Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

In My Softest & Most Liberatory Dreams: Reflections On Holding Complexity & Decentering Whiteness, Richard C. Clark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As the world contends with a global pandemic, climate catastrophes, white supremacy, coloniality, and concurrent genocides my attention splinters. In an act of futurity, or future making, I ask myself: What is needed to move from this place toward softer, more liberatory futures? This body of work finds its answer in exploring two interrelated concepts: Decentering Whiteness and Holding Complexity. Decentering Whiteness is the process of working toward a future where all the personal, spiritual, educational, epistemological, social, structural, psychological, financial, and systemic ties to white supremacy are unraveled. Holding Complexity weaves together knowledges of care, accountability, intersectionality, and …

Culturally And Socially Responsive Teacher Professional Learning At The American Museum Of Natural History, Jessica Correa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project consists of a series of professional learning sessions to support teachers in their implementation of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-SE) using the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a resource and case study. Through the lens of Historically Responsive Literacy, the series also seeks to reestablish social science as a critical element of natural history for teachers. This series can help teachers see the museum as not only a place to explore life and physical science, but also a place to explore identity, social/emotional development, cultural studies and American History. The project includes resources and directions for …

Equity Among Equity Workers: Public Service Motivation In An Educational Nonprofit Organization, Russell C. West Jr

Theses and Dissertations

What opportunities and challenges arise when an equity-focused educational organization aims to support employee’s individual equity practices while simultaneously developing the organization’s equity practice? In this study, employees of a non-profit educational organization were asked what rationales and expectations played a role in their decision to volunteer in an equity working group. Their responses were used to understand whether Perry’s (2000) process theory of Public Service Motivation helped describe their decision. In a second round of interviews, employees were asked what outcomes they perceived came from their participation. These responses were used to understand whether the outcomes aligned with those …

Diversity Still Matters: School-Level Racial Diversity, Poverty And Performance Of New York City Public Schools, Byunghwa Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the last few decades, schools in New York City (NYC) have experienced great demographic changes due to the massive influx of various ethnic and racial groups. Although the race and ethnicity makeup of NYC is 42% white, 29% Hispanic or Latino, 24% Black or African American and 14% Asian, 74% of Black and Hispanic students attend a school with less than 10 percent white students, while 34% of white students attend a school with more than half white peers. Also, more than 60% of Hispanic and Black students are attending schools where more than 75% of peer students experience …

Fostering Expertise, Confidence, And Passion In Writing Education: How A Common Sense, Nonbinary Education Policy May Serve To Enrich Teachers’ Writing Lives, Shrink The Divide Between Literacy Educators, And Finally Improve Literacy Among New York City Students, Rebecca I. Wallace-Segall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I examine the ongoing youth literacy crisis in New York City and, along with it, two long-standing, opposing education policies—progressive and traditional—that have sought to address it. I argue that resisting dogmatic adherence to one or the other of these approaches, coupled with teacher-centered professional development opportunities that emphasize educators’ reconnection to the personal experience of writing, will improve classroom writing education goals. Over the course of a decade and a half, I co-designed a new educational framework that combines and elaborates upon the strengths of both approaches; over the past year, I co-designed a teacher-centered professional development opportunity for …

Marginalized Communities Are Facing The Brunt Of Student Homelessness, Alicia Gajraj S. Gajraj

Capstones

Headline: Marginalized communities are facing the brunt of student homelessness.

My capstone is a news article focusing on the rising number of students who are homeless in New York City. It explores how advocacy groups and active community members are working to help those in marginalized communities experiencing homelessness at higher rates.

Data: Data collection on the number of students unhoused in the past 11 years was done on Datawrapper. The numbers were found on NYSTEACHS.ORG.

Keywords: Student homelessness, Shelter system, Unhoused, Advocates for Children, Mckinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, Schools, Education

Here is the link to my capstone: https://gajrajalicia57.wixsite.com/website/general-8

The International Academy Of Language And Culture: The Global (Pre)K-12 Charter School Network, Dree-El Simmons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The International Academy of Language and Culture (IALC) is a charter school based on the original concept of charter schools by Ray Budde and Albert Shanker, as an academic environment dedicated and designed to improving the educational outcomes for its students through innovative pedagogy. Committed to American (and global) education reform, the IALC incorporates elements from higher education into the early childhood and adolescent settings. We accomplish this by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach in our language and culture-based program.

