Graduation Year

2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ed.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Educational Measurement and Research

Major Professor

Elizabeth Shaunessy-Dedrick, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Charles Vanover, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Susan Bennett, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Ph.D.

Keywords

african american, family experiences, low income, south florida school district

Abstract

AbstractFor many years schools located within concentrated areas of poverty in an urban school county in south Florida have experienced alarmingly high teacher turnover rates and alarmingly low academic performance scores. In 2015, in a lauded exposé printed by the Tampa Bay Times, five schools, all of which would go on to become part of the Transformation Zone initiative, were featured in a series of articles, entitled The Failure Factories (Fitzpatrick et al., 2015). The purpose of this study was to explore how school policy and process changes enacted from these articles may have affected those students and families. Historically, the Transformation Zone (TZ) is an initiative by a Florida County School Board to identify and support low performing schools within their district. Most of the schools currently active in the TZ initiative are elementary schools with predominantly African American populations and high rates of students who qualify for free and reduced lunches (PCSB, 2019). While there are studies that describe the operation of these TZ initiatives, particularly in Tennessee with the well documented success of the IZone, there is a gap in the literature about how these powerful reforms are experienced by individual students and families (Glazer et al., 2020; Larbi-Cherif et al., 2022, p. 295). In this study I focused on family, guardian, and parent interviews in the form of questions utilizing an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) interview and analysis (Smith, et al., 2009). The study was comprised of audio recordings of the interviews with the adult family members. These interviews were transcribed verbatim using an automatic transcription service and attempted to capture and explore the familial experiences of the parents and children connected to these schools. The collected data were then analyzed for applicable information following procedures outlined in Smith et al. (2009).

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