Graduate School of Education

Students' struggles with algebra are well documented. Prior to the introduction of functions, mathematics is typically focused on applying a set of arithmetic operations to compute an answer. The introduction of functions, however, marks the point at which mathematics begins to focus on building up abstractions as a way to solve complex problems. A common refrain about word problems is that “the equations are easy to solve - the hard part is setting them up!” A student of algebra is asked to identify functional relationships in the world around them - to set up the equations that describe a system- and to reason about these relationships. Functions, in essence, mark the shift from computing answers to solving problems. Researchers have called for this shift to accompany a change in pedagogy, and have looked to computer programming and game design as a means to combine mathematical rigor with creative inquiry. Many studies have explored the impact of teaching students to program, with the goal of having them transfer what they have learned back into traditional mathematics. While some of these studies have shown positive outcomes for concepts like geometry and fractions, transfer between programming and algebra has remained elusive. The literature identifies a number of conditions that must be met to facilitate transfer, including careful attention to content, software, and pedagogy. This dissertation is a feasibility study of Bootstrap, a curricular intervention based on best practices from the transfer and math-education literature. Bootstrap teaches students to build a video game by applying algebraic concepts and a problem solving technique in the programming domain, with the goal of transferring what they learn back into traditional algebra tasks. The study employed a mixed-methods analysis of six Bootstrap classes taught by math and computer science teachers, pairing pre- and post-tests with classroom observations and teacher interviews. Despite the use of a CS-derived problem solving technique, a programming language and a series of programming challenges, students were able to transfer what they learned into traditional algebra tasks and math teachers were found to be more successful at facilitating this transfer than their CS counterparts.

This dissertation examines state-level efforts to mandate the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, especially following 9/11. Despite longstanding Supreme Court precedent declaring mandatory flag salutes unconstitutional, various state legislatures sought to institute or strengthen pledge mandates irrespective of students’ civil liberties. Driven by personal conceptions of patriotism, fears about cultural unity, and desires for political advantage, legislators pushed to institute new pledge mandates or defend existing ones without substantive consideration of their impact on students and schools. While the full impact of these laws has not yet been seen, some students have experienced harsh discipline and bullying due to pledge mandates, school personnel have needed to negotiate constitutionally questionable state law, and legislative persistence has yielded political victories and also resulted in an 11th Circuit-endorsed qualification of students’ civil liberties regarding compelled pledging. Using historical methods, this dissertation examines efforts to mandate and/or enforce pledging primarily following 9/11. Case-study locations include Minnesota, which experienced a three-year battle over its mandate legislation; Colorado, which attempted to curtail opt-out rights of both students and teachers; and Pennsylvania and Florida, both of which undertook court cases to protect state laws that constrained students’ rights to freedom of expression regarding the pledge. In designing this study, I expected mandate supporters to be advocating a form of civic education labeled by scholar Joel Westheimer as "authoritarian patriotism" and mandate opponents to be advocating a different form of civic education, labeled by Westheimer as "democratic patriotism." I assumed the debate over mandated pledging would largely be a debate over the best form of civic education that was already occurring in schools. While echoes of these debates occasionally occurred, legislators rarely addressed the educational aspects of this issue or its relationship to citizenship development. Instead, legislators emphasized broader concerns about threats to the culture and unity of the nation and focused frequently on gaining political advantage. In essence, little consideration was given to the effects of these laws on students and schools; instead, these legislative debates and laws served more as symbolic ammunition in what other scholars have identified as the "culture wars.”

The achievement gap between high- and low-income children in the United States widened considerably in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Seasonal comparison research suggests that this gap widens primarily during summer vacation: While high- and low-income children learn at similar rates during the school year, high-income children learn more during the summer. The widening income achievement gap may have been driven in part by increasingly divergent summer experiences of high- and low-income children, as in recent years, high-income parents have increased their investments in their children’s cognitive development. However, we have no evidence on how high- and low-income children’s summer learning and activities have changed in recent decades. In Study #1, I examine how kindergarten children’s summer learning and enrichment activity participation changed between 1998 and 2010. Second, while the growth of academic achievement gaps during summer vacation is a widely documented problem, little research has examined how socioeconomic gaps in children’s social-emotional and executive function skills change over the summer. In Study #2, I address these questions. Thirdly, our understanding of effective policies to ameliorate low-income children’s summer learning loss is limited. In Study #3, I conduct a randomized experiment of a home-based summer mathematics program aimed at improving low-income children’s summer home mathematics engagement and reducing summer learning loss. Taken together, these three studies inform our understanding of how children’s out-of-school environment contributes to educational inequality.

