The federal Pell Grant was designed to help low-income students pay for college. But over the past two decades, a growing share of middle-income students have become eligible for the program. This was not policymakers' explicit goal. This report examines how the program came to increasingly provide students from middle-income families with grants,…

This paper reviews prior research to assess the effectiveness of Title I in closing the achievement gaps of disadvantaged students vis-à-vis their non-disadvantaged counterparts. A research synthesis approach is adopted to summarize national assessments of Title I conducted between 1966 and 2011. These analyses are supplemented by the authors'…

Homeless youth and youth in foster care are often unprepared for the transition to adulthood. Given the economic benefits of college, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to examine the college experiences of these vulnerable youth. GAO examined: (1) college enrollment and completion for foster and homeless youth; (2) the extent to…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

This "Stated Briefly" report is a companion piece that summarizes the results of another report of the same name. The purpose of this study was to examine the changes in financial aid and student enrollment at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) after the U.S. Department of Education increased the credit history…

Recently, much attention has focused on the number of schools in the nation failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in raising student achievement under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The Obama Administration has projected a dramatic increase in this number as 2014--the year when 100% of students are expected to score proficient on…

By late 2008, the United States was in the midst of its most severe economic recession since the 1930s, brought on by a collapse in real estate prices and exacerbated by the failure of many large banks and financial institutions. Heeding calls from economists, Congress and the Obama administration passed a historic law in early 2009 to stimulate…

The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the impact of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) grant programs of 5 federal agencies National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Education (USDE), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and…

How government spends money, and who benefits, reveals our priorities. How, then, do children fare in the competition for public resources? This report looks at public investments across age groups, from birth through the elementary years. Key findings show that spending more than doubles per capita between the infant and toddler years and the…

The author analyzes the growth and nature of internal evaluation from the 1960s to the present and suggests that internal evaluation has been on the increase because of its perceived importance. Although the 1960s were characterized by a rich intellectual development of evaluation theory and practice, the fiscal conservatism of the 1980s ushered…

The Center on Education Policy (CEP) analyzed trends over four years in the number of schools and school districts that did not make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in raising student achievement under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Using data from the Consolidated State Performance Reports submitted to the U.S. Department of Education by all…

This document presents 2010 data from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program of the U.S. Census Bureau. The SAIPE program produces poverty estimates for the total population and median household income estimates annually for all counties and states. SAIPE data also produces single-year poverty estimates for the school-age…

This report provides a first-time analysis of the nation's current investments in elementary-age children, defined as children ages 6 through 11. The authors consider over 100 federal programs through which the federal government allocates money to children, and subsequently estimate the amount spent on six- to eleven-year-old children. This…

In support of the conclusions and recommendations in the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), this article makes explicit the connections between the economic rationale used in the plan and the educational transformations it recommends. The article reviews macroeconomic research, microeconomic research, labor market and workforce studies,…

This descriptive population study was prepared to provide descriptive analysis of the population of vocational rehabilitation (VR) consumers with HIV/AIDS in the years 2002-2007, with comparisons made to the population estimates for numbers of persons identified as living with HIV/AIDS and comparison to the larger population of VR service…