This report reviews high school dropout rates and related factors in rural high schools throughout 15 Southern and Southwestern states. These schools are in districts that are among the 800 rural districts with the highest student poverty rate nationally. Seventy-seven percent of the "Rural 800" districts and 87 percent of the students in them are…

How government spends money, and who benefits, reveals the priorities. How, then, do children fare in the competition for public resources? While families have long been the primary caregivers of children, all levels of government--local, state, and federal--invest in the growth and development of children, whether through education, family…

"Trends in College Spending, 1998-2008: Where does the money come from? Where does it go? What does it buy?" is the third in a series of reports on college and university spending from the Delta Cost Project. The findings presented in this report concentrate on the 1998 to 2008 time period--the last academic year for which spending data are…

If our students are to be prepared for the demands of the 21st century, we must find ways to meet their educational needs. We have increasing numbers of students with special needs, in particular a dramatic increase in students identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In 2009-10 there were 2,548 more of these identified students than five years…

Because educators often use previous years' budgets as a starting point, many budget items become entrenched with limited discussion about whether or not these are funds well spent. This approach is particularly detrimental for innovations that are initially supported through special funding sources. Unless successful new initiatives are…

This report is a summary of 2007-2008 school year expenditures funded by the Title V, Part A federal grant program in Austin Independent School District.

Purpose: As consensus emerges concerning the need to extend publicly funded home- and community-based services that support the independence of seniors, studies have reported the efficacy and cost effectiveness of assistive technology (AT). This article presents the latest available national AT expenditure and participation trends (1999-2002) for…

To make online learning an integral part of higher education, institutions must determine the real costs of instruction and what tuition to charge based on these costs. Then the question is: Is this tuition bearable by the target population of potential students?

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 presents salary and wage data collected as part of the "Educational Research Service (ERS) National Survey of Salaries and Wages in Public Schools, 2008-2009." The survey, conducted in fall 2008, collected data on salaries scheduled and salaries paid for 23 selected professional positions and 10 selected support positions in public…

This study estimates the costs of providing a high-quality PreK-3rd education approach in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Relying on an Evidence-Based approach to school finance adequacy, it identifies the staffing resources needed to offer high-quality integrated PreK-3rd programs and then estimates the costs of those resources. By…

Summertime winding down and summer vacations coming to an end signal that back-to-school time is near. It's a time that many children eagerly anticipate--catching up with old friends, making new ones and settling into a new daily routine. Parents and children alike scan the newspapers and Web sites looking for sales to shop for a multitude of…

In the postbellum southern U.S., African Americans were steadily disenfranchised, a modern publicly financed universal school system with racially segregated schools was created, and public school monies were allocated so that white pupils received substantially more than black pupils. An earlier paper (Ng and Halcoussis 2003) established a…

In this study, we surveyed school district superintendents in a southeastern state about their budget-building strategies. The majority of responding superintendents had worked with their most senior principals and business managers for less than three years. Patterns of variance along the openness of budget-building processes, information…

Recent evidence from Pakistan points to significant pro-male bias within households in the allocation of education expenditures. This raises two important questions. Is less spent on enrolled girls than boys through differential school-type choice for the two sexes; for example, through a greater likelihood of sending boys to fee-charging private…