The College of Education announces the final Dissertation of

Sandra Smith

for the degree of Doctor of Education

February 14, 2018 at 10:00 am in Ball Hall

Major Advisor: Reginald Green, EdD

An Analysis of the Relationship between Teacher Perception of Community Support and Involvement at Their School and Student Rates of Attendance, Graduation, and Academic Proficiency

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between educators’ perceptions of the quality of community support and involvement at their high schools and five longitudinally measured indices of school effectiveness. Given a sample of 248 Tennessee high schools, secondary data derived from the “Community Support and Involvement” subsection of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) Questionnaire Survey administered in 2013 were merged with concurrent student attendance, student graduation, and student achievement outcomes archived and made publicly available on the Tennessee Department of Education website. After controlling for the impact of student and faculty demographic variables, hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated the perceived influence of parent and community support and involvement to be both systematically statistically significant and uniformly positive with respect to the study’s five outcomes of interest, all of which were averaged over three years. More specifically, perceived levels of community support and involvement were observed to explain some 3.5% of the variance in schools’ attendance rate ( = 0.22, t = 3.65, p < 001) and about 1.8% of the variance in schools’ graduation rate (b = 0.15, t = 2.78, p = 006). As regards student achievement, perceived levels of community support and involvement were observed to explain 2.0% of the variance in schools’ ACT Composite scores (b = 0.16, t = 4.67, p < .001); 5.2% of the variance in schools’ percentage of students proficient in Algebra I (b = 0.21, t = 3.62, p < .001); and 1.5% of the variance in English II (b = 0.14, t = 4.19, p < .000).