Anticipatory organizational socialization begins in childhood as girls and boys are exposed to various messages from a range of sources. One of these sources is the film. The following study examines eighteen films, released between 2000 and early 2004, targeting teenage girls to explore messages that they receive about gender and possible…

This article reports on a new national survey showing that state spending on higher education is continuing to rise throughout most of the nation and growing faster in much of the South. Total state general-fund appropriations for higher education are up by 7 percent, to $72.18-billion, in the current 2006-2007 fiscal year, according to an annual…

Questions on the gap between the price parents pay and the "true cost" of quality care were the catalyst for the True Cost of Quality (TCOQ) project launched in the spring of 2001 by the City of Seattle's Northwest Finance Circle. The mission of the Northwest Finance Circle, a community collaboration, was to improve and expand the…

This volume explores whether the nation's early childhood programs are boosting child development and preparing children for schooling and proposes reforms that would improve the programs. The volume contains contrasting papers on the success of Head Start, Early Head Start, and home-visiting programs and on policies that would improve these three…

This report describes the design and implementation of the three interventions tested in Project Upgrade, one of four experiments conducted as part of the Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies. The evaluation was a multi-site, multi-year effort to determine whether and how different child care subsidy policies and procedures and quality…

This edition of the PPIC (Public Policy Institute of California) Statewide Survey is the fourth in a series of surveys funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation focusing on higher education. This survey seeks to inform state policymakers, encourage discussion, and raise public awareness about the state's public higher education…

High-quality out-of-school-time (OST) programs have a positive effect on youth development, but many cities have found it difficult to address the challenges of expanding and improving the quality of programs offered to underserved and high-need students. In response, The Wallace Foundation sponsored an initiative to help five cities increase…

Each edition of the IDRA Newsletter strives to provide many different perspectives on the issues in education topics discussed and to define its significance in the state and national dialogue. This issue focuses on Curriculum Quality and includes: (1) Suggestions for Conducting Effective Teaching Demonstrations in Classrooms with Diverse Learners…

In 1997, New York State lawmakers passed the Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) legislation, a bold new approach to early childhood education. It established new part-day Pre-K programs that were free and open to all four-year-olds. Today, the state invests $414 million annually in Pre-K, which serves more than 100,000 children in public schools and…

The purpose of this investigation was to build the blueprint of Taiwanese public higher education's fundraising. This study applied three surveys (NSH, NSC, and NSF) to three populations' samples (public universities, corporations, and foundations in Taiwan) as well as qualitative interviews toward these three populations in order to explore…

This paper presents the activities of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) for 2009. The past year was one of accomplishment for USAC. USAC implemented a host of advances in operations, infrastructure, and outreach in an effort to continue to improve collection and disbursement of the Universal Service Fund (USF) support and to…

This study was carried out at the request of the Ministry of Education, Zambia. The Commonwealth of Learning contracted Turning Points Consultancy CC, a Namibian company, who provided the services of the author, to "carry out an evaluation of the Zambia College of Distance Education (ZACODE) and submit recommendations to the Ministry of…

This is the fourth report of a process evaluation of Palm Beach County Prime Time, Inc., an intermediary organization dedicated to improving the quality of afterschool programs, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. It covers the 2007-2008 program year, which was the inaugural year of Prime Time's formal Quality Improvement System (QIS)…

In recent years, policy makers and educators in the U.S. have begun to show considerable interest in the concept of weighted student funding as a means of financing primary and secondary schools. Weighted student funding (WSF) has three main elements. Money follows students on a per student basis to the schools they attend, the per student amount…

This update contains analyses of legislative initiatives being tracked by California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) staff. The positions indicated are those adopted by the Commission at the September 8, 2009, and earlier meetings. A matrix of bills monitored by CPEC staff is included.