Doctor of Education , University of Dayton, 2023, Educational Administration

This mixed methods study focused on why mathematical outcomes for African American and Latinx students are substantially lower than any subgroup at an Ohio elementary school. A critical participatory action research design and phenomenological approach was used to uncover what teachers and administrators deemed effective in improving math instruction and quantifiable data that explored proficiency and growth of African American and Latinx students compared to their White peers. Results indicate that opportunity gaps and the absence of positive relationship between African American students and teachers negatively impact their mathematical performance. The proposed action plan calls for: ongoing professional learning on community cultural wealth, the adoption of CRP framework, weekly professional learning communities, after-school program, and alternate times and spaces for PTO meetings.

Committee: James Olive (Committee Chair); Clarissa Peterson (Committee Member); Meredith Wronowski (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Curriculum Development; Education; Educational Leadership; Elementary Education; Mathematics Education; Minority and Ethnic Groups

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2022, Leadership and Change

This study explores the underlying causes of the racial wealth gap between Black and White Americans: the absence of intergenerational wealth transfers in Black business families. As American wealth becomes concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the data reveal that one third of the 400 wealthiest Americans inherited their wealth from the entrepreneurial endeavors of earlier generations in their family, some creating entrepreneurial dynasties. An important aspect of succession planning is the construct of generativity. Generativity is practiced through leading, nurturing, promoting, and teaching the next generation to create things to “move down the generational chain and connect to a future” (Kotre, 1996, p. xv). There is little research that informs us about the generative intent of Black entrepreneurs. First-generation Black wealth creators operating in the beauty industry with dynastic and generative intent were the target population for this study. Interpretative phenomenological analysis of the data revealed that the paradigmatic ethos and frame of mind that developed from the lived experience of the study participants included the following themes: A Celebration of Blackness, Black Mothers: A Guiding Light, Destined for Purposeful Work, Our Health Our Wealth, and You Can't Pay It Back. The themes imply that entrepreneurial education and training for first-generation Black entrepreneurs with dynastic intent must contextualize the Black lived experience. The study offers a model for Dynastic Wealth™, which includes extensive implications for entrepreneurial training and curriculum design changes for practitioners and policymakers. The model has been contextualized for the Black entrepreneurial experience and is designed through a lens of racial equity. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Committee: S. Aqeel Tirmizi Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Donna Ladkin Ph.D. (Committee Member); E. Murell Dawson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Black History; Black Studies; Business Education; Curriculum Development; Economic History; Education Policy; Entrepreneurship; Families and Family Life; Minority and Ethnic Groups

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Economics

Wealth inequality has always been part of American life, but not until recently has it risen to a level not seen since the Great Depression. In this dissertation, I present three essays in which the wealth gap issue is investigated in depth from three different perspectives. The first essay deals with entrepreneurs, a group of people significantly more affluent than the rest of the population. Inspired by vastly different results from Hurst and Lusardi [2004] and Fairlie and Krashinsky [2012], I examine how liquidity constraints affect business entry using a new dataset. My essay not only resolves the conflict between these two studies, but most of all, delivers a unified message about the topic. In the second essay, I incorporate a non-parametric estimate of earnings into a two-asset model to explore how much wealth owned by the richest 1% and 5% of the households can be accounted for. By relaxing the normality assumption imposed on earning shocks, my model can better fit the upper tail of the wealth distribution and generate fewer households with negative or zero wealth. The third essay explores two other wealth-generating channels: differential returns and intergenerational link in returns on assets. By building them into an overlapping generations framework, my model can almost perfectly match the wealth of the top 5% of the households and well replicate the wealth of the top percentile.

Committee: Pok-sang Lam (Advisor); Hijame Miyazaki (Committee Member); Lucia Dunn (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics