This report summarizes the perspectives and attitudes of a selected set of district and school site administrators whom the authors interviewed in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) during the fall and winter of the 2009-2010 school year. The authors carried out interviews with selected district administrators and a series of focus groups…

In these days of radical contraction of funding and expansion in student numbers, universities are under pressure to prioritise their resources, as well as to achieve effective costing and pricing to support judgement and decision making for funding and any external work undertaken. This study reviews costing, pricing and income measurement in…

The rich and the famous are much in the news these days--colleges and universities that is, the ones with endowments in the hundreds of millions or more and whose run-up in assets has raised questions about their non-profit status from both state and federal lawmakers. The U.S. Senate Finance committee wants to know, for example, why institutions…

This report summarizes the perspectives and attitudes of a selected set of district and school site administrators whom the authors interviewed in Twin Rivers Unified School District (TRUSD) during the fall of 2009. The authors carried out interviews and focus groups with these individuals to gain an understanding of how the current budgeting…

The never-ending organizational challenge is to allocate available resources to best achieve its goals. Out of this fundamental question several models have evolved. One is a conceptual model--a way to think about how organizations operate. A second is a statistical model estimating the magnitude of relationships among goals and elements of the…

In the passionate debates over providing equal educational opportunity for all children, it's frequently argued that large financial inequities create challenges for many public schools, particularly those in lower-income urban areas. This study compares the revenues and operating expenditures of Michigan's urban, suburban, town and rural school…

Funders and program planners want to know: What does it cost to operate a high-quality after-school or summer program? This study answers that question, discovering that there is no "right" number. Cost varies substantially, depending on the characteristics of the participants, the goals of the program, who operates it and where it is located.…

Respite is one of the critical support systems for families and carers who support and care for a person with a life-long disability. This study examined the profile of respite services in the Australian state of New South Wales and explored respite providers' views of the factors influencing respite use, and their expectations of respite…

The purpose of this research activity is to understand further how large and small registered training organisations (RTOs) make decisions about the allocation of resources for developing their workforces. Six registered training organisations--four technical and further education (TAFE) institutes and two private providers--were selected for…

An economic analysis of the Open University with an attempt to examine the economic implications of establishing an open learning system in the United States. (Author)

A resource-directive model is developed that specializes the organization's goals and decisionmaking activities into quasiautonomous units and that circumvents interunit dependencies (or externalities) in decentralization. The organization is considered to act by the sequential process of decisionmaking, operating, and then, on the basis of this…

Student evaluations of instructors may be used as a basis for assigning instructors to courses. Four models are presented demonstrating various research techniques. Each of the four models has the same objective of determining the optimum allocations of instructors to courses, but the models differ in terms of their constraints. (JN)

Discusses the purpose of mathematical models and reviews the phases of the modeling process--defining performance, representing the problem, predicting performance, estimating parameters, defining optimization criterion, determining solution, and implementing results. Reviews of book-use, resource allocation, and library network models are…

Reports on the efforts of the California State University and Colleges to develop a series of cost studies to identify and analyze specific library operations as a basis for decision-making among alternatives. (Author/PF)

This report discusses the seven basic types of problems found in business and industry as they apply to library institutions. These seven basic types are: (1) inventory problems, (2) allocation problems, (3) queueing problems, (4) sequencing problems, (5) routing problems, (6) replacement problems and (7) search problems. (MF)