UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Preparing School Leaders to Meet the Needs of Students in Poverty(2022) Vecera, Sandra Gail; Anthony, Douglas; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Opportunity gaps for certain student groups are well documented across the United States as well as in the Mid-Atlantic state where this research occurred. According to Miksic (2014), “American public education aspires to provide rich and poor, Black and White, immigrant and native-born, with equal opportunities for success” (para. 1). While all of these identifiers matter greatly, researchers from Stanford University concluded, “It’s the difference in the poverty composition that is most predictive of the achievement gap” (Samuels, 2019, para. 4). As educators, we are challenged by the question, how do we ensure equity in order to eliminate these opportunity and access gaps for students in poverty? According to recent research by the Wallace Foundation, the impact of effective principals is even larger than previously thought. Highly effective administrators have meaningful impacts on student achievement and attendance as well as teacher satisfaction and retention (Grissom et al., 2021). Leithwood et al. (2004) had also found principals to be the second most important school-level contributor, after teachers, to student achievement. Focusing on school-based leadership and principal pipelines can reduce opportunity gaps for students in poverty. One way to ensure high-quality administrators in every school is through a standards-based induction program for new administrators that is grounded in equity. This study focused on an existing Assistant Principal (AP) Induction Program in a medium-sized public school district in a Mid-Atlantic state. The purpose of this sequential mixed-methods study was to (a) explore the district’s new APs’ (defined as those within their first two years in the role) knowledge related to equity according to Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) Standard 3: Equity and Cultural Responsiveness and (b) determine new APs’ needs for induction related to providing equitable supports to students and families. The research questions guiding this study were: 1. For which of the elements of Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) Standard 3: Equity and Cultural Responsiveness do new APs rate their practice as effective or highly effective? 2. What do new APs perceive as the key administrative practices needed to achieve equity and cultural responsiveness? 3. What barriers or challenges do new APs report that prevent them from meeting or exceeding PSEL Standard 3: Equity and Cultural Responsiveness? New APs completed a baseline knowledge survey as well as participated in individual, structured interviews. Survey responses were summarized and interview transcripts were coded for themes. A document analysis was also conducted in order to triangulate the quantitative and qualitative data. This study found that administrators did not rate their practice as effective or highly effective for PSEL Standard 3 Elements B, D, and F. New APs also identified the key administrative behaviors they needed to achieve educational equity, which were to create a sense of belonging, ensure students have access to resources, and additional supports. Participants also identified the barriers to achieving equity in their practice as systemic decisions and structures, staff mindset, demands of the AP role, and access to resources. Current findings suggest that the school district should consider expanding equity professional learning as part of administrator induction, emphasizing equity at the element level as a part of the induction program, and partnering with other offices and university programs to further enhance administrator induction and training.Item “LEARN AS WE LEAD”: LESSONS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN(2021) Hufnagel, Ashley Marie; Padios, Jan; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the spring of 1968, over six thousand poor people—black, chicano, white, Puerto Rican, and Native American from rural areas to urban centers—converged on Washington, D.C. to call attention to poverty and inequality in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. This six-week demonstration was part of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final and oft-forgotten Poor People’s Campaign. Fifty years later, thousands of people in over forty states have taken part in reviving this movement as the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC 2018+), co-chaired by Bishop William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. From low-wage workers’ fight for $15/hour minimum wage in the South to the Apache struggle to protect sacred land from copper mining in Oak Flat, Arizona; from the battle to stop emergency managers from poisoning and privatizing water services in Michigan to the urgent demands to abolish the criminalization of black, immigrant, and poor communities, “Learn as We Lead” investigates how local and national organizers are utilizing the vehicle of the campaign to build a broad-based movement across lines of identity, geography, and issue, while centering the leadership of the poor. Drawing on participant observation within the campaign, interviews with over forty grassroots leaders from twenty-seven states, and archival research, this dissertation uncovers how movement practitioners are reproducing and reformulating a long history of multiracial and multi-issue class politics—from the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the National Union of the Homeless of the 1980s and 1990s, from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) of the early 2000s to the Moral Mondays and low-wage worker movements of recent years. In a time of deepening political, economic, environmental and health crisis, leaders with the PPC 2018+ offer critical insights on forging class consciousness and solidarity across difference.Item Institutions, Poverty, and Tropical Cyclone Mortality(2019) Tennant, Elizabeth; Patwardhan, Anand; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tropical cyclones can result in thousands of deaths when the exposed population is unprepared or ill-equipped to cope with the hazard. Evaluating the importance of institutions and socioeconomic conditions for these deaths is challenging due to the extreme variability in hazard exposure. Studies of socioeconomic risk factors that do not account for exposure will be imprecise and possibly biased, as a storm’s path and intensity are important determinants of mortality and