Tesis sobre el tema "Education partnerships"

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impacts of strategic partnerships between community colleges and key stakeholders; to specifically examine strategic partnerships; leadership decision-making; criteria to evaluate strategic partnerships that added value to the institution, value to the students, faculty, staff, and the local communities; and that furthered the community college mission. One-hundred and twenty-five higher education administrators from thirty seven states and one U.S. territory participated.

The literature defined strategic partnerships in higher education (Alfred, 2006; Gajda, 2004) and highlighted the theoretical constructs of strategic management (Alfred, 2006; Myran & Howdyshell, 1994; Stahl & Grigsby 1992), leadership decision-making (Bogart, 1994; Eaton, 1988; Strauss, 1978), collaboration theory (Gray, 1989; Schroeder, 1999), negotiation theory (Faberman, 1978; Strauss, 1978), and resource dependency theory (Nienhüser, 2008; Strauss, 1982, Schwalb et al., 2011). The literature review established a basis for successful strategic partnerships.

A web-based survey was created by the author based on the literature and was reviewed by an expert panel. The sample included community college administrators, primarily College Presidents (n = 66). Data collection utilized SurveyMonkey. Data analysis was descriptive on seven research questions.

The recommendations abridged from the research study were: • Reevaluate strategic partnerships to meet the current goals outlined in the existing community college mission statements. • Modify the community college missions in the United States to be reflective of the federal mandates of accountability and degree completion. • Provide greater inquiry by community college administrators over the costs and benefits of strategic partnerships to improve selections that ratify the missions with focused emphasis on accountability and degree attainment. • Strengthen strategic partnerships that foster K-12 transitions, greater attainment of two-year degrees, and matriculation toward higher level degrees to be reflective of the higher expectations placed upon community colleges to meet the needs of diverse student populations. • Advance and strengthen models of strategic partnerships, particularly with the university, to improve the effectiveness and increase successful transfer rates and higher rates of degree completion.

This dissertation was aimed at providing information on developing and sustaining public-private partnerships (PPPs) in early childhood education as a way to increase efficiency and effectiveness on how resources are allocated. This study also emphasizes how teachers are perceived and supported within the PPP context. Studies have shown that investing in early childhood education yields the greatest gains to one's life and society at large. Yet, the early childhood field continues to battle waves of budget cuts while striving to convince policymakers and the public that early education is critical and necessary.

Although PPP presents itself as a new way of doing business by combining resources from the public and private sectors and redistributed based on the shared goal and vision of the PPP, there is limited research on PPPs and even more scarce specifically related to early childhood. The goal of this study is to provide exposure to the early childhood field on how PPPs can be formed and sustained using the Educare model as one example of a PPP in early childhood.

This was a qualitative designed to capture rich conversations and experiences of research participants that are relevant and appropriate to the early childhood field. Grounded theory was used in this study to learn from research participants' perceptions of PPPs based on their experience and expertise in PPP and early childhood education.

This study used theoretical sampling to target research participants at a specific Educare development site to capture real time and real life experiences in developing a PPP in early childhood education. The Educare model was developed by the Ounce of Prevention Fund in 2000 aimed at "narrow[ing] the achievement gap for students in high-risk communities" (Ounce of Prevention, Educare schools, 2011). The Educare model has set requirements for teachers and all related job categories that will work in an Educare school including professional development requirements. The Educare school also has a salary structure that is competitive to the local public elementary schools.

Five themes were identified in the findings and discussed in relation to the significance of this study. The findings from this study have implications for early childhood administrators, educators, funders, advocates, and the field at large on maximizing the usage of existing resources. The findings from this study, including questions raised, are significant in development of partnerships in early childhood education.

Five years ago, the author began a second career as a teacher in a small Wyoming town with a diverse student population. The beginning of her career coincided with a change in the demographics to include a large number of English Language Learners (ELs) and the imposition of sanctions from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) for being a failing school. The author collected, analyzed, and used summative and formative data in an effort to differentiate for all students. She went on home visits to build trust in the local community, co-planned and participated in work teams to further local curriculum, and conducted multiple rounds of extensive action research projects. False starts, circular paths, crushed dreams, and just plain exhaustion led to the development of a seed idea and the journey that follows, a yearlong project-based thesis, exploring how one classroom teacher could harness the power of an engaged community to supplement curriculum, motivate students, and instill a joy of learning. The focus of this thesis was derived from the following question: How might a community partnership of diverse agencies and leaders focused on education to foment radical change in public education, be founded and flourish?