Test-based accountability systems have become a widespread approach to improving educational quality at a large scale. However, studies of these systems have shown that they can have unintended consequences, such as inflating students’ scores on state assessments (Hamilton et al., 2007; National Research Council, 2011). As a result, test users may erroneously infer from widespread score gains that schools are becoming more effective. I examine this issue with three studies focused on different aspects of this problem. The first study analyses elementary math teachers’ self-reported test preparation practices, creating measures of inflationary test preparation and using them to predict student performance on a high-stakes test and a low-stakes test. This study finds that the measures predict greater performance beyond prediction on the high-stakes than on the low-stakes tests for teachers who self-report low use of inflationary test preparation. The second study describes patterns of test performance related to one common test preparation strategy that can cause inflation: focusing on content that is likely to be assessed at the expense of content that is unlikely to be assessed. This study finds that schools that experienced relatively large year-over-year gains may have done so by aligning instruction better toward content with medium-to-high representation on prior tests. The third study explores changes in the predictive relationship between 8th grade test scores and high school graduation to identify any changes that could suggest that scores were inflated. This study finds that changes in these relationships sometimes align with concerns about inflation, with larger changes observed in contexts where prior research suggests there should be more inflationary test preparation. Together, these studies connect test preparation to gains in test scores that may not reflect improvements in students’ life prospects, highlighting the challenges associated with using test-based accountability systems to drive education reform.

There is increasing pressure on the central office, particularly in large school districts, to improve student outcomes across schools and to close large achievement gaps between groups of students based largely on race and income (Louis, 2008; Honig 2012). Reforms intended to “raise the bar and close the gap” in student achievement are often implemented at the intersection of central office and schools. However, these efforts often do not achieve their intended outcomes. In this context, it is essential to understand the conditions under which reforms targeting the central office-school relationship succeed or fail. Given the pressing need for improved approaches to managing school systems, my dissertation explores the relationship between school leaders and central offices in two large, urban districts in Maryland. I use a qualitative inquiry strategy that incorporates interviews and document review to construct case studies of principals’ interactions with central office in the two districts. (Yin, 2013). I then use the framework of loose coupling theory (Orton & Weick, 1990; Wieck, 1976) to interpret the conditions under which the central office-school relationship leads to consistent or variable practices across schools.

In the case studies, I examine three essential functions—budgeting, staffing, and academic programming—shared between principals and central office (Johnson, Marietta, Higgins, Mapp, & Grossman, 2015). I found that the two school districts took fundamentally different approaches—one centralized and the other decentralized—to managing their relationships with schools in the three functions. As a result, principals in each district had very different interactions with central office as they carried out their work. Examining these interactions through the lens of loose coupling theory sheds light on whether the districts’ approaches worked as intended. Under some conditions, the approaches worked as expected (e.g. centralization produced tight coupling). However, in other cases, the approach did not (e.g. centralization led to loose coupling). Two factors appeared to matter the most in determining whether an approach worked as intended: the capacity of principals and principals’ perceptions of the capacity of central office. Findings from the research show the importance of matching the district’s approach to capacities of those responsible for implementation.

