Explores whether state policies encouraging the consolidation of rural school districts to improve efficiency through economies of scale are substantiated in the research literature. Reviews three decades of research on education economies of scale involving cost and production-function studies. Finds little program-evaluation research on school…

Investigates effects of school-choice laws on U.S. teachers' work incentives, using 1993-94 Schools and Staffing Survey data. Examines whether school system competitiveness works to solve the principal-agent problem in education. Results are mixed, but suggest that one type of choice policy--intradistrict choice--enhances teacher motivation.…

Examines the inter-related issues of college curricular coherence, student mobility, and transferability of college credits among institutions. Urges agreement on intended outcomes of general education programs and suggests linking such outcomes to transfer agreements. Reports on two states Utah and Georgia which are developing new system-wide…

Educators can learn from business people accounting models that can be applied to managerial accounting, integrated information systems, focused/activity-based costing, decentralized information, and mission-driven costing. A sidebar discusses measuring technology's impact. (MLF)

A mathematician's work consists of proving theorems, calculating, and making mathematics understandable. An assistant for all three components is a Computer Algebra System. We describe and discuss various CAS-assisted processes for proving theorems, and discuss the constraints which can appear regarding efficiency, confidence in the result and…

The Australian Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education References Committee has been asked to examine the principles of Commonwealth Funding for schools, with particular emphasis on how these principles apply in meeting the current future needs of government and non-government schools and whether they ensure efficiency in the…

For many industries, the economic crunch of the past few years has brought about an increased focus on controlling expenses, gaining process efficiencies and finding a competitive advantage in an overcrowded market. While community colleges are not immune to these challenges, they are limited in how they are able to respond. Unlike other areas of…

The contradiction between equity and efficiency is an important issue common to the development of higher education worldwide as well as a problem that many thinkers, politicians, pedagogues, sociologists, and economists, both past and present and in China and abroad attempted to solve. There is an abundance of expositions on equity and efficiency…

Educational management is a field of study and practice concerned with the operation of educational organizations. The present author has argued consistently (Bush, 1986; Bush, 1995; Bush, 1999; Bush, 2003) that educational management has to be centrally concerned with the purpose or aims of education. These purposes or goals provide the crucial…

The primary purpose of "National CrossTalk" is to stimulate informed discussion and debate of higher education issues. This issue contains the following articles: (1) "Effectiveness and Efficiency": The University System of Maryland's Campaign to Control Costs and Increase Student Aid (Kay Mills); (2) Remote Access: Western…

To explore how online speech processing efficiency relates to vocabulary growth in the 2nd year, the authors longitudinally observed 59 English-learning children at 15, 18, 21, and 25 months as they looked at pictures while listening to speech naming one of the pictures. The time course of eye movements in response to speech revealed significant…

A computerized adaptive test (CAT) may be modeled as a closed-loop system, where item selection is influenced by trait level ([theta]) estimation and vice versa. When discrepancies exist between an examinee's estimated and true [theta] levels, nonoptimal item selection is a likely result. Nevertheless, examinee response behavior consistent with…

The compensatory-encoding theory (C-ET) of reading specifies how the efficiency of performance subcomponents affects comprehension under diverse task conditions. It maintains that readers can overcome weak skills through compensatory processes. To test whether C-ET captures more general principles underlying scholastic performance, the authors…

The authors describe 2 efficiency (planned missing data) designs for measurement: the 3-form design and the 2-method measurement design. The 3-form design, a kind of matrix sampling, allows researchers to leverage limited resources to collect data for 33% more survey questions than can be answered by any 1 respondent. Power tables for estimating…

This paper outlines reasons for the apparent discrepancy between public- and private-school cost per student. The paper compares one public and one private school system in Palm Beach, Florida--Palm Beach County Schools and Lake Worth Christian Schools. It argues that public schools are more expensive because of the many categories of student…