Tainted by failure, rooted in myth, and marked by questionable practice, public-private partnerships in education are risky. Performance contracting failed miserably in the 1970s. Faulty privatization rationales include myths surrounding SAT test scores and the "bloated bureaucracy" and "money doesn't matter" arguments. Neither…

Discusses a normative strategy toward pricing human services, which will allow providers to develop pricing strategies within the context of organizational missions, goals, and values. Pricing is an effective tool for distributing resources and improving efficiency, and can be used as a tool for encouraging desired patterns of service utilization.…

Applying Deming's principles to education represents change in metaphor, not paradigm shift. Exchanging factory metaphor for enlightened corporation metaphor updates business/economics image but perpetuates view of students as raw materials to be processed efficiently. No business metaphor truly aims at improving society as a whole. If production…

Estimates of interindustry wage differences using National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men data show that 84% of variance is explained by individual fixed effects. Although efficiency wage theories predict that differences should widen in a recession, these data do not demonstrate such a tendency. (SK)

Discussion of working environments that enhance performance highlights a holistic planning model; activity-based versus organizational-based planning; private and collaborative spaces; worker involvement in the planning process; and measuring effectiveness versus efficiency. (LRW)

A study investigated the quantity of alloy lost in the fabrication of three types of cast restoration by dental students, and identified the proportion of loss at each of the four principal stages of the fabrication process. Suggestions for reducing metal loss and related costs in dental schools are offered. (MSE)

Compared the ease and efficiency of the Qwerty and Dvorak keyboards by analyzing five popular lists on high frequency words to determine differences in fingering for the keyboards. Found that more high frequency words and more characters are typed on the Dvorak keyboard home row, and therefore children should be taught to use the Dvorak rather…

Ostensibly, state governing and coordinating boards have been established to reduce unwarranted duplication of effort and costly competition and to increase overall efficiency of higher education operations. As this study shows, there is some indication that these objectives have been achieved, but additional research is needed to develop clear…

College business officers should take advantage of the industry's market to prepare their institutions for an upcoming hard market. Steps to be taken include evaluating the insurance broker; meeting with the company underwriter; negotiating; considering a renewal contract; negotiating pooling mechanisms; lowering deductibles; and implementing…

Discusses various methods for making employee training programs more efficient: spacing practice, memory consolidation, determining the optimum practice period, periodic review, and testing. Presents research evidence on the effectiveness of spaced practice. (JOW)

The traditional seven-period high school schedule is undergoing intense scrutiny. New schedules are reducing class preparation time; permitting students to move ahead, attend alternating full-day vocational and academic programs, and perform community service during regular school hours; and allowing teachers more productive instructional modes.…

As educators battle restricted budgets, inflation, and enrollment changes, strategic sourcing management is replacing traditional transaction-based procurement. Procurement-card programs, allowing organizations to use credit cards for small purchases or low-value items, save time and enhance controls over merchants, credit limits, issuance limits,…

Explains and evaluates the conceptual and technical aspects of INTERFYS, an Internet-based system for making the review and revision processes in distributed editorial work more efficient by applying the concepts of workflow management using Web technologies only. Discusses systems architecture, management of editorial workflows, and functions of…

Discusses the adoption of the pinyin Romanization standard over Wade-Giles and considers the impact on retrieval in online library catalogs. Describes an investigation that tested three factors that could influence retrieval efficiency: the number of usable syllables, the average number of letters per syllable, and users' familiarity with the…

One way colleges can approach cost control is by taking advantages of cooperative purchasing activities with other, similar institutions. Guiding principles for effective efforts include sharing the risk, sharing the resources, providing services to other institutions, and expanding institutional bargaining power through cooperation. Significant…