Who Belongs in Neighborhood Schools? A Mixed Methods Reexamination of Alternative High School Transfer

My dissertation reexamines the transfer of students into alternative high schools, separate educational settings for students who have been deemed unsuccessful in mainstream schools. I engaged an exploratory mixed-methods sequential design to present three papers. In the first paper, I leveraged QuantCrit to examine the association between racialized characteristics of mainstream schools and alternative high school transfer. In the second paper, I engaged the unique case of racially-conscious transfer policy reform to explore the racialized features of discretion. In the third paper, I used narrative methods and found that caregivers experienced alternative high school transfer as a form of school pushout. Together, these papers present a new framework of alternative high school transfer that has implications for direct practice and policy reform in districts.