What impact does the academic library have on student persistence? This study explores the relationship between traditional library input and output measures of staff, collections, use, and services with fall-to-fall retention and six-year graduation rates at Association of Research Libraries member libraries. When controlling for race/ethnicity…

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the Foundation for Excellence in Education have embarked on a well-funded campaign to spread selected Florida education reforms to other states. These reforms include assigning letter grades to schools, high-stakes testing, promotion and graduation requirements, bonus pay, a wide variety of alternative teacher…

The 2010 edition of the "Digest of Education Statistics" is the 46th in a series of publications initiated in 1962. The "Digest" has been issued annually except for combined editions for the years 1977-78, 1983-84, and 1985-86. Its primary purpose is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field…

The U.S. Census Bureau conducts a Census of Government Finances and an Annual Survey of Government Finances as authorized by law under Title 13, U.S. Code, Sections 161 and 182. The Census of Government Finances has been conducted every 5 years since 1957, while the Annual Survey of Government Finances has been conducted annually since 1977 in…

This report presents the first detailed comparison of resource allocation between rural and nonrural districts in the West Region. Three regional characteristics often associated with rural districts were chosen for the analysis: district enrollment, student population density within a district (students per square mile), and drive time from the…

Contracting out public schools to private institutions is an instrument for reforming public education as it may facilitate academic innovation and improve student academic performance through higher school accountability and autonomy. The degree of autonomy that different providers have may vary substantially depending on the contractual and…

American students are failing to demonstrate expected competency on basic skills taught in schools. The educational system needs a major overhaul to address declines in scholarly engagement. The State Board of Education (SBE) designed the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) to give some merit to the high school diploma. Minorities and…

As a consequence of the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law, there is tremendous pressure on school principals, teachers, school superintendents, district staff, state departments of education and governors to maximize the increase in student achievement that is obtained with every dollar of expenditure. Currently, teachers are…

Using detailed individual-level data from public universities in the state of Ohio, I estimate the effect of various institutional expenditures on the probability of graduating from college. Using a competing risks regression framework, I find differential impacts of expenditure categories across student characteristics. I estimate that student…

The "2010 State Preschool Yearbook" is the eighth in a series of annual reports profiling state-funded prekindergarten programs in the United States. This latest Yearbook presents data on state-funded prekindergarten during the 2009-2010 school year. The first report in this series focused on programs for the 2001-2002 school year and…

In the United States, evidence abounds on the effects of expenditures and class size on student achievement, but often it is controversial. In other parts of the world, hard evidence is not as easy to come by, mostly because of data limitations. But over the years, testing agencies have started to collect data on student performance and family…

This study analyzes and explains Florida's education finance system. It explains the sources of revenue and the expenditure of funds, reporting figures for each of the state's 67 districts. It also analyzes the trend in current expenditures --that is, the day-to-day operating costs of schools--to address the question of whether they have been…

The increased attention to costs in recent years at colleges and universities draws attention to the matter of whether all costs are reflected and accounted for in the institution's internal and external financial reports. One category--capital costs--is thought by some to be overlooked at times. The possible neglect of capital costs in…

Legislative mandates for improving student achievement under the No Child Left Behind Act have increased the need for student assessment, curriculum development and staff development in public schools. In order to meet these demands, schools must have the capacity necessary for improvement. Minnesota's small districts and their schools face…

Tax revenue flows to California's nearly 1,000 school districts through many different channels. According to the Governor's Committee on Education Excellence (2007), this system is so complex that the state cannot determine how revenues are distributed among school districts, and after reviewing a large number of academic studies in the Getting…