School rezoning is the process of drawing and redrawing school attendance boundaries (SABs). However, studies explicitly focused on changing SABs through rezoning or other mechanisms are spread across multiple bodies of literature. Rezoning is also a politically contentious issue governed by local school boards, tying it to conceptual work on the…

The aim of this applied dissertation was to develop a better understanding of how elementary principals in a large school district in the southeastern United States perceive their self-efficacy as instructional leaders and administrators. The pressures of high accountability play an impactful role in how principals view their roles and their…

The Local Control Funding Formula, executed in part through the Local Control and Accountability Plans, allows California school districts to allocate funds based on their needs as identified through goals and action items. This research project sheds light on the extent to which the funds have been utilized in the classroom and at the school…

Across the United States, school districts are reshaping the role of principal supervisors to include supervision practices intended to enhance the instructional and leadership skills of the principals they supervise. The purpose of this research study is to add to the existing body of research involving the predominant practices that principal…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore and examine the autonomous decision-making process and fiscal strategies used by Evidence-Based Funding Tier-One decision-makers. The processes utilized, factors considered, and results achieved were studied retroactively to learn how school districts approach allocation of Evidence-Based…

Instructional leaders require timely and predictive data to guide post-pandemic systemic changes. We investigated the predictability of an observational instrument, the Rigor Appraisal, and its association with achievement and other school effectiveness measures in a sample of 53 schools in Illinois. We found that increases in the Rigor Appraisal…

The use of teacher leadership in PK-12 education has experienced a resurgence since the late 1990s as school leadership models have evolved to include the engagement of diverse stakeholders in school and district leadership processes aimed at improvement efforts. Despite this resurgence, there remain several barriers to understanding the nature of…

This dissertation presents a phenomenological qualitative study that examines the lived experiences of six Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Directors representing county, urban, and suburban school districts. The study aims to explore the perspectives, challenges, and strategies of SEL Directors in implementing SEL programs district-wide. The…

This was a case study of the principal succession planning practices of a large school district in Oregon. For the study, the researcher interviewed nine principals and nine central office administrators and surveyed 17, K-12 assistant principals within the studied school district. The findings from this study reveal many strengths and weaknesses…

The study examined the relationship between expenditures and student achievement in Ohio school districts for the years 2015 through 2019. Data were analyzed for categorical district expenditures correlated to student achievement. Operating and instructional expenditure categories, along with typology demographics, comprised the independent…

Purpose: This study contributes to a growing literature focused on institutional complexity, or the phenomenon of competing institutional logics, in PK-12 public education. Responding to calls for more nuanced characterizations of district-level administration, our purpose was to identify the logics of curriculum leadership in one large school…

This dissertation comprises an examination of how school districts have allocated the resources they received as a result of the Illinois Evidenced-Based Funding (EBF) for Student Success law. The law was passed in 2017 with the rationale of providing additional resources to school districts based on evidenced-based approaches, with the vast…

This study explores educational technology infusion in the U.S. school district context. We used a complex systems perspective to understand the interactions between the classroom (micro), building (meso), and organization (macro) system levels of a school district, offering insight into "how" and "why" certain permutations of…

This article aims to undertake a comparative investigation of school administration to understand further the frames of curriculum making. School administration is an under-illuminated aspect of curriculum research. The paper commences from the notion that, in mass education, a school system is operationalized by many schools, which are coupled to…

This case study uses the approach by the Texas government to attempt a state takeover of Houston Independent School District (HISD) to examine the impact of framing on awareness and acceptance of executive action. This work extends recent studies in Georgia and Massachusetts that find stakeholder relationships, the role of Republican governors,…