Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item In Pursuit of Equity: The Politics of Desegregation in Howard County, Maryland(2023) Bill, Kayla Mackenzie; Scribner, Campbell F.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)School desegregation policies aim to redistribute educational resources and opportunities more equitably, but they have not always done so. Evidence indicates that political factors, including resistance from White parents and legal constraints, have undermined desegregation policies’ potential to fulfill their aims. Yet, a few studies suggest that windows of opportunity to desegregate schools exist. Even so, these studies often focus on how a subset of political factors shape desegregation efforts, and some political factors remain understudied. Furthermore, school desegregation research tends to focus on either the political dynamics of advancing these policies or the effects these policies have on segregation. Thus, the extent to which political factors affect desegregation policies’ potential to reduce segregation and, eventually, to advance educational equity remains an open question. My dissertation addresses these gaps in the literature by using a race-conscious political framework and a qualitative-dominant, convergent parallel mixed methods design to explore the politics and outcomes of the Howard County Public School System’s (HCPSS) recent effort to desegregate by redistricting, or redrawing school attendance boundary lines. Howard County is an ideal setting to study desegregation because it possesses several favorable conditions for desegregating schools, including racial/ethnic diversity, espoused commitments to educational equity, and a history of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic integration. These favorable conditions allow me to “test” whether desegregation is a feasible policy goal for school districts and to provide policymakers with insights about how to advance desegregation policies in ways that maximize their potential to reduce segregation and promote educational equity. I find that school overcrowding, growing racial/ethnic and socioeconomic segregation, and resource inequities led the HCPSS Superintendent and the Howard County Board of Education to initiate redistricting. The superintendent proposed a redistricting plan that had the potential to reduce segregation in HCPSS. Yet, various political factors—including resistance from wealthy White and Asian parents and limitations from HCPSS’s formal attendance boundary adjustment policy—led the board to enact a redistricting plan that had relatively less potential to reduce segregation and would have increased it at some school levels. Upon implementation, the enacted redistricting plan appeared to reduce segregation in HCPSS, but those reductions likely resulted from enrollment changes in the district. Ultimately, findings suggest that, under favorable political conditions, desegregation policies do have the potential to reduce segregation. However, realizing these policies’ potential will require districts to either a) explicitly prioritize desegregation, rather than allowing policymakers to attempt to balance desegregation with other, often competing policy goals, or b) align desegregation with other policy goals, rather than pitting it against them.Item "The Schools are Killing our Kids!": The African American Fight for Self-Determination in the Boston Public Schools, 1949-1985(2014) Bundy, Lauren Tess; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines a grassroots movement led by black Bostonians to achieve racial justice, quality education, and community empowerment in the Boston Public Schools during the postwar period. From the late 1940s through the early 1980s black parents, teachers, and students employed a wide-range of strategies in pursuit of these goals including staging school boycotts, creating freedom schools, establishing independent alternative schools, lobbying for legislation, forming parent and youth groups, and organizing hundreds of grassroots organizations. At the heart of this movement was a desire to improve the quality of education afforded to black youth and to expand the power of black Bostonians in educational governance. This dissertation demonstrates that desegregation and community control were not mutually exclusive goals or strategies of black educational activism. I examine the evolution of the goals, ideology, and strategy of this movement over the course of more than three decades in response to shifts in the national and local political climate. This work traces the close ties between this local movement in Boston and broader movements for racial and social justice unfolding across the nation in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Most importantly, my dissertation puts this movement in conversation with a broader national project of various marginalized groups in the postwar period to radically transform the institutions of democracy. This dissertation challenges a well-known narrative of civil rights and school desegregation in Boston in this period. This story of the so-called Boston "busing crisis" focuses on white resistance, a narrow period of time in the mid-1970s, and court-ordered desegregation. In the rare instances in which black Bostonians are included in this narrative it is as victims or apathetic bystanders. The rhetoric of "busing," particularly the framing of opposition to desegregation as "anti-busing," obscured and continues to obscure the more complex racial politics driving the opposition to the integration of the Boston Public Schools. My scholarship brings light to a much broader and more nuanced history of racial politics in Boston and demonstrates that we cannot understand the period of court-ordered desegregation without examining the decades of grassroots activism which preceded it.Item Music Education in Prince George's County, Maryland, From 1950 to 1992: An Oral History Account of Three Prominent Music Educators and Their Times(2004-11-23) Moore, Judy Williams; McCarthy, Marie; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation documents the professional lives of three prominent music educators in Prince George's County, MarylandLeRoy Battle, Maurice Allison, and Dorothy Pickardwhose careers from 1950 to 1992 spanned the period of school desegregation and its aftermath. The professional lives of Battle, Allison, and Pickard, their philosophies of teaching, and the instructional strategies they used in building music programs of distinction are examined employing methods of oral history. The interviews of twenty-three other Prince George's County professionals, including a county executive, a superintendent, county teachers, and county administrators, combine with testimony of the three music educators in creating the fabric of this historical dissertation. Set in Prince George's County, scene of dramatic societal change between 1950 and 1992, county educational, cultural, societal, and political processes are explored to gain understanding of the lives and times of Battle, Allison, and Pickard. Although the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling ended the era of "separate-but-equal" schooling in the United States, it was not until December 29, 1972, that a countywide system of busing of students was ordered in Prince George's County to enforce racial balance in schools. Busing altered the racial distribution in county schools and was thought by many to have precipitated "white flight" of Prince George's residents to surrounding jurisdictions. Remaining county residents voted to limit taxes for county services, creating a financial burden for the schools, the police, and the county government. Subsequently, the white-to-black ratio in the county and the schools altered. Through advocacy efforts of teachers, concerned residents, and students, the elective programs in Prince George's County Public Schools were twice spared from elimination, in 1982 and again in 1991. Music education remains an active part of the Prince George's County School curriculum due in part to the work of Battle, Allison, and Pickard, music educators who displayed creativity in the face of adversity. They set an example for other educators of how to produce, maintain, and support quality-performing groups in music education.