The United States is home to 45 million foreign-born inhabitants, including naturalized citizens, resident aliens, visa holders, and undocumented immigrants with and without DACA authorization (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). Safeguarded by "Plyler v. Doe" (1982), nearly 65,000 undocumented students finish high school each year (Eusebio &…

"Just Innovation" problematizes taken-for-granted assumptions about innovation in education as "just" about new devices like laptops, computers, or smart-phones. It also aims to open conceptual space for considering what is "just," or fair in twenty-first century contexts by investigating the cultural politics of…

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushered in a period of change in higher-education systems across the former Eastern bloc. Reform-minded leaders in the region sought to introduce western models and policies promoted by foreign development aid agendas. Private higher-education institutions emerged. This qualitative multiple case study examines…

This case study investigates the selection of partner institutions for international joint degree programs at the graduate level utilizing Knight's (2008) challenges to the development of such partnerships which are: Academic Alignment, Mobility and Language concerns, and Recognition and Legitimacy concerns. This study focuses on the criteria used…

This dissertation explores and explains the organizational responses of Mexican public state universities to an ambitious incentive-based policy created by the federal government in 2001: "The Integral Program for Institutional Strengthening" ("PIFI"). Drawing upon literature on organizational-environmental relationships and on…

This dissertation investigates the prevailing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate as an effective platform to improve schools. The data compiled for use in this study represented 426 high schools in Pennsylvania and were retrieved from publicly accessible, state-sponsored sources. The statistical methodologies from the Pennsylvania Value-Added…

Education reform and improvement in K-12 public education continues to be a national priority. Research within the past half century has brought to the forefront the brutal truth that American public education needs improvement (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). The call for improvement includes the need for teachers to emerge from silence and isolation…