The proportion of children across the world who have access to basic education through formal schooling has never been as high as it is today. Surveys of literacy and numeracy skills in low- and middle-income countries, however, regularly highlight low levels of learning, even for young people with several years of formal schooling. Among the structural issues faced by school systems in low- and middle-income countries experiencing rapid increases in enrollment, linguistic heterogeneity of communities and countries stands out as it poses both a threat and opportunity to quality instruction. This dissertation is organized in three papers and aims to explore: (i) ways in which language in education policies are designed, implemented, and understood; (ii) whether cross-linguistic transfer theories apply in a new context; and (iii) heterogeneity across teachers and schools of the impact in a bilingual literacy intervention. The first paper describes the multi-faceted factors that policymakers take into account when designing language in education policies, and presents a framework for analyzing these policies at the community, regional or state-level. The second paper uses structural equation modeling to test cross-linguistic transfer in a sample of second-grade students in Uganda. Findings suggest children in second grade have developed common decoding skills across two languages, and those staring to learn in their first language can transfer reading comprehension skills to the second. The third paper in this dissertation explores the impact of a literacy intervention in Kiswahili and English in urban public and private nonformal schools in Kenya. The study exploits the random assignment of schools to an intervention to identify whether the impact of an intervention differed across types of teachers and schools. The study finds large average gains in literacy skills in English and Kiswahili and no differences in average impact across teacher characteristics. In contrast, the school characteristics moderate the impact of the intervention on higher-level skills (word reading and comprehension). This work contributes to support the process of designing and implementing language policies in schools focused on inclusion and equity.

Too often, teachers are not given meaningful opportunities to participate in discussions about the purposes of education and the interaction of purposes and practices, key conversations about the means and ends of teachers’ work (Ingersoll, 2003; Johnson, 1990). This problem has particular manifestation in the area of educational technology, where discussions about what to do and why are frequently dominated by actors other than teachers, such as administration or designers and producers of the technology itself (Bowers, 1988; Buckingham, 2007; Cuban, 2001). Consequently, the categories for understanding how teachers relate to educational technology have been largely binary: compliance with or resistance to the plans and visions of integration formulated by others. This project, based on qualitative interviewing with teachers about the terms in which they understood and thought about their own practice, intervenes in these conversations in two ways. The first is by offering an alternative framing to resistance/compliance as a way to talk about teachers and technology, that of teachers as both open and critical in their orientation to technology in classroom practice. This is an orientation to technology characterized by selective use of technological tools and practices in the service of teachers’ own sense of purpose for themselves, their students, and their classrooms. Secondly, rather than focusing on the perception of teacher resistance as the central problem in efforts at meaningful technology integration, I argue that we should be concerned with what some teachers described as the anxiety-provoking pressure to “keep up” with technology, an idea reflected in dominant discourse that positions technology as the driver of necessary educational change and equates lack of use with bad teaching. In considering the implications of this study I argue that the orientation of being both open and critical towards educational technology, while contrasting with dominant discourse, is resonant with existing research on how people (and teachers) learn and how meaningful educational change takes place.

There is growing policy interest in requiring evidence-based decision-making. The premise is that, by mandating the use of research, policymakers can ensure that schools and districts invest their school improvement efforts and funding more wisely. In this dissertation, I study state and district implementation of the evidence requirements in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). In the first paper, I present three different ways that eight states approached the requirements while developing their ESSA plans: using lists of pre-sanctioned evidence-based interventions, training schools and districts to find and evaluate the research supporting potential interventions, and building local evidence of effectiveness. In the second paper, I follow one state into its first year of implementation and observe three districts attempting to use the state’s new tools and trainings. Together, these studies highlight the importance of policymakers’ interpretive processes when making sense of and adapting new policy mandates, and the challenges involved in tightening the linkages between practice and external policy pressures. They also suggest that the imposition of evidence use may at times impede the very practices and ways of thinking it aims to encourage.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), released in April 2013, provide an “unprecedented opportunity to transform science education for all students” (Penuel, Harris & DeBarger, 2015, p.45). However, as history has demonstrated repeatedly, the U.S. public education system does not immediately “snap into alignment” when newly created standards are unveiled (Cohen, Peurach, Glazer, Gates, & Goldin, 2013, p. x-xi). Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a promising strategy for developing the necessary infrastructure – of new professional knowledge and skill – to enact new teaching and learning. RPPs are long-term collaborations between teachers, district administrators, and researchers that are organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving schools and school districts (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). This two-paper study investigated the impact of participation in the Inquiry Hub (iHub), an RPP currently focused on co-designing a student-centered, NGSS-aligned, ninth grade biology curriculum. The iHub is a partnership of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder working with teachers and district administrators from Denver Public Schools. Investigating the organizational level, the first paper posits that some research-practice partnerships create a “niche reform” in that they operate within a protected and bounded space and target to change part, but not all, of the school district. This study determined that the following three practices enabled this partnership to nurture and sustain its novel and specialized scope: (1) inter-organizational meeting routines to promote ongoing communication, (2) informal professional support to deepen trust, and (3) developing and using shared tools to build institutional memory. The second paper examines the level of the individual RPP participant - the teachers, district administrators, and researchers - and finds that iHub participants experienced an expansion of personal identity and increase in professional renewal. Teachers, district administrators, and researchers were energized by the RPP collaboration, and participation affirmed their desire to do this work over the long-term. By developing a broader evidence base of where, when, how, and under what conditions RPPs are viable and effective, the field of education will deepen its understanding of a promising approach to transforming education for all students -- and teachers, district administrators, and researchers.

