During the 2004 legislative session, the Colorado General Assembly enacted Senate Bill 189 (SB189), which established the first system of college vouchers in the United States. The supporters of SB189 hoped that the voucher system, called the College Opportunity Fund (COF), would: 1) stabilize the flow of state funding to higher education; 2)…

In an era of significant disinvestment in public higher education by state governments, many public universities are moving toward a "progressive tuition model" that attempts to invest approximately one-third of tuition income into institutional financial aid for lower-income and middle-class students. The objective is to mitigate the…

As test-based educational accountability has moved to the forefront of national and state education policy, so has the desire for better measures of school performance. No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) status and safe harbor measures have been criticized for being unfair and unreliable, respectively. In response to such criticism, in 2005 the federal…

Governments frequently introduce education policy reforms to improve the educational outcomes of pupils. These often have simultaneous effects on pupils because they are implemented in the same schools and at the same time. In this paper, we evaluate the relative and multiple overlapping effects of two flagship British educational policies--the…

Climate change is only one factor driving growing numbers of cities throughout the globe to reconsider conventional approaches to electricity generation and use. In the U.S., this momentum is incorporating a shift away from centralized, supply-side approaches reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear power, toward more distributed, flexible, and cleaner…

The purpose of the Research and Mapping for MCEECDYA Project: Student Academic Engagement was to examine the characteristics of schools with a low Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) from all jurisdictions that were identified to be making a difference to student academic and to identify the key drivers and characteristics of…

The educational achievement and attainment of young people in the United States has been a long-standing issue of concern. While analyses of long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that students in the United States have made gains in reading and mathematics over the past few decades, a sizeable…

We study how the employment effects of enterprise zones vary with their location, implementation, and administration, based on evidence from California. We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods, coupled with a survey of enterprise zone administrators. Overall, the evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase…

This literature review was commissioned by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) to draw together current and recent studies of integrated working, in order to build an overview of the theories and models of such working. The review is important for current work on evaluating the early impact of integrated children's services and…

This report is intended to inform the European Commission's DG Information Society and Media in developing its policies for the period 2010-2020. It is targeted to policymakers with expert knowledge of the field. The report summarises the work conducted in the study: "Policy Options for the Ubiquitous Internet Society". It builds on…

This article presents findings from the first independent, third-party appraisal on the impact of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) on student test score gains in mathematics. TAP is a comprehensive school reform model designed to attract highly-effective teachers, improve instructional effectiveness, and elevate student achievement. We use a…

Background: In this article we address some of the challenges posed by the development of national assessment systems and discuss the need for high quality information on trends in attainment; support for school improvement processes and ways in which learning should be enhanced through valid assessment. Purpose: Key elements are explored,…

The goal of this study is to apply a conventional education cost-function approach for estimating the sensitivity of cost models and predicted education costs to the inclusion of school district level racial composition variables and further to test whether race neutral alternatives sufficiently capture the additional costs associated with school…

This paper discusses the impact on initial teacher training of a new policy initiative in England: the introduction of Training Schools. First, the Training School project is set in context by exploring the evolution of a partnership approach to initial teacher training in England. Ways in which Training Schools represent a break with established…

A common strategy employed by wealthy industrial nations for dealing with short-term skill deficits is to recruit internationally; such was the case, around the millennium, when a teacher supply crisis occurred in the United Kingdom (UK). That immediate crisis is now over; yet irrespective of peaks and troughs, international teacher migration is…