The IALC is a multilingual, full-immersion program. Food Studies (including culinary arts), the Arts, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Martial Arts …

Colonial Education: Puerto Ricans And The Carlisle Indian School, Progenitors Of The Mythic Identity, Melissa Swinea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

‘GOD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES’ reads a subheading of The Red Man –a historic periodical memorializing the tune of 19th century Americana with references to Godliness and its connection to Indianness and ostentatious capitalism in a canon of school newspapers. The Red Man was the staple periodical of the Carlisle Indian Industrial Institute published monthly and declared “in the interest of Indian education and civilization” for the annual price of 50 cents[1] The subject and recipients of The Red Man would also include 193 Puerto Rican students sent to Carlisle through the U.S.’s campaign to Americanize the Caribbean …

Unraveling The Double-Bind: An Investigation Of Black And Latina Women In Stem, Katlyn L. Milless

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Civil rights activist Robert P. Moses was a driving force in defining equitable dissemination of quality science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education as an act of social justice. My work borrows this frame to highlight access to STEM education as a civil rights issue and to emphasize the importance of taking a social justice approach to interventions for those who experience intersecting systems of oppression (i.e., Black and Latina women), and for whom previous intervention efforts have not adequately addressed. Ameliorating racial and gender disparities through fostering psychological safety (e.g., belonging) in STEM fields has been a substantive focus …

Indigenous Mexicans In New York City: Immigrant Integration, Language Use, And Identity Formation, Leslie A. Martino-Velez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As indigenous Mexican immigrants migrate, settle, and raise families in the United States, parents, particularly women, and their children increasingly have contact with community institutions, such as schools. Despite their growing numbers in U.S. schools, indigenous children, youth, and their parents are often invisible due to their ethnolinguistic identities and undocumented status. Understanding what parents do to help their children is essential to understanding the first generation's integration and their children, the second generation.

To better understand this, I conducted an ethnographic research study at a bilingual Head Start program in New York City, in East Harlem, where many undocumented …

Por Ellas: A Latina’S Autoethnography On Emotions, Achievement And Agentic Learning, Ivonne Barreras

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, students of Spanish-speaking descent classified as Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx attending public school districts continue to demonstrate alarmingly high academic underachievement and dropout rates. Standards-based learning environments and related assessments tend to marginalize people whose lived realities already make the prospect of achievement daunting. In other words, people living amid high-risk factors, including low educational and occupational aspirations, health, or family-related absenteeism, counterculture or early pregnancy, are often among those whose decision to drop out is most often influenced by social and academic experiences (Rumberger, 2011). Research on neuroplasticity and mindfulness explains the influence emotions have …

The Lopez Effect Remixed: The Significance Of Mattering Through A Hip-Hop Lens In Education And Beyond, Kashema Hutchinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this dissertation is to examine the theoretical frameworks of mattering (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981; Schlossberg, 1989; Love, 2018) in traditional and non-traditional spaces through a Hip-hop lens. When mattering is applied to marginalized groups, it centers them to a certain extent. In my dissertation, I examine how Dr. Nadia Lopez, the former principal of junior high school, Mott Hall Bridges Academy (MHBA), employed mattering in her holistic approach to education. Her dedication to her students, faculty and staff went viral on the popular blog Humans of New York in January 2015. Lopez’s commitment is to “open a …

Reimagining Post-Secondary Training, Community College, And Welfare Supports, Aaron Azerad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper seeks to study the income patterns at the sub-bachelorette level through community colleges and workforce training programs. Using 2018 U.S. Census PUMA microdata, this thesis not only explores which fields of study, industries, and occupations have a sufficient number of observations to determine whether they provide incomes which are commensurate with a middle class livelihood but, also whether these jobs are plentiful in number.

The second goal is to evaluate the effects of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (the Clinton era welfare reform) and how it has influenced Giuliani era ‘work requirement’ initiatives tied …

Class Act: Symbolic Revolution And The Meaning Of College In Prison, Ruth E. Delaney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The United States has gone through two transformations in the meaning of higher education in prison and the value of access for people in prison in the last 50 years and is now moving towards a third. The establishment of Pell grants in 1972 allowed for widespread access to higher education in prison, while the removal of those grants in 1994 effectively ended access. Federal policy makers are now poised to restore access to Pell grants to a broad swath of people in prison (Green, 2019; Krieghbaum, April 22, 2019; Krieghbaum, October 11, 2019). In this paper, I interpret the …