Algebra is considered a linchpin for success in secondary mathematics, serving as a gatekeeper to higher-level courses. Access to algebra is also considered an important lever for educational equity. Yet despite its prominence, large-scale examinations of algebra instruction are rare. In my dissertation, I endeavor to better understand what contemporary algebra instruction looks like. I explore instructional practices across a large sample of video recorded algebra lessons from 5 urban districts. To do this, I draw on video and other data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project. In the first study, I utilize grounded analysis to describe the format and features of instruction in lessons in the sample. I find that most lessons are teacher-centered with some opportunity for student engagement in mathematical thinking; however, very few lessons provide significant opportunities for student exploration or discovery of mathematical concepts. Looking beneath the surface, I find specific instructional practices teachers employ in algebra lessons and argue that improving these practices may be a promising lever for instructional improvement. Next, I describe the development and validation of an observational instrument oriented toward algebra and designed to measure the nature and quality of these practices. Finally, in the third paper, I use the observational instrument to describe the frequency and quality of these practices in algebra lessons in the sample. I present both descriptive results and qualitative cases of algebra lessons to illustrate these instructional features.

Policy makers, practitioners and scholars agree that teachers need sustained job-embedded professional learning experiences to help students meet the demands of new accountability systems, higher education, and the workforce (Smylie, Miretzky, & Konkol, 2004; Valli & Buese, 2007). Research shows that job-embedded learning for teachers can improve student performance (Parise, & Spillane, 2010). Although, researchers generally agree about the core features of effective professional development (Cohen & Hill, 2001; Desimone, 2011), their findings do not provide sufficient guidance to practitioners and policy makers in designing and implementing on-the-job learning opportunities (Hill, Beisiegel, & Jacob, 2013). This dissertation is a qualitative, comparative case study embedded in a larger study, “Developing Human Capital Within Schools,” conducted by the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. I analyzed collected documents and data from 142 semi-structured interviews of administrators and a diverse sample of teachers from six high-performing, high-poverty schools within one city. Three of the schools are state-authorized charter schools (one a restart of an underperforming school) and three are district schools (one traditional and two former turnaround). In this study, I explored how teachers experienced and assessed three practices intended to support improvements in teaching quality—teacher evaluation, collaborative data routines and peer observation. Teachers and administrators across the sample, described evaluation, first and foremost, as a robust, ongoing improvement process that incorporated frequent feedback to teachers, which they valued. It also played a role in holding teachers accountable for their work. All six schools had structured data routines that required teachers to collaboratively gather, analyze and respond to students’ learning data. Data practices contributed to high expectations for all students and teachers. Finally, the schools had a range of practices that allowed teachers to observe each other, be observed, and in some cases analyze the experience. Teachers’ responses, although generally very positive, differed across and within schools, depending on the school’s ability to address logistical and cultural barriers to peer observation. None of these practices were implemented as discrete, stand-alone initiatives. Instead, the professional learning opportunities at these schools were intensive experiences that teachers described as highly interconnected.

