of the schools, …

Charter School Funding: Inequity In The City, Patrick J. Wolf, Larry D. Maloney, Jay F. May, Corey A. Deangelis

School Choice Demonstration Project

Public charter schools are a growing part of K-12 education. Charter schools are public schools that are granted operational autonomy by their authorizing agency in return for a commitment to achieve specific performance goals. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are free to students and overseen by the state. Unlike traditional public schools, however, most charters are open to all students who wish to apply, regardless of where they live. If a charter school is over-subscribed, usually random lotteries determine which students will be admitted. Most charter schools are independent of the traditional public school district in which they operate.

School Discipline In Arkansas, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

This brief examines school discipline practices and outcomes in Arkansas. Using data publicly available from the Arkansas Department of Education, we examine state-wide discipline trends, summarize the analysis on school-level data demonstrating disparities in student discipline, and make recommendations for utilizing this information.

Education Policy Factors Contributing To Special Education Identification, Sivan Tuchman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vital to the discussion around special education is the topic of identification and de-identification as having a disability that impacts one’s education. Variation in special education enrollment across geographic locations, racial groups, and schooling sectors causes researchers to question the process and incentives involved in identification and de-identification. The studies that comprise this dissertation aim to analyze the effects that educational policies have on special education identification and subsequent enrollment. Specifically, the studies cover the special education finance, school accountability, and school choice policies.

The special education finance reform effort of switching from a prospective to a capitation funding system …

Employees Communicating Within Transportation And Logistics Organizations: What Studying Stress And Acts Of Incivility In The Workplace Reveals About The Industry, Elizabeth Munyak Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project investigates the relationship of workplace stress and workplace incivility in the context of transportation and logistics organizations. Informal, one-on-one interviews with transportation and logistics operations office employees are conducted to answer this study’s research questions that examine the commonality, perceived norms, and perceived emotional and physical effects of workplace incivility in response to stress within the transportation and logistics workplace. Using grounded theory analysis, it is revealed that acts of incivility amongst transportation and logistics operations office employees communicate the conflict occurring at the industry, organization, and workplace levels of the transportation and logistics industry. The ultimate …

An Evaluation Of Arkansas’ Developmental Coursework Policy At Postsecondary Institutions, Evan Thomas Rhinesmith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an evaluation of the impacts of assignment to and enrollment in postsecondary remedial coursework in the state of Arkansas. In this study, I evaluate the impacts of the policy on students’ academic achievement and attainment as measured by graduation rates and persistence. I include subgroup analyses of these outcomes to determine whether there are heterogeneous effects for students enrolling at two-year or four-year institutions, institutions with the highest remediation rates, and students of different races, genders, and baseline achievement. Like previous evaluations of remediation in other settings, the results here point to negative impacts of remediation on …

2016 Arkansas Education Report Card, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary Ritter

Education Report Card

In addition to performance on annual assessments, we present information on the state’s student growth on these assessments, as well as high school graduation rates, school discipline, National Board Certified Teachers, and school finance. The data are intended to provide a snapshot of K-12 education in our state.

National Board Certified Teacher Incentive Bonuses: Senate Bill 555, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

National Board Certification is a voluntary process that, according to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, certifies that they “have developed and demonstrated the advanced knowledge, skills, and practices required of an outstanding educator.” Currently, National Board Certified (NBC) teachers in an Arkansas public school receive an annual bonus of $5,000 for up to 10 years. In this brief, we examine NBC in Arkansas and Senate Bill 555, which proposes the modification and enhancement of NBC incentive bonuses for teachers receiving certification after January 2018.

Outstanding Educational Performance Awards: Highlighting High Achieving Arkansas Schools, 2016, Charlene A. Reid, Gary W. Ritter

Arkansas Education Reports

This section highlights high-achieving schools across Arkansas based on the ACT Aspire examinations in Math, English Language Arts (ELA) and Science for the 20115-16 academic year. For these awards, we consider schools that serve free or reduced lunch to at least 66% of the student body.