School Recess And Changes To Children's Play Opportunities In New York City, Keyonna Hayes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The policy, No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 in US public schools was designed to improve how children learn and test in schools, but it has resulted in the decline or removal of recess from most schools. This thesis examines two important issues. The first issue is to assess the play opportunities that public elementary schools offer to children, in terms of both the time available for recess and the quality of the spaces and resources for play during recess. The second issue is to learn, alongside the question of the quality of school recess, how parents’ work …

Journalism Through Learning Design, Geoff Decker

Capstones

Abstract

At its core, journalism is a civic enterprise with a mission to help citizens better understand their world and communities. Fulfilling this lofty mission in today’s digital media landscape poses new and evolving challenges, but it also presents a unique opportunity to reexamine the relationship between storytellers and their audiences. Advancements in the learning sciences in recent decades offer important insights into how the mind works. In teaching and learning, pedagogical experts and practitioners increasingly utilize these insights to refine and implement instructional strategies that increase student engagement, motivation, and learning. This capstone project aims to establish a framework …

The Effects Of Eighth Years Of Compulsory Schooling Enforcement In Turkey, Muhammed Tumay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that cover Education, Labor and Health Economics.

Chapter 1. Impacts of Compulsory Schooling Reform on Higher Education and Intergenerational Educational Mobility: we estimate the effects of an exogenous increase in mandatory schooling (5 years to 8 years of schooling), as a result of a change in compulsory schooling law, on higher education, potential intergenerational educational mobility, and labor market outcomes among women in Turkey. Our empirical strategy addresses a well-known identification problem where women’s years of schooling are endogenous to individual characteristics. The Law took effect in 1997, whereby girls born before January …

Thrown Off Course: School Suspension And Its Consequences For Students’ Educational Trajectories And Outcomes, Celina Cuevas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Purpose: The literature on exclusionary school discipline has repeatedly documented disparities in its use and its relationship to various negative outcomes, causing the use of suspensions to become a pressing concern in the United States. The goal of this dissertation is to add this body of literature by being the first to examine the educational trajectories youth take after first being suspended, and how the effect of school punishment on trajectories may be more severe for subgroups of students disproportionately affected by school discipline and often underserved in school settings.

Methods: New York City Department of Education data is used …

Economics Of Higher Education Productivity, Uchenna K. Oparah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How does spending affect academic outcomes in higher education institutions? Postsecondary schools incur costs to provide services to its student body. In this study, I introduce multiple outcome variables, a two-stage production function, and current-year expenditures on core services to evaluate how school spending affects academic outcomes.

The empirical analysis includes 28 group sample parameter estimates from four outcome variables, the pooled sample, and group samples for each of six sectors. The fixed effects/instrumental variable (FE-IV) instructional expenditure parameter estimates were positive for 20 of the 28 group samples. The sign and size of the estimated academic output effects varied …

Essays On The Education Production Function, Daniel Dench

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters which test interventions along several dimensions of the education production function. In chapter one, I run a field experiment comparing the effect of two interventions, (1) an email nudge telling students similar problems to their homework will be on the exam and (2) grading the homework, on attempting homework. I find both interventions increase homework attempts: nudging by 3 percentage points and grading by 72 percentage points. Instrumenting for the effect of attempting the homework using grading, I find that attempting problems from the homework leads to an increase in the probability of getting …

Felony Disenfranchisement: Factors Relating To Support For Restoration, Alexis K. Karpf

Student Theses

Felony Disenfranchisement, a collateral consequence, strips justice-involved individuals of their voting rights. While this policy is enacted in 48 states and the District of Columbia, a majority of community members are unaware of its existence. The current study used three hypotheses to guide its research about how education about disenfranchisement policy impacts a community member's opinion:1) Participants exposed to information about the effects of disenfranchisement will be more supportive of enfranchisement than those in the control condition; 2) Participants who receive the vignette featuring the White justice-involved individual will indicate a higher level of support for enfranchisement compared to those …

Spatial Distribution Of Chinese Language Education And Historical Development Of Chinese Language Pedagogy In Higher Education In The United States, Jing Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project includes two major components: an interactive digital map that displays the geographical distribution of Chinese language programs in colleges and universities in the United States, their program starting years, the types of such universities and colleges, and their names and states; and a multimedia essay on the evolution of Chinese language pedagogy in colleges and universities in the United States. Data has been collected on the program start year, school names, states where schools are located, school types, and whether the school had been funded by two federal sponsored language programs: the National Defense Education Act in …