While theorists, educators, and researchers have identified the importance of meaningful teacher-student relationships, there is little research out there that explores what teachers need to do to form such relationships, or how teacher education programs are attempting to prepare teachers to do so (Grossman & McDonald, 2008). In this study, I employ ethnographic methods, particularly portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), to explore how two different teacher residency programs – No Excuses Teacher Residency (NETR) and Progressive Teacher Residency (PTR) – attempt to prepare their teacher residents to form meaningful relationships with students, especially across cultural differences, and how residents make sense of these practices in the program and beginning practice. Contrary to what might be expected, I find that NETR intentionally and repeatedly addresses teacher-student relationships, but in a way that is consistent with how they approach other aspects of teaching: NETR views relationships as instrumental to student achievement and attempts to teach residents how to manufacture these with the use of discrete moves. More consistent with what is known of progressive schools, PTR centralizes teacher-student relationships, viewing them as fundamental to education, and approaches their growth holistically, in part by immersing residents in the nurturing school that spawned PTR. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, the two programs each hold a different social justice vision and offer differing approaches to coursework on race, but this is limited by social forces like colorblind racism and white fragility. Ultimately, both programs leave visible imprints on the beginning relational practice of their graduates, but school factors reinforce or undermine teachers’ willingness/ability to implement lessons from their training program. Moreover, the way teachers learn to understand and form relationships in each program has powerful implications for the different populations of students they will serve.

African Americans have a long history in the United States of being asked to live within, and flourish in spite of, a racist society. Throughout this history, African Americans built education institutions – often referred to as emancipatory schools – with the primary goals of (1) “freeing” African Americans psychologically and (2) equipping African Americans with tools to fight for their economic, political and social freedom. As racism persists, disseminating these tools to African Americans remains necessary today. Yet, there is currently no emancipatory, comprehensive school model for African Americans outside of the limited offerings of Afrocentric schooling. In fact, recent educational interventions we have chosen to focus on diligently prepare African Americans to succeed in spite of their racially unjust world. This dissertation builds on historical efforts and offers a theoretical model for African American education that re-prioritizes cultivating the skill and will for enacting social change (transformation) in addition to the capacity to thrive within existing constraints (navigation). Revisiting emancipatory schools as a viable pathway for educating might shift this landscape and prepare more African Americans to forge radical change. Drawing on cross-disciplinary scholarship, including psychology, sociology, political science and education, this dissertation suggests that five pillars must serve as the cornerstone of new emancipatory practice. These pillars are: a) a sound racial identity, b) critical consciousness, c) collective obligation, d) a liberation centered academic achievement identity and e) activism skills. Many of these pillars are staples of critical education but they are not always fully explained as a set of liberation tools and traditionally do not serve as the cornerstone of whole-school comprehensive practice. Using both theoretical and empirical literature, this work describes each of the asserted pillars, outlines their demonstrated impact on the lives of African Americans and explains how all five pillars are interconnected and should be cultivated together in a whole-school setting to achieve the intended outcome of preparing African Americans to fight for their racial liberation.

In this dissertation, I undertake a sequential analysis of an elaborate system of forces that contribute to the production of history textbooks in Pakistan. I review longitudinal series of data on education policies and history textbooks from 1938-2012, and examine the decision-making processes, which inform said policies and textbooks, at the federal, provincial and local levels of government in Pakistan. My analysis is grounded in a particular understanding of religious nationalism and identity politics which is essential in conceptualizing religious political extremism and its role in defining what it means to be “Islamic” in context of history education in Pakistan.

Findings suggest that a history textbook in Pakistan is produced by seven highly influential and complex variables: (1) Religious ideology: religious ideological direction set through federal education policy, and the international pressures and domestic political events that inform this policy; (2) Identity politics: the scope of identity that the state mandates for its citizens, including the resistance to that scope as captured by student interaction with textbook content; (3) Military revisionism: war narratives and the state’s reconciliation with its past; (4) Political power: perceptions, leadership, and exclusionary tactics; (5) Financial vulnerabilities; (6) Systemic inefficiencies; and (7) Past history textbooks, in how they empower certain interest groups which inhibit curriculum development and revised conceptions of history.

