The confluence of people, policy, and practice : an examination of the school improvement journeys of restructured schools under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001

Ph.D. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2014.Includes bibliographical references.The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the restructuring feature of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was successful in changing schools' practices in ways that led to their exit from restructuring status. More specifically, this study investigated how changes in schools' educational process factors over time differentiated (a) schools that entered and exited restructuring status and (b) schools that entered but did not exit from a reference group of schools that did not enter restructuring status. The results highlight how strategic improvements in schools' educational processes, when accompanied by shared leadership, contribute to growth in student achievement over time. At least three contributions to research on school improvement were made in this study. First, the results supported the hypothesis that differences in teachers' perceptions of school processes (e.g., improving curriculum, improving student support, improving staff collaboration skills) were related to changes in NCLB-related sanction status; that is, a decrease in perceptions of key educational processes occurred when schools entered restructuring and subsequently, an increase in those indicators occurred as schools began to exit. Second, schools that exited restructuring showed significant improvement over time in their key educational processes and in shared leadership. Third, using piecewise growth modeling to differentiate schools' improvement journeys and multinomial logistic regression to classify schools according to process, staffing, and context factors added to previous studies that primarily used cross-sectional analyses of school variables to measure differences in achievement and/or qualitative case studies of a limited number of schools