Class Matters: School Affluence And Other Predictors Of Attainment For Wealthy And Poor Students, Alison Brockhouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public schools in the United States are becoming increasingly segregated by socioeconomic status. Though the educational consequences of socioeconomic segregation are well researched, segregation is often ignored or exacerbated by education reform. To learn more about the wider implications of socioeconomic segregation, this study utilizes theoretical frameworks derived from Max Weber’s theory of social stratification to analyze over 10,000 students’ experiences from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) 2002, 2004, and 2012 waves of data collection. More specifically, this research explores the impact of attending an affluent high school on long-term educational attainment. It finds …

Transforming Through Power: Teachers And The Negotiation Of Authority In Schools, Madhu Narayanan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Schools are unique institutions where structural and cultural dynamics shape the actions of humans. Teachers work within structures of power to establish themselves as legitimate figures of authority worthy of the right to command respect. Such efforts are complicated by the multi-faceted and swirling relationships of power that exist everywhere in schools, defining and guiding individuals. In this study, I interview and observe the practice of seven secondary teachers working in New York City public schools. All in their third year of teaching, they were at an interesting time in their development, not novice teachers and not quite veteran. Using …

The Influences Of Education, Antisocial Behavior, And Involvement In The Criminal Justice System On Adult Legal Understanding, Lily Alpers, Mark Fondacaro

Student Theses

The current study examined the legal understanding and decision-making capacities of young adults compared to older adults. Furthermore, the current study examined these two age groups on the basis of a history of criminal justice involvement, antisocial behavior, and education level, in order to determine whether these variables also affect legal understanding and decision-making. One hundred and one subjects participated in this study, grouped by age into younger adults (18-34 years old) and older adults (35 years and older). The results of the current study found that participants with the lowest levels of education performed more poorly on the measure …

Essays On Paid Family Leave In The United States, Beila R. Leboeuf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: The first chapter is a literature survey that reviews the empirical research conducted on paid family leave in the United States. This chapter summarizes the documented benefits of paid family leave on women's labor force participation, leave usage, and children's health. Also, evidence that suggests potentially harmful effects of paid family leave is discussed. Possible directions for future research are explored, and the chapter concludes by considering the implementation of a national paid family leave program in the United States.

Chapter 2: The second chapter replicates and extends the results of Rossin-Slater et al. (2013). The purpose of …

Adults Formerly In Foster Care Narrate Schooling Experiences, Danielle Walker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Roughly 400,000 children are in foster care in the United States (Lash, 2017, p. 5). These youth are less likely to graduate high school than their non-foster peers (Barnow et al., 2015). While several barriers contribute to the poor educational outcomes for children in foster care, research has noted that the label “foster child” is associated with negative connotations and differential teacher treatment (Altshuler, 2003; Finkelstein, Wamsley, & Miranda, 2002). In spite of such observations, little research has emphasized the perspectives of those in foster care. To fill this gap, this qualitative study posed the following question: How do adults …

Finding The Public: Models Of Interaction Between Curatorial And Education Departments In Three American Encyclopedic Museums, Liam Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Curatorial and education departments have coexisted for the last half century in American art museums, and have often had differing attitudes about who the museum is for and how best to convey the current and historical meaning of the works they display. This results from trends and transformations in the field, which have recently yielded an increased attention on broadening the definition of the public that the museum serves. This thesis examines interactions between curatorial and education departments in three encyclopedic art museums across the United States, in order to better understand how meaningful collaboration can be fostered between these …

The Equal Right To Sing: The American Zeitgeist And Its Implications For Music Education, Youngeun Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to music educators and proponents of arts education, music education in U.S. public schools seems to be in jeopardy. This thesis brings attention to several issues in current music education. It is a case study of music education in New York City public elementary schools. First, it shows that music education is not equally distributed to all students in the public-school system and is especially unequal among elementary schools. Next, it investigates possible causes for this inequality, from the current system’s limitations to more fundamental causes including the cultural perception of music among the U.S. public. The consequences of …

Kinder Carnage, Talib Visram

Capstones

In the wake of school shootings, including Parkland, states and school districts have scrambled to protect against threats. But faced with no federal focus on gun control and little funding, schools have to make tough safety choices. Some have adopted novelty security gadgets; others have discussed arming teachers and even giving children tools to defend themselves. To some, this is the ideal solution; the answer to violence is more violence. And so, some schools are starting to resemble military camps. With reporting from a security conference in Florida, and a military camp for kids in Kentucky, this story takes a …