Time to Discuss

Hey everybody! So we are another week closer to having our final papers completed! Over this past week, I have been working on organizing all of my analysis to create and write my results section. After concluding my analysis, I found seven major themes among my interview and survey data that really explain why the school I am studying is the way it is. These themes are high expectations, quality teachers, a focus on academics, a strong support network, a motivation to be at school, a strong community, and teacher autonomy. Although finding the themes was not very difficult, it was challenging to figure out how to incorporate my observation data into my results, since my surveys and interviews focused on the school as a whole, whereas my observations did not. Eventually though, after I did some research, I was able to find the characteristics that are indicative of good teaching, and so I was able to use those to code my observations.

Anyways, going into this week, I know that my discussion section is going to be difficult to write. Although I am a little bit worried about how I am going to be organizing everything, I am more worried about figuring out what to include or omit, because there is so much to talk about. First and foremost, I need to answer my research question. In my results, I provide a summary of what I found with each theme, but now I need to explicitly state what specifically works to make a charter school successful. Although the straightforward answer would be to just say that other schools should do whatever this school is doing, it unfortunately is not that simple. This is because charter schools are ultimately schools of choice, and so an educational model for one school might not necessarily transfer well to another. In addition to this though, there are some far more fundamental questions that should be approached, such as whether the measure of success I used in this study, which was based off of grades and test scores, is even an accurate measure of success. Also, I need to explain why my results were what they were, where the error in my research was, and what future fields of research could be. Anyways, I am going to stop ranting now, and instead I am going to talk about some discussions that I have read that are related to my paper.

1.   Bortree, Denise Sevick. 2005. Presentation of Self on the Web: an ethnographic study of teenage girls’ weblogs. Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida.

      Although the content of this research does not relate to what I am doing, it is also an unconventional ethnography in that it seeks to understand a community not traditionally studied in this type of research. This study sought to understand how teenage girls interrelate with one another through blogs, just as I am trying to understand how the different parts of a charter school come together to create a high achieving community. I chose this study because this ethnography did a good job being concise in its overall analysis and conclusion. This paper was also qualitative in nature, and so the discussion section was spent really tying together the different components of the community. In this section, it started with the smaller components and become more and more broad, which is something that I need to do, because I have many moving pieces in my research.

2.   Raymond, et al. 2013. National Charter School Study. Stanford, California: Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Stanford University.

      This study did a good job in laying out and explaining the implications of their research. It sought to determine if charter schools are successful or not, and so the discussion focused on laying out a few key points at the end, and then it explained those in greater depth. I think that this may be an effective way for me to organize everything at the end, because there are a lot of implications involved in my research, and so explicitly stating and then discussing them may be useful.

3.   Buddin, Richard, and Ron Zimmer. 2005. Is Charter School Competition in California Improving the Performance of Traditional Public Schools? Smith Richardson Foundation

      What was useful about this study is that in the conclusion, it tied the purpose of the study with the results that were found to show to what extent their research was able to answer their question. In their conclusion, they acknowledge how other literature has mixed results regarding the same question being asked, but they tried to explain the inconsistencies. Although there is not any research that has tried to answer the exact same question, there are a couple sources that I have that postulate what makes a school successful, and so what they thought is something that I should address and comment on.

Anyways, I have a lot of work ahead of me this week, but I am looking forward to having a finished product soon. Sorry about such a long post. Until next week!

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