DIGITAL ACCESS TO

In the 30 years following the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983), states have struggled to create effective systems of teacher leadership and compensation. Despite decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, states’ efforts have yielded limited results. In January 2013, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad and Director of Education Jason Glass unveiled a legislative proposal to build a statewide system of teacher leadership and compensation designed to end this futility and re-imagine the teaching profession in Iowa. This capstone describes my role in facilitating a task force of educational leaders and in crafting their ideas into a report that formed the basis of the Governor’s proposal. It also describes the iterative feedback process and financial modeling I engaged in to help develop the system. The results of these efforts included an actionable, research-aligned, consensus-based report; a financial model that informed the development of the teacher leadership and compensation system; and a politically and financially viable legislative package. This project generated important lessons for the Iowa Department of Education in engaging in future policy efforts, for other states interested in creating a similar system of teacher leadership and compensation, and for my own development as an educational leader.

Oakland Unified School District, under pressure from community organizations and the Office for Civil Rights, signed a Voluntary Resolution Plan in September of 2012 to eliminate disproportionality in exclusionary discipline, particularly for African American male students. This plan built on the previous work of Superintendent Tony Smith who had spoken of the “moral imperative” of equity since becoming the first Board appointed superintendent following seven years of state control of the Oakland schools. Now in its second year, the Voluntary Resolution Plan has been highly successful in reducing the overall number of suspension and expulsions in Oakland and is garnering national attention. In my project I had the opportunity to co-lead the VRP team in Oakland with Chris Chatmon, the Executive Director of African American Male Achievement. As co-lead I have had the opportunity to collaborate with leaders across departments as we have designed the next steps of implementation, as well as the ability to lead a listening campaign with principals to better understand the conditions and reality of the work to transform school culture and climate in Oakland. This provided me a unique vantage point to help understand the complex theory of action in play in Oakland, what aspects of that plan have driven positive results so far, and what challenges may lay ahead for the next stages of implementation. This Capstone seeks to add to a growing body of work that suggests that a viable alternative to Zero Tolerance policies exists and calls for additional study of the programs and conditions in Oakland that have led to these positive results. How can we eliminate disproportionality in punitive school discipline for African American students? This question was at the heart of the launch of the Children’s Defense Fund in 1973 and its groundbreaking report, “School Suspensions: Are They Helping Children.” The question remains even more urgent in 2014, when the percentage of African-American students suspended on an annual basis has doubled in the last 38 years and represents a dramatically disproportionate rate of 3.5 times that of white students (U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2012). Not only has progress not been made, but the historical trend towards “Zero Tolerance” discipline policies (Skiba, 2000) has significantly increased the problem. According to Skiba, approximately 95% of suspensions are for minor and non-violent offenses like repeated small disruptions, defiance, or being late to class. The correlative impacts of these suspensions on education and life outcomes are devastating: According to research by Balfanz, Byrnes, & Fox (2013), a student suspended even one time in ninth grade has double the chance of dropping out of school, rising from 16% to 32%. A matched cohort study (Arcia, 2006) found that students who had been suspended even one time fell behind by an additional two years of reading in comparison with the cohort group (over a two year period). In a recent study (Toldson & Ebanks, 2012), black students’ response patterns reflected a dynamic whereby school safety significantly diminished the overall level of empathy and respect that students perceived from teachers, and punishment from teachers significantly reduced students' grades. (Toldson & Lewis, 2012) There is a strong connection between out of school suspension and entry into the juvenile justice system (Losen & Skiba, 2010). In summary, exclusionary discipline results in lower academic performance, a higher dropout rate, and increased entry into the prison system. All of these outcomes have significant costs not just for the individuals involved, but for society as a whole, possibly as high as $750,000 per dropout over a lifetime (Belfield, Levin, & Rosen, 2012). Over the past two decades, promising practices have emerged as alternatives to suspension. These include programs like Positive Behavior Support (PBS) / Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS), and Restorative Justice (RJ), as well as a number of other programs and approaches across the country. Communities across the United States, from Baltimore to Cleveland to Oakland, are attempting to interrupt the punitive dialogue, even as “Zero Tolerance” discipline policies remain the norm and exclusionary school culture work at charter schools gets defined positively as the “new paternalism” (Whitman, 2008). Oakland Unified School District, under the leadership of former superintendent Tony Smith, has emerged as a leader in the pursuit of equity in discipline and a new paradigm around school culture and climate. Working in tandem with the Office for Civil Rights in response to a community report detailing the disproportionate number of suspensions for African-American males in the district (Brown et al., 2012), a Voluntary Resolution Plan (VRP) was drafted and signed in September, 2012 (Appendix A). In addition, as one of the lead authors of the California Office to Reform Education’s (CORE) Waiver Application, Smith helped bring the concept of accountability to the world of school climate by including suspension rate as a factor in the School Quality Improvement System (California Office to Reform Education, 2013). In 2013-2014, OUSD has already started to use suspension rate and disproportionality in the district version of a “Balanced Scorecard” for analyzing school performance (Appendix B) Over the course of the 2013-2014 school year, I had the opportunity to co-lead the committee in charge of implementing the Voluntary Resolution Plan in Oakland. District leadership viewed this as the group responsible for leading the work to transform school culture and climate and eliminate disproportionality in exclusionary discipline in the Oakland Public Schools, a feat that to this date has not been accomplished in any large, diverse urban school district. As I entered the work, my mind was filled with questions. Was the Voluntary Resolution Plan a new blueprint for interrupting what has been dubbed the “school to prison pipeline?” If so, what were the key components? If not, what was missing? Given the Oakland context, what were the vital steps to take in 2013-2014 to set the system up for success in the future? On a personal level, how could I contribute and what could I learn from this experience? On a site and sector level, what could be learned from the VRP work thus far?

