Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2017

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ed. D.

Department

Educational Leadership, Evaluation and Organizational Development

Degree Program

Educational Leadership and Organizational Development, EDD

Committee Chair

Ingle, W. Kyle

Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)

Muñoz, Marco

Committee Member

Muñoz, Marco

Committee Member

Haselton, Blake

Committee Member

Powers, Deborah

Author's Keywords

academic achievement; low SES students; ordinary least squares regression; school integration; socioeconomic diversity; student assignment plan

Abstract

There is contention among researchers about how to best operationalize socioeconomic status (SES). This study seeks to provide an explicit definition of one metric of socioeconomic status, the diversity index (DI) of Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) and investigates its efficacy at predicting the aggregate academic achievement of students within a school, relative to other common metrics of SES which are analogous to components of the DI. Another purpose of this study is to investigate possible peer effects of socioeconomic diversity on low SES students. This study utilizes a correlational – multiple regression approach to explore relationships among study variables and to test two competing theories on the relationship between socioeconomic diversity and academic achievement of low SES students. As American educational aims are arguably shifting and its courts seem to be losing interest in mandating desegregation in schools, implications of resegregation must be considered. If not, then arguments for structuring within-school diversity might be misconstrued as doing so for the sake of diversity itself. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

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