This book offers a roadmap for developing, growing, and sustaining living-learning communities (LLCs) that promote student success and enhance the undergraduate experience. Drawing on the Best Practices Model presented in "Living-Learning Communities That Work," as well as updated research and rich, real-life examples from LLC…

A strategy for allocating merit-based awards and need-based aid is critical to a university. Such a strategy, however, must address multiple, sometimes competing objectives. We introduce an approach that couples a gradient boosting classifier for predicting outcomes from an allocation strategy with a local search optimization algorithm, which…

Statement of Purpose and Method of Study: Historically, Mississippi has lagged behind the rest of the nation in student achievement and funding for education. This comparative quantitative study investigated whether significant differences in student achievement as measured by mean composite ACT scores of high school juniors in Mississippi public…

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is due for reauthorization, and Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Chakkah Fattah have both proposed revisions to the comparability provision of the federal Title I program. Harkin's proposed legislation requires the use of per pupil expenditures, including actual teacher salaries, to demonstrate…

Clearly defining what rural means has tangible implications for public policies and practices in education, from establishing resource needs to achieving the goals of No Child Left Behind in rural areas. The word "rural" has many meanings. It has been defined in reference to population density, geographic features, and level of economic…

This paper presents a method for the development of a rating or classification system for assessing the performance of schools within a local school system. It is designed as a tool to improve local school management and to raise the level of dialogue between school officials and the public. Since it may be misleading to compare the performance of…