Applies multilevel models of cost-effectiveness to numerous types of (British) institutions providing courses of instruction in the General Certificate of Education at Advanced Level. Different impressions may be gained about an institution's relative effectiveness when cost considerations are combined with outcome measures. Data evaluation needs…

Suggests the digital revolution in the university and the culture as a whole mandates widespread adoption of technology in all facets of student support services, providing powerful new tools for meeting student needs. Advantages of adopting new technology include speed and accuracy, convenience, efficiency, security, improved evaluation and…

Discusses the theory of microeconomic efficiency measurement, including frontier efficiency-measurement techniques; reviews the research measuring inefficiency in education; discusses the determinants of educational efficiency; includes table listing author, methodology, inputs and output, analytical techniques, and main findings for 28 studies of…

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…

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…

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)