The goal of this brief is to provide school district and school staff with tools to help make more effective and efficient use of resources, particularly American Rescue Plan ESSER III funding. ESSER III funding offers districts and schools an opportunity to not only support their immediate needs of safely reopening schools to in-person…

Community colleges are under pressure to increase completion rates, prepare students for the workplace, and contain costs. Colleges need to know the financial implications of what are often perceived as routine decisions: course scheduling, program offerings, and the provision of support services. This chapter presents a methodology for estimating…

Class-size reduction (CSR) has been a complex and contentious issue for the last quarter century. Although the small-class concept was adopted because it appealed to common sense, research over time has revealed a mix of confounding variables, instead of a definitive conclusion. Some CSR efforts, such as Tennessee's Project STAR and Wisconsin's…

Better managerial control in terms of decision making and understanding the costs of a system/service result from allocating indirect costs. Allocation requires a three-step process: selecting cost objectives, pooling related overhead costs, and selecting costs bases to connect the objectives to the pooled costs. Argues that activity-based costing…

Choosing a machine for the new microcomputing program at Drexel University is described. It was necessary to give students access to computing capabilities that were versatile and powerful enough to assist them in the full range of their coursework. The university made the decision to have students bear part of the expense of the new curricular…

For budget planners, undergraduate tuition is an extremely important price as the largest income item and one over which the institution has substantial control. Although several factors affect price, the programs' cost structures is the most significant. Also, budget developers can unbundle cost elements to price services and programs separately.…

A Rochester Institute of Technology (New York) program costing model designed to reflect costs more accurately allocates indirect costs according to salaries and wages, modified total direct costs, square footage of space used, credit hours, and student and faculty full-time equivalents. It allows administrators to make relative value judgments…

In 1985 a project was developed to strengthen policy guiding regionalization of occupational programs in New Jersey county community colleges. The project had three major goals: to establish a policy for the regionalization of selected occupational programs offered by the colleges; to describe ways that programs could be identified for regional…

The School Planning, Evaluation, and Communication System (SPECS) is an overall design for districtwide program assessment and development. It is both a way of interrelating planning and evaluation of individual programs and a way of comparing the outcomes of all district programs with the district's community-defined educational goals. Component…

This report describes a project to develop a tool to assist local schools and districts in choosing among various educational approaches to serving children and youth with disabilities in general education settings. The primary purpose of the study, its objectives, and the final product are described in the first chapter. The second chapter…

Experiences in systems-development for state information systems are summarized for eight pilot-test state agencies, as part of the State Level Information Base project. Attention is directed to the evaluation of information needs; hardware and software choices; survey administration; data organization, storage, and linkages; and staffing…

A model for forecasting postsecondary enrollment, the PDEM-1, is considered, which combines the traditional with a cross-pressure impact decision-making model. The model is considered in relation to its background, assumptions, survey instrument, model conception, applicability to educational environments, and implementation difficulties. The…

Experiences of pilot-test state agencies in developing an information system are summarized, as part of the State Level Information Base project. The background and functions of each of the eight pilot-test state agencies are described, along with the information systems approach, and planning responsibilities (comprehensive planning, budgeting,…

Health planning is a complex procedure in the American federal system of multi-authorities and multi-levels of responsibility. Because of its public nature, responsibility for the area of health planning is delegated to the health professional for its substantive dimension, but to the politician-bureaucrat and public-decision-maker for its policy…

The technical, social, and procedural phenomena that facilitate the effective utilization of analytic models in decision-making are examined. Attention is focused on the theoretical issues associated with: (1) selection and fit of the model to the needs of the decision setting; (2) human factors such as cognitive style and the political climate…