may be correlated with socioeconomic conditions. I therefore model and then control for hazard exposure by spatially interacting meteorological and socioeconomic data, allowing me to develop novel evidence of socioeconomic risk factors. In essay 1, I construct a global dataset of over one thousand tropical cyclone events occurring between 1979 and 2016. Controlling for population exposure to strong winds and rainfall, I find that higher levels of national government effectiveness are associated with lower tropical cyclone mortality. Further, deaths are higher when exposure is concentrated over a subset of the population that is already less well off. In essay 2, I investigate whether local government capacity and poverty alleviation can reduce tropical cyclone deaths, using panel data from 78 provinces and 1,426 municipalities in the Philippines. Tropical cyclone exposure is concentrated in wealthier regions of the Philippines, but once wind exposure and rainfall are controlled for I find robust evidence of a link between local poverty rates and cyclone deaths. In essay 3, I investigate the potential for leveraging policy experiments for causal inference about the effects of development interventions on disaster mortality using an existing randomized control trial in the Philippines. This empirical example illustrates how randomization overcomes issues of multicollinearity and omitted variable bias; however, the presence of outliers in exposure and vulnerability to natural hazards interact to make average treatment effect estimates highly imprecise. Strong evidence of an association between government effectiveness and cyclone deaths suggests that capacity constraints need to be addressed in tandem with risk-specific strategies and financial transfers. Further, evidence that local poverty rates and socioeconomic conditions matter highlights the need for equitable and inclusive approaches to mitigating the risk from tropical cyclones.Item City of Hope and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign: Poverty, Protests, and Photography(2017) Bryant, Aaron E; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have produced rich materials on the civil rights movement since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. These resources generally offer the familiar narratives of the period, as they relate to King’s earlier campaigns as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This includes research on demonstrations in Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, and Memphis. Few studies offer insights on King’s final crusade, the Poor People’s Campaign, however. As an original contribution to civil rights research, the following study offers an overview of King’s antipoverty crusade to contextualize the movement’s impact on America’s past and present. This study presents new insights on the movement by introducing previously undiscovered and unexamined archival materials related to the campaign and Resurrection City, the encampment between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial that housed campaign participants. Photographs, architectural drawings, and other visual materials supplement evidence collected from primary documents and other archival sources. While the investigation of written records and printed materials helps the study construct a chronology of events to frame a historical narrative of the campaign, graphic materials presented in the study add eyewitness perspectives and visual evidence to help shape the study’s conclusions. Perceptions of the Poor People’s Campaign were unfavorable as media coverage fed national fears of riots and civil disorder. Additionally, national memory recorded the efforts of the campaign’s leadership as inadequate in filling the void left by King’s assassination. King’s antipoverty campaign, however, had its merits. It was a microscope on poverty and a critique that focused public attention on poverty nationwide. It was a catalyst to important federal and grassroots programs that laid the groundwork for later legislation and social change. The campaign was also a precursor to subsequent civil and human rights movements. In addition to bringing social concerns related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic justice to the public fore, King’s antipoverty crusade introduced age, gender, and quality-of-life issues to a national discourse on equality. Additionally, the campaign represented a change in sociopolitical activism as protest movements shifted from civil rights to human rights campaigns. Equally important, however, the campaign was the final chapter of King’s life and, conceivably, his most ambitious dream.Item IMPLEMENTING FULL-TIME GIFTED AND TALENTED PROGRAMS IN TITLE 1 SCHOOLS: REASONS, BENEFITS, CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITY COSTS(2018) Tempel-Milner, Megan Elizabeth; Croninger, Robert G; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collective-case study examined the implementation of community-based, full-time gifted and talented programs in three Title 1 schools within a large school system. It investigated the reasons for, perceived benefits of, challenges of, and opportunity costs of implementing full-time gifted programs in Title 1 schools. The findings from the study reveal that the community-based, full-time gifted program directly contrasts the pedagogical beliefs and instructional practices associated with Martin Haberman's pedagogy of poverty, which was the theoretical framework for this study. The program goes against the belief that students from low-income families need basic, low-level styles of teaching, and moves to a belief that students from low-income families need access to rigorous educational opportunities, similar to their more affluent peers (Haberman, 2010). The community-based program started as a way to retain students in local schools, which lessened accountability pressures at the school, as well as, provided access to gifted services for students who qualified without having to leave the community school. However, the community-based, full-time gifted program became more than a targeted program for high-ability students, as it became a culture shift across the three high-poverty schools. The full-time gifted program became an avenue to access needed rigorous, enriched, and accelerated learning opportunities which are not prevalent in many Title 1 schools in the country. The program changed instructional practices to that of high-level, hands-on, student-centered, problem-solving activities, instead of remediation and reliance on basic skills for not only the students in the