Educational Sociology Commons^™

Pipeline To Failure: Social Inequality And The False Promises Of American Public Schooling, Adia Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My experience as a New York City public school student was absolutely electrifying, though filled with many trials. While my mother would have preferred to put me in private school, having access to some of the world’s greatest institutions and resources offered unique opportunities and exposures. The performing arts provided me with an outlet to express myself and build skills and confidence. In particular, dance education kept me occupied and disciplined in a large city full of danger. Every so often, I witnessed hostile, or even violent exchanges between students, or students and staff. While some of my schoolmates became …

Embody: The Transformation Of Intimate Knowledges Through Generations In Liberal Societies, Lisa Kronberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project aims to examine how intimate knowledges[1] are transferred and communicated between generations in Western, liberal societies. By ‘Intimate knowledges’ I mean to encompass diverse knowledge of emotional intelligence, sexual identity, and gender.

Intimate knowledges evolve with human life circle everywhere and at all times, but in Western popular discourse of today, are treated with confusion and repression; they thus emerge as a “loud display of simultaneously silent sexual desire.” (Fine and McClelland, 2006) I explore this tension through a critical, feminist lens that sheds light on the ways in which political economy creates cultural norms that …

Culture And Class In Marginalized Minority Educational Attainment, Alan R. Takeall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using a national sample of Black and Latino high school students, I ask: What is the relative impact of demographic factors, aspirations, adherence to an ideology of achievement, and sociocultural capital on future educational attainment? Additionally, how do poor students compare to their non-poor counterparts on these measures? Employing the Educational Longitudinal Study (2002 & 2012) and multivariate statistical techniques, this dissertation examines the role of cultural and other factors on the educational attainment of Black and Latino students and then explores the role of poverty on those outcomes.

In recent years educational reform efforts have placed considerable emphasis on …

The Value Of Value-Added: Science, Technology, And Policy In Educational Evaluation, Daniel Douglas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first decade of the 21^st century, researchers and policymakers in K-12 education began to focus on evaluating teacher and school performance based on students’ standardized test scores. One evaluative technique, value-added assessment (VAA), has been given particular attention. This research presents a comprehensive study of the theoretical, technical, historical and political dimensions VAA. Theoretically, the assumptions that underlie value-added diverge significantly from the observed operations of the schools and classrooms these models are supposed to evaluate. Technically, even if the theoretical assumptions are accepted, teachers’ actual value-added rankings are shown to be unstable across time periods and …

Dominance & Survivance: Urban Latino Communities And Education In Racial Neoliberal Urbanism, Edwin Mayorga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

U.S. Latino youth are as undereducated and underprepared today as they were in the 1960s, leading some to declare that there is a national “Latino education crisis” that is affecting the lives of millions. While this problem is national in scope there are multiple narratives that underpin this story. Of particular interest in this study is the intersection of urban Latino core communities and public schools. This dissertation is based on the Education in our Barrios Project, #BarrioEdProj, which is a digital, critical participatory action research study of urbanism and urban education in the Latino core community of East Harlem …

Cognitive And Affective Aspects Of Personality And Academic Procrastination: The Role Of Personal Agency, Flow, And Executive Function, Marc Graff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Academic procrastination is a prevalent issue that affects school-related and other experiences of many students, with some studies identifying as many as a third of college students sampled as‘severe’ procrastinators. This study investigated some of the factors previous studies have identified as potential contributors to procrastinating in the academic arena. In defining procrastination as a self-regulation issue, it is proposed that distinct executive function processes play a role in one’s efforts at academic task engagement and completion and resisting the tendency to procrastinate on these tasks. It is also proposed that the frequency with which one experiences ‘flow’, a state …

Understanding School And Interethnic Relations Of Mexican Immigrant Youth In A Post-Industrial Community, Roberto Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a dearth of literature on how immigrant groups understand minority groups in the United States, in particular, African-Americans. Increased technology and more rapid global movement in the 21st Century challenges 20th explanations of assimilation (Chicago School) and necessitates more research focused on how immigrant groups and racialized minorities interact to negotiate new worlds. This ethnographic research was conducted over thirteen months during 2012 and 2013 in a post-industrial neighborhood in the northeast that had been the site of 11 purported anti-bias attacks against Mexican immigrants during the summer of 2010. Research questions focused on: 1) Mexican immigrant youth …

Ecological Transitions Of U.S. Elementary School Students: Their Short– And Long–Term Educational Outlooks, Anthony Buttaro Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I identify different types of U.S. elementary school students experiencing ecological transitions and examine their characteristics. Then, I investigate the short-term and long-term educational outlooks of these ecological transition groups from birth through their 5^th-grade. The main research questions are: Which are the characteristics of students experiencing each type of ecological transition? What short–term associations exist between different types of ecological transitions and students’ academic achievement during the elementary school grades? What long–term associations exist between students’ ecological transition histories and their academic achievement growth?

