This thesis project explores the extent to which elected education officials, specifically school board members, with a background in education make policy decisions differently than those who do not have a background in education. This line of questioning began with a project completed in a class I took in the fall semester of 2023 - Innovations in School Democracy, where students chose a critical issue in the education sphere and situated it within the context of civic education. The critical issue I addressed at the time was the significant number of individuals in “high-ranking” positions in the education field who do not appear to have a background in anything education-related, outside of their own schooling. The issue lies with the fact that these individuals are making large scale policy decisions that impact all students, teachers, parents, and school faculty members within their district without having any research or practice-based educational foundation or experience to draw upon for their decision making. For the purpose of this thesis, I expanded this phenomenon beyond the realm of civic education by performing a comparative analysis of elected education official decision-making between school boards that have members with educational backgrounds and those who don’t, in addition to analyzing the stances and policies of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The goal of this analysis is to see how, or if, decisions differ and to what extent those decisions appear to be driven by current political ideologies versus educational research and best practices. I hypothesize that elected education officials who have a background in education will make decisions that are more student- and educator-focused and have fewer indicators of a specific partisan political ideology. Conversely, I hypothesize the opposite for decision-making by officials without an education background, where I expect to find more evidence of influential partisan political ideology. In order to determine if a decision-making gap exists, I examined school board websites and pulled district-related news articles in order to cross-analyze the verbiage on specific political buzzwords or phrases that could be clearly linked to a political party’s ideology or stance on public schooling matters and policies. I performed a similar search through the campaign platform and current Arizona Education System biographical page for Superintendent Tom Horne. To begin this investigation, thirty school districts in the state of Arizona were selected for preliminary research - ten small districts, ten medium-size districts, and ten large districts. Through the use of school district websites and the biographies of school board members, I determined which school boards had individuals with a background in education and which did not. From there, two school boards from each district size category were selected for examination - one board categorized as having a strong educational background presence and one board that either had very minimal presence, or none at all. From this research, I intended to present preliminary findings about the extent to which differences in policy-making decisions relate to school board member education background and experience, as well as the degree to which explicit partisan politicization appears to influence such decisions. Upon completion of this limited research, my findings ended up deriving more directly from the mission and vision statements of school districts and school boards, though policy decisions were still loosely analyzed through district media articles. However, my research on Superintendent Horne lent itself well to answer all three of my proposed research questions.

This paper gains an understanding of the perceptions of migration among non-migrants within the United States and Mexico. Given the politicization and relevancy of migration in contemporary politics, a deeper sociological analysis is important to understand if perceptions from a migrant-receiving and a migrant-sending country are similar or different and to understand the motivations of these perceptions. This study utilizes quantitative data from the World Values Survey that asked questions centered around policy preferences for migration. Additionally, qualitative interviews were conducted with both American citizens and Mexican citizens with questions centered around perceptions of migration within their country, perceptions of United States-Mexico migration, and their general perceptions of the economic reliance between both countries. The analysis of this data has shown a strong correlation between one's home country and their perspective on migration. Both Americans and Mexicans have liberal attitudes about migration but have a slight variation in responses. Americans tend to favor surveillance, legality, and security. Additionally, Americans had a lack of a holistic understanding of migrant motivations. Mexican participants responded to questions with more of an emphasis on empathy and a comprehensive understanding of the push and pull factors that drive migration. Both countries agreed that the United States and Mexico have economic interdependence and agreed that Mexico has a higher reliance on the United States. However, American respondents viewed the reliance between both countries as lower than Mexican respondents. The study concludes that historical, economic, political, and geographic factors have a strong influence on perceptions of migration and these factors vary depending on one's country of origin.

The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment prescribes a concept of equality, rather than any particular conception of equality. This distinction enables us to move beyond a historically fixed understanding of equality, as limited to that at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment. This concept of equality requires that classes of persons are not subject to invidious and arbitrary discrimination on the sole basis of an immutable trait. Furthermore, where there there is a history or pattern of arbitrary discrimination in respect to a certain immutable characteristic, such as race, the Court ought to subject such classifications to the highest form of judicial scrutiny: strict scrutiny. This high level of judicial scrutiny acts as a safeguard against furthering a legislative and judicial history of invidious and arbitrary discrimination. The U.S. has a legislative history of arbitrary sex discrimination. Therefore, I will argue that the Court ought to subject sex-based classifications to the highest form of judicial scrutiny: strict scrutiny.

In Arizona, many expect all and any Latin influence to come from Mexican immigrants but, in actuality, there are a variety of countries that have immigrants established themselves in the state. One of the best ways to learn a new culture and to become more empathetic is through their food. Knowing this, I went to several Latin American restaurants in the Phoenix valley to conduct ethnographic interviews with owners in order to analyze their cultural influence on the community and the overall impacts of culture, community, and Latinidad.