Human capital, financial support, and other resources are often provided to schools by private organizations such as corporations, community organizations, universities, and governments. There is a wealth of research on the benefits of public school-external partnerships (Barnett, Hall, Berg, & Macarena, 2010; Gardner, 2011; Norman, 2009, Semke & Sheridan, 2012), however, there is little information on the sustainability of public school’s external partnerships. Beabout (2010) argued that external relationships can be difficult for school leaders to establish and maintain. Since partnerships are essential to offset school shortage and provide opportunities for students, it is crucial to expand our understanding of how schools maintain their external partnerships.

This qualitative study involving interviews of 23 partnership organizers examined how schools maintained their long-term partnerships. This study explored institutional theory as a theoretical framework to examine how schools and organizations function as institutions. Powell and DiMaggio (1991) and Selznick (1957) stated that as an organization is “institutionalized” it tends to take on a special character and to achieve a distinctive competence, in other words, a trained or built-in incapacity. The study drew on Bolman and Deal’s (2003) four frames for how people view the world: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic.

Partnership organizers described effective communication as an important factor in maintaining partnerships. Key factors in effective communication were establishing points of contact for both the school and the partner, understanding each other’s roles, and having clear expectations. Partnership organizers shared that collaboration that moves the partnerships forward were key. That kind of collaboration involved understanding and respecting the school culture and procedures as well as building buy-in for the school and the organization stakeholders and it offered real world experiences to students. Participants cited a commitment to working through barriers with a focus on commitment, flexibility, and dedication as key factor.

Based on the partnership organizers experiences, this study offers a deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to maintaining public school-external partnerships, with implications for existing and future school partnerships. This study also offers implications for policy on school partnerships.

Now, over a century later, the expansion of arts continues. A most recent development is the growth of arts education programs within professional producing/presenting organizations.

The purpose of this study is to understand the motivations, benefits and realities of educational programs from the perspective of a professional producing/presenting arts organization. More specifically, what has enticed these organizations to create and sustain educational programs? Are these programs viewed as an extension of outreach, or as a program to serve their mission, or for reasons unstated?

Research was collected in Charlotte, NC, a community with diverse arts organizations, many of whom support educational programs. The school district also has a strong arts education programming. Nine arts organizations and three supporting organizations were selected for direct interviews. Each interview was conducted in the same manner, based on five questions.

This research reveals that arts organizations are proactive and have created valuable educational experiences for their community, but many organizations are doing a disservice to their core beliefs by not defining the value the educational program provides for the organization.
Master of Fine Arts

At a critical time in educational transformation, NCLB incorporated the notion that parents would assume power and engage with schools around this monumental shift for accountability concerning the success of all students. Now the Every Student Succeeds Act, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, upholds this task and calls for parent and family engagement in district and school improvement processes and the development of parent and family engagement policies. Traditional notions of parental engagement have rarely addressed partnerships for educational reform and policy change (Cooper, 2009). Furthermore, narratives regarding parents of color are dominated by a deficit discourse of what families “lack,” described as, “empty vessels” that need to be “filled” with knowledge to be able to engage in schools like their White middle-class counterparts (Lightfoot, 2004).

This qualitative study examines a counternarrative definition of parental engagement according to Latino parents in a particular community in which White privilege contributes to and perpetuates the marginalization and continued exclusion of particular groups. I employed a critical race methodology to focus on the lived experience of Latino families through counterstory that challenges the dominant narrative created and sustained by White privilege and traditional White educational discourse.

Findings in this study centered on Latino families’ limited access to the school, school programs, and institutional knowledge and power; systemic barriers maintained by White privilege; the cultural funds of knowledge and expertise of Latino parents as educators and advocates; a critique of the system from participants’ perspectives; and recommendations participants had for change in current practice. Through the findings, major implications for practice surfaced, including an examination and elimination of systemic barriers, the use of counterstory to disrupt deficit narratives of families of color, and educators’ and educational leaders’ utilization of practices to structure venues for authentic dialogue for reform.

This project examined the college-going culture at David Starr Jordan High School, an urban high school in North Long Beach, California. Drawing from two conceptual frameworks, Joyce Epstein's six elements of school-family-community partnerships and Patricia McDonough's nine elements of a college:.going culture, a new conceptual framework was developed: school-family-community partnership collegegoing culture. This new conceptual framework emphasizes the three C's: (a) communication, (b) college-information, and (c) collaboration, bridging schoolfamily- community partnerships and college-going culture.

To increase the college-going rate at David Starr Jordan High School, two community events were implemented at the school utilizing this new conceptual framework-providing a link between theory and practice. As a result, the project helped build school-family-community alliance, disseminated college information to students and families to debunk myths about college-related options, and promoted David Starr Jordan High School as a safe and caring high school.

