This booklet contains the final report of Maine's Commission on Child Abuse. The commission is charged with examining the current policies as well as public and private programs and resources related to physical and sexual abuse of children. The commission's recommendations are discussed in detail. The nine recommendations concern: teacher and…

Child advocacy groups have become increasingly sophisticated about using data to mobilize public opinion and motivate greater public investment in young children and their families. The lesson emerging from this work is that state and local data are needed in addition to national data to build a more powerful case for change. This policy brief…

Data collection and analysis are frequently neglected by school leaders over the course of the decision-making process. All schools gather large amounts of information about students and teachers, but most data are used to satisfy administrative requirements rather than evaluate school improvement in a systematic fashion. Apprehension regarding…

A project was conducted to establish criteria by which adult basic and literacy education (ABLE) student enrollment, completion, early separation, and educational level/category attainment are reported throughout Pennsylvania. First, staff at 10 Project Educational Quality for Adult Literacy (EQuAL) sites were interviewed to identify recurring…

This study examined policies to help states develop, recruit, and retain more highly qualified teachers. Researchers conducted interviews to examine the data systems in 14 states. Results indicated that comparable, timely, and accurate data about teacher quality were conspicuously absent from many policy discussions. Although states collected and…

This study examined the relationship between instructional and assessment accommodations for students with disabilities in grades 1-8 on the Maryland state tests comprising the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. The study evaluated the Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) of 280 students with disabilities in four local education…

This report reviews existing data related to post-school outcomes for individuals with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), discusses why these data may be misleading, and describes what the special education field is doing to improve the post-school outcomes for individuals with EBD. In the first part of the paper, outcomes related to three…

Counseling supervision has often been conceptualized as an extrapolation of counseling theory to the supervisory context. As a learning context central to the professional development of counselors distinctly different from counseling, this scope of supervision limited the supervisor's ability to deliberately enhance supervisee growth. Although…

This study analyzed data from the Illinois Shared Enrollment and Graduation Information System concerning attendance and graduation patterns of two groups: students who entered Illinois public universities as first-time freshmen between 1987 and 1992 and students who had graduated from Illinois public universities by spring 1998. Major findings…

This report looks at student retention in Texas over a 4-year period, beginning with the 1993-94 school year. Grade-level retention is typically defined as having a student repeat an unsuccessful grade or holding back a child not developmentally ready to enter school. The information is analyzed by grade, ethnicity, and gender, as well as other…

The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) tracks the experiences of a cohort of college graduates who received their baccalaureate degrees during the 1992-93 academic year and who were first interviewed as part of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The experiences of this group in the areas of academic enrollment, degree…

Data are not available to inform education policy discussion regarding how resources are allocated both within and among schools. This study was conducted to develop and pilot test a questionnaire that would collect school-level expenditure data. This report describes the three site visits and focus group conducted for this project, findings from…

This report analyzes existing national data sets to determine their utility in studying teaching, learning, and assessment issues as they affect postsecondary student outcomes. The analysis used Astin's Input-Environment-Outcome model to evaluate student and faculty databases that are intended to be nationally representative, are recent or…

Special statistical reports on public, society, and school libraries have been published periodically by the United States Bureau of Education. Nine of these reports have appeared in the past 40 years, the last one, preceding the present 1913 report, presented the statistics of 1908. The earlier reports included the names of all libraries…

The need to evaluate educational programs is briefly addressed, and the application of the Discrepancy Evaluation Model (DEM) at a hypothetical residential school for the visually handicapped is described. (Author/SW)