It should be the intention of any organization to continually examine its infrastructure to assure that the work that people do allows them to channel their efforts toward the mission and vision of the organization. As Dr. Joshua Starr assumed the role of Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in July 2011, he led his team in a deep investigation of what structures were in place to stimulate student achievement. Based on the findings and his leadership philosophies he decided that the definition of and operational practices that constitute central office support to schools needed to be further examined and reoriented. This capstone explores the investigation that was done with a deep consideration of both existing literature on how structure supports achievement, as well as comprehensive asset mapping of the existing professional learning structures in the District. An internal team gathered information by speaking with stakeholders at all levels and met to determine the best way to support district employees and therefore student achievement in the schools. After a year of focusing on the changing of leadership practices at the central office, the Superintendent’s cabinet decided that, in order to continue to provide quality professional learning opportunities and begin to standardize achievement across the grade levels, moving to a district with horizontal instructional leadership alignment and level-alike school support would optimize the way that central support services in Montgomery County supported the improvement of teaching and learning in schools. The level-alike restructuring will be actualized on July 1, 2013 and will be in effect for the upcoming school year. This capstone concludes with reflections on potential implications for the author, MCPS, and the larger education sector.

The proliferation of environmental legislation since the 1972 Stockholm Declaration has not arrested the intensification of the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This thesis examines the extent to which regional and international instruments contribute to the crystallization of ecocide as a principle of criminal accountability for environmental destruction. Employing a qualitative comparative documentary methodology and drawing on transnational legal process theory and the Finnemore-Sikkink norm lifecycle model, the study analyzes five instruments, the Council of Europe 2025 Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, the EU Environmental Crime Directive 2024/1203, the African Union Malabo Protocol, the Escazú Agreement, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and traces their transposition across five domestic jurisdictions: France, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, and Kenya.

The analysis reveals three principal findings. First, regional instruments are functioning as norm laboratories that generate new legal architectures for the most serious forms of environmental harm. These instruments share a tendency to distinguish catastrophic environmental destruction from ordinary environmental offending, while differing over whether severity, geographic extent, duration, and irreversibility should operate cumulatively or through alternative limbs. Second, international organizations, transnational advocacy networks, and domestic legal innovators are operating as complementary drivers of norm diffusion, with the EU directive mechanism creating a distinctive forced-downloading dynamic that simultaneously transposes ecocide-like provisions across twenty-seven jurisdictions. Third, the ecocide norm is currently positioned at the transition between emergence and cascade in the norm lifecycle. The evidence points to convergence around the proposition that catastrophic environmental destruction warrants aggravated criminal treatment, but continued divergence over the precise threshold and mental element required for liability. This combination of normative agreement and doctrinal contestation is characteristic of a norm that has acquired substantial institutional traction without yet reaching a settled legal form.

The thesis concludes that the emerging combination of national, regional, and international instruments constitutes the normative infrastructure of a growing environmental criminal regime, characterized by partial convergence on gravity, liability, and enforcement, but continued disagreement over threshold architecture and mens rea. As such, institutional enforcement capacity remains the principal obstacle to its consolidation. Directions for future research include the investment law-criminal law interface, temporal doctrines for cumulative ecocide, non-human victimhood, and empirical assessment of deterrent and expressive effects.

This study examined whether a structured employee voice initiative could improve workforce retention and worker mental health in U.S. fulfillment centers. The intervention, called the Health and Well-being Committee, brought frontline workers and supervisors together to identify workplace concerns and implement practical improvements. By testing this approach in a high-turnover sector, the study shows how worker voice can move beyond surfacing workplace problems to producing visible changes that can support employee well-being and organizational stability.