Canadian humorist Steven Leacock once told a story about a jockey who became so upset over bad news that he leaped on his horse and rode off in all directions. According to this author, that action well summarizes the condition of the State of Arkansas after receiving a Supreme Court order to provide an equal and adequate education to the children…

In this paper, we address the often contentious debate over state and local recycling policy by carefully estimating the social net benefit of curbside recycling. Benefits are estimated using household survey data from over 4,000 households across 40 western U.S. cities. We calibrate household willingness to pay for hypothetical bias using an…

Data in social and behavioral sciences typically possess heavy tails. Structural equation modeling is commonly used in analyzing interrelations among variables of such data. Classical methods for structural equation modeling fit a proposed model to the sample covariance matrix, which can lead to very inefficient parameter estimates. By fitting a…

Efficiency scores are determined for Canadian universities using both data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier methods for selected specifications. The outcomes are compared. There is considerable divergence in the efficiency scores and their rankings among methods and specifications. An analysis of rankings, however, reveals that the…

This study applied the maximum expected information (MEI) and the maximum posterior-weighted information (MPI) approaches of computer adaptive testing item selection to the case of a test using polytomous items following the partial credit model. The MEI and MPI approaches are described. A simulation study compared the efficiency of ability…

Are education and efficiency antithetical? Does the pursuit of efficiency in education inevitably lead to misguided practices and measurement attempts that distort the character and purposes of education? Despite legitimate fears about misguided efforts at efficiency, history shows that efficiency and enlightened educational leadership can be…

Total Quality Management (TQM) is being adopted by many governmental entities, including public school districts. A basic tenet of quality improvement is that the customer, not the organization, defines quality. Other tenets are that the organization must satisfy the customer in order to best the competition; and that the organization must change…

This paper uses data from a survey of K-12 unit schools to fashion a measure of small school sustainability and relate it to variables pertinent to the rural context. Drawing on definitions of sustainable development and sustainable agriculture, this study proposes sustainability as a concept appropriate to schooling in general, and to small rural…

Some of the issues surrounding school productivity are discussed in this ERIC digest. It presents the results of early research that explored whether there is a relationship between educational funding and student outcomes. Some of the reasons behind schools' productivity problems are presented, including problems with unstable governance and the…

This paper presents two types of approaches to media selection--rational-choice approaches and social-influence approaches. It is argued that designers should combine the two types of approaches in a bottom-up/top-down media-selection process. As examples of the two types of approaches, two conceptual frameworks are described--task/media fit and…

Six papers on educational management systems and indicators development are presented in this document. Research was conducted under the Improving the Efficiency of Educational Systems (IEES) Project, which provided assistance in several countries, some of which include Indonesia, Botswana, Haiti, Guinea, and Nepal. The papers include:…

In the past two decades choice has become a major policy proposal for promoting efficiency in schooling. This paper argues that it would be both efficient and feasible to remove government from its present roles in school finance and pupil assignment. The first part examines the revenue side of school finance and identifies four types of…

Current theorizing in education, as in industry, is largely devoted to explaining trial-and-error, failure-tolerant, low-reliability organizations. This article examines changing societal demands on education and argues that effective responses to those demands require new and different organizational structures. Schools must abandon industrial…

This report focuses on the use of linear programming models to address the issues of how vocational rehabilitation (VR) resources should be allocated in order to maximize program efficiency within given resource constraints. A general introduction to linear programming models is first presented that describes the major types of models available,…

Provides student credit hour (SCH) production data and full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty values for physics departments for eight state institutions in Illinois. From this data a SCH/FTE "efficiency" ratio is calculated and implications for present staffing patterns and maintaining faculty size are discussed. (Author/CP)