When the Model Work Standards were first crafted more than two decades ago, they were built on the premise that quality child care jobs are the cornerstone of high-quality services for children and families. The intent of these standards is to make it possible for those who choose teaching young children as a career to reasonably and responsibly…

K-12 education resources are often allocated non-strategically, with schools spending time and money on activities that have little relationship to student outcomes. Most of these decisions take place within districts, rooted in the processes of setting schedules, staffing levels, and assignments, and creating final budgets. Local Education…

Many factors and pressures affect decisions made in UK university libraries on opening hours especially 24/7. This article reports on a project to examine the decision-making process, influential factors, and stakeholders. A workshop for senior library managers in the East Midlands was held to gather data and share experiences. From analysis of…

The Main Library Service Desk is a one-stop academic help center located between a newly renovated student-focused space called the Learning Commons and the library collections. Services began with the first day of classes, August 26, 2013, and assessment has been ongoing, in part due to the availability of data. Staffing levels, staffing hours,…

Conventional thinking holds that districts and schools face a strategic decision between two fundamentally different alternatives: make or buy? The former refers to planning, designing, and enacting school-specific improvement initiatives. The latter refers to contracting with external providers of schoolwide improvement programs. However, there…

This article focuses on the elaboration of institutional research practice, which is an important element of any research university. The study addresses three questions. First, how did institutional research arise, and what is its raison d'etre in a research university? Second, how can institutional research contribute to the improvement of the…

Declining reference statistics, diminishing human resources, and the desire to be more proactive and embedded in academic departments, prompted the University of South Florida Library to create a taskforce for re-envisioning reference services. The taskforce was charged with examining the staffing patterns at the desk and developing…

This study examined the adoption of information technology (IT) emerging technology by higher education institutions with a focus on non-research and research based institutions categorized by Carnegie Mellon classifications that are members of EDUCAUSE, a higher education non-profit organization, whose mission is the use of IT in higher…

Implementing high-quality out-of-school time programs requires well-trained and well-prepared frontline staff who are supported by informed, competent, and committed program managers and administrators. Research on out-of-school time programs has found that effective program managers--referred to as "facilitative administrators"--promote…

A few years ago, in "Student Success in College (SSiC)," the authors profiled twenty colleges and universities that were unusually effective in fostering student engagement and success, defined as better-than-predicted scores on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and better-than-predicted graduation rates. These schools are…