Homeschool families have the freedom to uniquely structure the learning environment to meet the needs of their children. Many homeschool parents increasingly rely on digital devices and the Internet to provide alternatives to traditional and private schools. Cooperatives (co-ops), charter school partnerships, virtual academies, online tutors, digitized instructional programs, and individualized curricula can be utilized to provide or supplement the learning environment. This research presents a multiple-case study exploring the variety of learning environments that homeschool parents utilize to teach their children. The participants in this research were homeschool parents who share teaching responsibilities with other homeschool parent educators, charter school organizations, or online instructional programs. In essence, the study examined the perceived effectiveness, efficiency, and efficacy of online, blended, and traditional face-to-face learning environments from the parents’ perspective. Data collection involved the combined responses from an online survey and participant interviews with ten homeschool parents. Each of the parents shared teaching responsibilities with a homeschool cooperative, a charter school organization, or both. Profiles of each participant include demographic information, homeschooling style, and the rationale for homeschooling their children. Three main themes emerged from the analysis of the homeschool parents’ perceptions: A Flexible Learning Environment Structure, Quality Time with Family, and Support from Like-Minded Others. The findings from this study can be utilized to advise future families of optimal practices for cultivating academic success and social development of the homeschooled child. The findings indicate homeschool parents perceive the academic and social learning environments as flexible and sufficient for their children’s education. From the study participants’ perspective, integrating technology into the homeschool structure positively impacted their children’s mathematics and literacy development. While partnering with homeschool cooperatives and charter schools, study participants were encouraged to continue educating their children, establishing close familial bonds, and providing opportunities for their children to interact with many people of different age-groups.

This dissertation study documents in-depth the exploration of the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) between the Dayton Regional STEM School (DRSS) and their industry partners as well as the establishment of a framework for evaluating and assessing PPPs. The public-private partnership agreements were studied in order to answer the over-arching research question: How is an effective public-private partnership established, assessed, and evaluated in education? A descriptive case study methodology was used to study DRSS' public-private partnership agreements to determine if goals and objectives were established and whether or not the partnerships met those goals and objectives. This case study also included the development and testing of a proposed evaluation framework that will allow for consistent, systematic inquiry that can produce defensible assertions regarding the assessment and evaluation of public-private partnerships in education.

Results of the case study support the findings that utilization of an evaluation framework can serve to make public-private partnerships more successful. Results also indicated that establishment of goals and objectives enable effective evaluation for informal partnerships but could not be definitively stated for formal partnerships due to the lack of data points. The data from this case study revealed many emergent themes that should be considered in the development of future public-private partnerships. Overall this study contributes to the growing body of knowledge for public-private partnerships in education.

The goal of this study is to contribute to understandings of parent-school relationships involving parents of students with autism by exploring notions of belonging with a small group of parents. The purpose of the study is to describe the experiences of middle school parents of children with autism. From these descriptions, I examined how parents of students with autism might contribute to understandings of belonging in school-family partnerships and enable schools and families to collaborate more effectively. This study addresses an apparent gap in understandings of belonging of parents of children with autism in their relationships with their child's school. As parents are asked to make connections with their children's school in parent-school partnerships, understandings of those connections are vital to generating and sustaining meaningful and effective relationships between parents and schools. This study uses thick descriptive methods (Geetz, 1973) to examine the phenomenon of belonging in parent-school partnerships among a small group of parents of middle school children with autism. The experiences of the parents in this study suggest that parents of middle school students with autism seek a sense of belonging in their relationships with those they work with regarding their children's schooling. This study also suggests that a sense of belonging may be an essential element of effective parent-school partnerships.

This study's purpose was to investigate new site administrators' perceptions of the term community involvement, of their role to engage the local community members as partners in their school, their preparation and support to work with their communities, and their challenges on-the-job with community engagement. This study also examined new site administrators' perceptions and needs to better understand what tools are necessary to help them create thriving community partnerships.

Thirty new site administrators across 4 counties of Southern California participated in a semi-structured 45-minute interview. All were employed less than 4 years and represented the gender, age and ethnic diversity of these counties. These individuals initially responded that parents were the community, not noting businesses, churches, health and the many other entities that surround and should be involved in school life. Each stated in some fashion that the role of the site administrator was to interface with the community beyond the site faculty and staff. All perceived that their academic preparation lacked any knowledge and skills to work with parents and the community although that is 1 of 6 required components for an administrative license in California. In addition, none indicated formal on-the-job professional development opportunities; 2 in the same district mentioned superintendent support of community involvement.

The first year administrators shared their sense of feeling overwhelmed in their new leadership position for a school staff and the myriad of policies/procedures. New site administrators in their second–fourth years commented on the struggle to find time to deal with community partnerships, the lack of district support, and limitations created by policies/procedures.

The respondents expressed interest in working with community groups, noting the many benefits to the school. All suggested ways that school districts, counties, colleges, department of education, professional associations, accrediting agencies, and policymakers could provide required training in the knowledge and skills to develop sustaining community partnerships.