My analysis reveals that while state sponsored curriculum material is used for the purpose of solidifying the relationship between religion and state, the content, the process, and the constantly shifting narrative of religious nationalism, selected from a multitude of narratives, are products of strategic choices that may well employ religion but are not entirely religiously motivated. Consequently, I propose the possibility that history education in Pakistan does not foster religious nationalism for the sake of religion, but uses religion as one tool amongst many, to further secular, political, and nationalistic objectives.

As a result of the multi-decade effort to hold schools accountable for student learning and parental satisfaction, there is a wide consensus that the traditional conception of the school as symbolic, loosely connected, and disinterested in monitoring or improving instruction is no longer apt. What’s less clear is what image should take its place. Although school and system leaders are now more concerned with improving teaching and learning, there are still numerous examples of schools complying with the letter of new reforms and prioritizing incentivized outcomes over the slower work of improving teaching and learning. In this dissertation, I seek to develop a more refined understanding of the contemporary school organization that accounts for these conflicting patterns. In Paper One, I argue that as a result of the demanding institutional environment surrounding schools and the uncertainty that pervades deeper levels of educational practice, accountability reforms are successfully changing surface-level aspects of educators’ practice, but these changes are becoming loosely connected to deeper aspects of practice. I develop the concept of technical ceremonies as a way of theorizing this emerging pattern of school organizations. I build on these arguments in my two empirical papers, which investigate two districts’ implementation of a continuous improvement (CI) method. Drawing on principles from improvement science and design, CI methods offer an approach to improvement that is tailored to the endemic uncertainties that pervade educational systems. I focus on the Data Wise Improvement Process, a prominent CI method in education. In Paper Two I identify three sources of uncertainty that pose challenges for educators as they engage in Data Wise, and find that educators developed ways of coping with and lessening uncertainty to support their improvement work. In Paper Three I focus on the role of school leaders in implementing Data Wise. I find that they engaged in a range of behaviors that correspond with different images of the school organization: actively shaping practice to align with Data Wise, buffering teachers from external influence, and getting caught up in technical ceremonies that influence teachers’ practice but in a way that privileges external legitimacy over internal improvement. These responses were shaped by leaders’ professional identity, their assessment of the alignment of Data Wise with their beliefs and the technical demands of their work, and their (varied) perceptions of the degree of regulation around Data Wise.

There is a significant lack of educational research in which teachers’ talk about teaching is not mediated by researchers. In the public sphere, teachers’ voices rarely reach us unfiltered by the media, union and school district representatives, education reformers, and policymakers. What if we could listen to teachers talk about teaching unconstrained by any topic or agenda, in a conversation initiated by them? The StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative (SCNTI) provides an unparalleled opportunity to answer this question. In 2011-2012, hundreds of teachers talked about teaching with someone significant to them. Listening to these conversations enables understanding of teaching from the perspective of those doing the work, in their own voice.
This study addresses the meanings and conceptualizations of teaching articulated by teachers. Three basic assumptions guide this research. First, because teaching is an uncertain craft (McDonald, 1992), I suggest poetics of teaching (Hansen, 2004) as a listening lens. Second, because the experiences of teaching are expressed in conversation, I suggest a prosaic approach to language (Morson & Emerson, 1990) which considers form and function. Third, I conceptualize teacher voice as a source of knowledge about teaching and the phenomenon by which we can comprehend its humanity, uncertainty, and unfinalizability (Bakhtin, 1981). Building on this conceptual framework, I propose a unique empirical approach to studying teacher voice: a synthesis of hermeneutics, metaphor analysis, and portraiture.
The answer to the question When teachers speak of teaching, what do they say? is in the form of a portrait, a portrait of teaching composed of teachers’ voices. I find that teachers talk about four essential human phenomena: love, learning, power, and purpose. Within these constructs, I provide a critical interpretation of teacher talk about teaching that illuminates the complex and varied nature of teaching work.
This study privileges teacher voice—literally and epistemologically—and presents research as an act of listening. It transmits and amplifies teacher voice to constitute a refreshed and reexamined cultural record (Lamothe & Horowitz, 2006) of teaching. And as critical interpretation of human experience, this research invites participation: a response to teacher voice.