full-time gifted class but across the whole school. It opened access for students who live in poverty, where typically low-income students are underserved for gifted services, which has long-term effects on their academic achievement. The schools relied on strong principal leadership and vision to guide the program, and the program was supplemented by Title 1 funds to finance staff positions that support gifted beliefs and practices, professional development, investment in curriculum resources. Across all unique cases, the budgetary and philosophy-shift challenges associated with implementing the program were outweighed by the benefits of the program.Item The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy(2016) Greene, Daniel Marcus; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 2013, a series of posters began appearing in Washington, DC’s Metro system. Each declared “The internet: Your future depends on it” next to a photo of a middle-aged black Washingtonian, and an advertisement for the municipal government’s digital training resources. This hopeful discourse is familiar but where exactly does it come from? And how are our public institutions reorganized to approach the problem of poverty as a problem of technology? The Clinton administration’s ‘digital divide’ policy program popularized this hopeful discourse about personal computing powering social mobility, positioned internet startups as the ‘right’ side of the divide, and charged institutions of social reproduction such as schools and libraries with closing the gap and upgrading themselves in the image of internet startups. After introducing the development regime that builds this idea into the urban landscape through what I call the ‘political economy of hope’, and tracing the origin of the digital divide frame, this dissertation draws on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in startups, schools, and libraries to explore how this hope is reproduced in daily life, becoming the common sense that drives our understanding of and interaction with economic inequality and reproduces that inequality in turn. I show that the hope in personal computing to power social mobility becomes a method of securing legitimacy and resources for both white émigré technologists and institutions of social reproduction struggling to understand and manage the persistent poverty of the information economy. I track the movement of this common sense between institutions, showing how the political economy of hope transforms them as part of a larger development project. This dissertation models a new, relational direction for digital divide research that grounds the politics of economic inequality with an empirical focus on technologies of poverty management. It demands a conceptual shift that sees the digital divide not as a bug within the information economy, but a feature of it.Item Rilke's Russian Encounter and the Transformative Impact on the Poet(2014) Finney, Victoria; Beicken, Peter U; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Russian culture had a pivotal role in the development of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetic perception and evolution. As late as 1922, Rilke emphatically claimed that Russian culture made him into what he is. Decades earlier, during his visits to Russia in 1899 and 1900, Rilke encountered many Russians from different walks of life: writers, artists, intellectuals and ordinary folk. Having immersed himself in the study of Russian language, literature, visual arts and religious ritual, Rilke prepared himself for a most intensive acculturation of Russia as a cultural other. This cultural encounter often has been critiqued as shallow and tainted by the poet's preconceived Western ideas. In contrast, by examining opposing critical views, this study investigates, interdisciplinarily and from the perspective of transculturation, how three central concepts of Rilke - poverty, love, and the artist's role - were substantially transformed by his absorption of Russian cultural and literary discourses. Russia is defined here as a `representational space,' employing Henri Levebvre's concept of geographical space consisting of both physical attributes and imaginary symbols. Using Wilhelm Dilthey's concept of `lived experience', the study approaches Rilke's Russian encounter as a holistic intercultural experience on both conscious and unconscious levels. Incorporating these theoretical aspects into a modified concept of transculturation, the study transcends the question of accuracy of Rilke's Russian depictions so often raised in biographical studies that insist on positivistic factuality. Instead, approached transculturally, Rilke's Russian encounter highlights the transformative changes that the poet's subjective perceptions and poetic development underwent. This is enhanced by the references to and analyses of Rilke's works informed by his Russian encounter. Most significantly, Rilke's transculturation as informed by his transformative Russian encounter generates the development of the concept of a compassionate imagination based on the idea of universal interconnectedness. This fostered Rilke's unique view of the individual as an integral part of a universal unity, by which the individual is considered inherently worthy regardless of limiting attributes such as social class or gender. This perception channeled Rilke's idea that the tragedy of the poor and the root of modern inability to love are to be found in the constant construction of identities imposed on an individual by others. For Rilke, after his Russian encounter, art's purpose was to create awareness of the individual's place in the universal unity.Item Getting the Word Out: A Study of Assistance Information Made Available to Low-Income People through County Websites(2014) Wilson, Susan Copeland; Jaeger, Paul T.; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Electronic government (e-government) is vetted as a mechanism to deliver government information and services to the public with efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and greater democratization. The impacts to low-income people can be significant but the topic remains largely unexplored by research. This new study establishes a research agenda to examine the social impacts (rather than the technology focus) of that space wherein assistance information is deployed digitally and a low-income person seeks and retrieves it. This dissertation examines how information about Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ("food stamps), and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families ("welfare") are