Schools should be safe, nurturing, and welcoming environments for all students. Frequently, exclusionary school discipline practices, which remove students from the classroom--even for minor infractions of school rules--through suspension or expulsion, prevent students from participating fully in their education. Suspensions, expulsions, and other…

This "Policy Insight" is a supplement to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education's (WICHE's) annual "Benchmarks" indicators, which summarize the Western states' progress with improving access to, success in, and financing of higher education. This brief explores one variant for how WICHE states might meet…

The 2009-11 state general fund appropriation is $597.9 million for the eleven campuses, University of North Dakota (UND) School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS), Forest Service and North Dakota University System Office, which is an increase of $153.4 million over the 2007-09 adjusted appropriation, less 07-09 one-time funding. This includes…

The OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) constitute two of the largest ongoing international student and teacher surveys presently underway. Data generated from these surveys offer researchers and policy-makers opportunities to identify particular educational…

The "Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965" ("ESEA") requires that school districts provide services to higher-poverty, Title I schools, from state and local funds, that are at least comparable to services in lower-poverty, non-Title I schools. The current Title I comparability requirement allows school districts to…

This report provides a first-of-its-kind descriptive summary of private school expenditures. It includes comparisons of expenditures among different types and affiliations of private schools, and it also compares those expenditures with public school expenditures for districts in the same state and labor market. Results indicate that (1) the…

In 2005-06 almost half of the pupils in California's public schools were Latinos, but Latinos only received about 15 percent of the BA degrees awarded by public and private colleges in the state. Texas has a comparable Latino population, but does significantly better than California in getting Latino students through college. The implication of…

Class-size reduction (CSR) mandates presuppose that resources provided to reduce class size will have a larger impact on student outcomes than resources that districts can spend as they see fit. I estimate the impact of Florida's statewide CSR policy by comparing the deviations from prior achievement trends in districts that were required to…

The economic and employment outlook for individuals without a high school diploma is bleak. For many of these individuals, passing the General Educational Development (GED) Test is the first step in competing in the increasingly demanding job market. GED test-taking policies vary across test centers and jurisdictions, and have the potential to…

After decades of focusing on expansion and access, California's institutions of higher education are now being handed a more difficult charge: to dramatically increase the number of college graduates with diminishing state funding. There is a growing consensus that the United States needs to ratchet up its production of college graduates to turn…

This report examines the effects of increasing science course-taking requirements in the Chicago Public Schools. CPS has been at the forefront of the national movement to require a college-preparatory curriculum for all high school students. In 1997, CPS mandated that all entering ninth-graders take a college-preparatory curriculum in high school,…

In this paper, the authors estimate the effect of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP, or the Milwaukee voucher program) on integration in public and private schools. Their first question is straightforward: Do the student bodies at private schools participating in MPCP have a racial composition that more closely or less closely resembles…

The British Columbia (BC) Council on Admissions and Transfer (BCCAT) has undertaken, in the last couple of years, a review of the BC Transfer System. Preliminary findings indicate that the current structure of the BC Transfer Guide (BCTG), which designates institutions as either "sending" institutions or "receiving"…

Demand for university education has increased due to the recent innovations of universal, free and compulsory education at the basic and senior secondary education level. Education has been expanding very rapidly at all levels in Nigeria. However, there are serious problems related to quality, equity, unavailable human and material resources and…

Students and their families must cover, on average, 83% of the roughly $16,000 cost of attendance for a full-time, in-state undergraduate at a state university in Florida. On average, 75% of the cost of attendance in Florida's public universities is from expenses other than tuition and fees and books. The largest expense is room and board,…