When Mark Smith was principal of Houston's Anderson Elementary School in the early 1990s, he often ran up against a maddening mathematics problem. At the time, the Houston Independent School District doled out money to schools for nonteaching staff members--like assistant principals, clerks, and librarians--based on a set of enrollment formulas…

This brief provides a summary and analysis of a survey taken in the fall of 2005. The survey was conducted with a distribution of questionnaires to all of the district superintendents in the state of Arizona. Responses were received from 116 individuals out of a population of 227. These superintendents represented all three types of school…