delivered electronically. Case studies of three Maryland counties 1) examine information to understand what is made available on-line, 2) examine the state and county statutes, strategies, and policies issued on-line to understand expectations, requirements, and implementation decisions, and 3) compare implementations and alignment with statutory mandates. The research identified commonalities and gaps between the mandates and implementation. In particular, state statutes support delivering services and information digitally across multiple platforms. This is being implemented for some county services but notably, not for assistance services for low-income people. This obviates opportunities to reduce the stigma, effort, and costs in applying for services and for realizing greater efficiency in assistance delivery by Departments of Social Services. This gap perpetuates low-income people as a "separate but unequal" class, making this a question of civil rights, and issues of income and full-realized citizenship. This exploratory research provides a new lens through which to expand current information theory models such as information poverty, small worlds, and digital inclusion. It can help identify mechanisms to address. This research can help policymakers to address the intersection of technology; changes in demographics, technology access, and literacy; income; citizenship; biases designed into automation; and organization efficiency. Finally, it can help inform a practical framework with which counties can determine how closely program information and delivery meet public needs and evaluate the impacts of e-government.Item Formal Savings & Informal Insurance in Villages: A Field Experiment on Indirect Effects of Financial Deepening on Safety Nets of the Ultra-Poor(2011) Flory, Jeffrey Allen; Leonard, Kenneth L.; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis exploits a unique micro dataset that uses a natural field experiment to identify indirect effects of formal savings access on de facto ineligibles residing in the same community. Despite widespread interest in microfinance as a poverty-reduction tool, the indirect effects on the very poor of expanding formal financial services remain largely unexplored. This study examines evidence from a large field experiment which helps fill this gap. It also contributes to an important emerging literature on the indirect impacts of policy interventions in developing countries, often (incompletely) evaluated solely on the basis of how they impact participants and beneficiaries. In developing regions, households vulnerable to extreme poverty often benefit from long-standing local safety nets based on cash gifts and other transfers from relatives and friends, which help them smooth consumption across food-deficits and household shocks. To date, little is known about how these pre-existing practices are affected as community members begin adopting newly available formal financial services, and there remains much unexplored in the interaction of formal financial markets with informal safety nets. This paper addresses that gap by examining how formal savings expansion affects inter-household wealth transfers, with a particular emphasis on receipts by the most vulnerable. Using a rich panel dataset from Central Malawi that includes over 2,000 households, I find that experimentally boosting local savings uptake in rural areas leads to a strong positive effect on assistance receipts by non service-users during peak periods of hunger. The difference is strongest among the most vulnerable households. That is, the entrance of formal savings appears to complement local informal support systems for the highly vulnerable through an indirect mechanism, channeling greater wealth to such households during periods of food-deficits. The positive impacts of formal savings expansion on non service-users suggests that formal savings may have substantially greater benefits than would be suggested by focusing exclusively on the impacts experienced by the service-users themselves.Item Neighborhood Level Disadvantage, Race/Ethnicity and Infant Mortality in Washington DC(2010) Amutah, Ndidi N.; Anderson, Elaine A; Hofferth, Sandra L; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the effects of neighborhood level disadvantage and individual level characteristics such as race/ethnicity on infant mortality. Social determinants of health theory and ecological theory were used to construct a neighborhood advantage index for Washington DC. Secondary analyses were conducted using linked birth/death certificate and census data from the DC State Center for Health Statistics. Live births (55,938) and infant deaths (607) occurring in Washington DC from 2001-2007 were examined. Multilevel modeling techniques were utilized to determine the relationship between individual and neighborhood level factors on infant mortality. The research questions were: (a) Do women who are comparable on factors such as maternal education and marital status experience different rates of infant mortality by race? (b) Do women living in areas of high disadvantage experience higher rates of infant mortality than women living in areas of low disadvantage? (c) Does the effect of race/ethnicity on infant mortality change if the mother lives in a place of high disadvantage versus low disadvantage? (d) Does having an infant born preterm or low birth weight increase the risk of infant mortality? Whites have the lowest rates of infant mortality (2.8/1000), followed by Hispanics (7.4/1000), with Blacks having the highest rates (15.2/1000) after adjusting for age, education, and marital status. These findings are consistent with previous research affirming a relationship between race/ethnicity and infant mortality. Infants born in disadvantaged neighborhoods are 1.63 times more likely to die before their first birthday than those born in advantaged neighborhoods. The odds for infant mortality compared to Whites decreases especially for Blacks (5.39 to 3.10; 42% change), living in disadvantaged communities even when race/ethnicity was interacted with the neighborhood disadvantage index. This suggests that disadvantage has different consequences for different race/ethnicity populations living in those neighborhoods. The importance of place (disadvantaged or advantaged neighborhood) in relation to infant mortality at the neighborhood level in addition to improving individual level factors is discussed for program development and policymakers. Implications for health disparities, maternal and child health, social support and future public health research are presented.