Some universal behavioural screening processes require classroom teachers to complete a risk assessment measure on each student in their class, leading to a possible, but unexplored, problem: risk assessment scores may be influenced by the teacher completing the measure. The current study investigated whether teacher-reported risk assessment…

When the researcher proposed this study, no instrument existed for measuring citizens' attitudes toward school funding equity, so this study was designed as a series of investigations leading to the creation of such an instrument. In order to accomplish this purpose, the researcher first generated an initial pool of items to measure attitudes…

Recent meta-analyses of drug-court studies recognized the poor methodological quality of the evaluations, with only a few being randomized. This article critiques the design of the randomized studies from a statistical perspective. Learning points are identified for future drug-court studies and are applicable to evaluations both of other…

A new report published by the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions is a minor variant on six similar reports published by the Friedman Foundation over the past three years. The new report repeats some of the errors in the previous reports, and it follows a parallel structure, arguing that the costs of dropping out are dramatic for the…

A Friedman Foundation report attempts to find empirical support for the contention that competition from private schools, through voucher programs, improves the effectiveness of public schools. In the first year of Ohio's new EdChoice voucher program, the report claims to have found substantial academic gains at public schools exposed to the…

At the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the call for all students to be "proficient" in reading and mathematics by 2014. Yet the law expects each state to define proficiency as it sees fit and design its own tests. This study investigated three research questions related to this policy: (1) How consistent are various…