This report examines two districts--Azusa Unified and Dinuba Unified--that have begun to shift district structures, policies, and culture to have a measurable effect on student outcomes. Both districts have committed to reducing the D/F rate for students (eighth graders in Dinuba and ninth graders in Azusa) as part of a learning community led by…

Lead a foundational shift in the way your school approaches student behavior. "Trauma-Sensitive Leadership" offers research-based, practical strategies for understanding and supporting trauma-impacted students rather than "fixing" them. Using straightforward language, the authors illustrate how to integrate new mindsets into…

Mental health and trauma have a significant impact on student achievement and behavior (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). Students have struggled to maintain stability, routines, behavior, and achievement. Organizations such as Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have created resources to help educators meet…

Racism has always been a factor in U.S. education, whether it be anti-literacy laws aimed at enslaved Africans (Mitchell 2008), segregated schools in the south during the era of Jim Crow (Ladson-Billings, 2004), or funding disparities in the northern United States between schools serving majority white students versus those serving predominantly…

From fall 2021 to summer 2022, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted virtual focus groups with administrators at 47 colleges: a nationally representative sample of 36 2-year and broad-access 4-year colleges and a purposive sample of 11 colleges selected for their track record with advising. The study identified four key findings…

Citizenship education is the bedrock for the (re)making of future adult citizens in mono and multicultural democratic nations, and social studies is typically and optimally the premier discipline that primes students for engaged citizenry. Anti-immigrant sentiments towards fourth wave immigrants and the nearly absent research on and training for…

This autoethnography analyzes how my life experiences both as a student and as an educator in this community influenced my principalship and my efforts to open a new elementary school focused on college and career readiness. The aim of this dissertation was to utilize an autoethnographic method to examine the process of opening a new elementary…

When school districts do not have established policies to guide training, practice and professional development for all co-teaching staff, inconsistencies and inequities may arise for the student populations most directly impacted by the lack of those policies, including both general and special education students. In order to best serve the…

Within teacher education, work on mathematics teaching often occurs separately from work on issues of race and racism. Typically, mathematics content and methods courses tackle subject matter-specific concepts and teaching practices, while the history and current dynamics of racial inequity in education, if addressed at all, tend to be the domain…

This dissertation is a mixed methods study of race, language, and writing using the racial equity gaps in student success data as a starting point for the conversation that calls the fields of Rhetoric and Compositions, Literacy Studies, and Higher Education to act more intentionally towards creating equitable spaces in our writing classrooms.…

This study examines how one college in a large private university sought to benefit its students by implementing a program of faculty-mentored, co-curricular high impact practices (HIPs). This qualitative single case study uses confirmatory and exploratory document analysis to examine how an educational leader translated institutional purpose via…

This essay explores the broader implications for education of the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: What can COVID teach us? The case is made that COVID is inviting us to consider a relational universe, and what a pedagogy of presence would look like. It takes a futures perspective and is therefore, unabashedly speculative. It draws on the author's many…

We explored factors associated with school approaches to identify and support student social, emotional, and behavioral needs. Hypothesized mediators of the relationship between district demographic characteristics and district academic and behavioral outcomes included district administrator perceptions of problems; use of a universal behavioral…

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a personalized narrative of one science teacher's use of reflexive teaching as an agent of change. This dissertation is about a journey of change in instruction fostered by a change of identity as a science teacher, using the butterfly cycle as a metaphor. This dissertation narrates the identity…

Critics of the neoliberal university argue that grading undermines student learning. In this article, I survey the literature in order to ascertain whether such critiques are supported by pedagogical research. Investigating the relationship between grading and motivation, feedback, and autonomy, respectively, I conclude that grades most often do…