To address these questions I used data from the public …

A Gift We Can't Keep Giving: An Analysis Of The Prevalence And Consequence Of Educators' Unpaid Labor, Jared Martin Hanneman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unpaid labor by educators is an important topic of social inquiry. With over half of all urban teachers leaving the profession within five years, it is of vital importance to examine the current U.S. educational system and take steps in minimizing the teacher burnout and attrition that is so costly to both students and the educational institutions. Most of the previous literature on unpaid labor focuses on domestic labor in the home rather than work performed by an employee above and beyond their ordinary contractual obligations - either by arriving early, staying late, or bringing work into the home. With …

Don't Push Me Over The (Knowl)Edge: The Social Correlates Of Latino High School Dropouts, Robert Charles Baskerville

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to the forecast of the US Census Bureau, Latinos are the largest, fastest-growing ethnic group within the United States today and will comprise the majority of the US labor force sometime during the mid-21st century. Yet today, the youth of this diverse segment of the population are plagued by alarmingly high high school dropout rates, about double that of African-Americans youth and triple that of white youth. This yawning disparity prompts the examination of the social conditions contributing to this social crisis. How do demographic, aspirational, school-level, and socioeconomic variables affect the decision that so many Latino youth make …

On The Same Page: The Strong Teacher Professional Community At The Heart Of A Good New York City Public Middle School, Nathan Warner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes how one high-functioning, public, non-selective middle school in New York City, the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS/MS348), consistently gets strong student achievement gains. For the past three years, WHEELS has ranked near the top of all middle schools on the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) School Progress Reports, which measure student academic growth and performance in each school. At the same time its students, assigned randomly and coming from the neighborhood catchment zone, rank in the bottom decile in terms of economic advantage, and the bottom quartile in terms of elementary school academic performance …

Teachers At Work: Factors Influencing Satisfaction, Retention And The Professional Well-Being Of Elementary And Secondary Educators, Patrick Edward O'Reilly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study has been to explore the question of how factors in the work lives of teachers influence their experience of workplace satisfaction, and how satisfaction influences retention in the teaching profession. This study had three specific goals: (1) to examine whether five specified factors that teachers' encounter as workers influence their professional satisfaction, (2) to explore whether teacher satisfaction influences retention in the profession and (3) to determine whether school level taught plays a role in degrees of satisfaction a teacher experiences.

Data was collected over a period of five months, using a survey administered to …

On Becoming A Teacher (Or Not): Students Of Color's Perceptions Of Teachers' Work, Consideration Of Teaching As A Career, And Implications For Diversifying The Teaching Force, Amanda Lee Winkelsas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The racial/ethnic demographics of the American public school teaching force stand in contrast to the racial/ethnic demographics of the students and families who are served by our public school system. In an effort to understand the racial/ethnic demographic disparities between the teaching force and the public school student population, this study explores the perceptions of students of color as they relate to teachers' work, authority, and power. Utilizing a participatory, mixed methods approach in one public, urban, college preparatory school, I analyze the experiences, cultural models, and knowledges that shape students' perceptions of teachers' work and their own consideration of …

Renewal And Disposability: Projects And Narratives Of Development And Dispossession In The "New" New Orleans, Allison Padilla-Goodman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When much of the physical landscape of New Orleans was destroyed with Hurricane Katrina, expedited change and a need to redefine the city's future rushed in. The "new" New Orleans would be decisively different: it would be change-oriented, optimistic, and a leader in progressive reform movements. Discourse around post-Katrina New Orleans was focused on making New Orleans "better than before" and becoming a national leader for cutting-edge urban renewal. On-the-ground change mirrored this discourse, as the city's institutional landscape was dismantled and reconfigured along lines of privatization and newness as the trend of "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey, 2005) blanketed the …

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …