In the United States, most local jurisdictions are challenged as they seek to maintain fiscal strength. But majority-Black jurisdictions are uniquely burdened due to legacy and contemporary racist and racialized policies and racial capitalism. Leaders in majority-Black locales make harsher budget trade-offs than those in majority-White…

International student mobility has increased rapidly since 1975. This article examined country differences in outbound student mobility and the correlates of those differences. Previous studies have addressed this question but differ in their conclusions depending on whether they focus on factors associated with student outflows or inflows. UNESCO…

Convexity-based measures of shape compactness provide an effective way to identify irregularities in congressional district boundaries. A low convexity coefficient may suggest that a district has been gerrymandered, or it may simply reflect irregularities in the corresponding state boundary. Furthermore, the distribution of population within a…

There has been a significant increase in the use of secondary data sets. Many such data sets purport to be nationally representative. Secondary data sets include research commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control, and other public entities. Research increasingly utilizes these secondary data in…

How can teachers encourage their geography students to make sense of big numbers? The key math skills geography students need to apply are ones they learned long ago in fifth grade: estimation and place value. However, in order to recognize the size of a city, or strength of a country's per capita income, or value of a birth rate, they need…

Over the past few decades, a handful of states have chosen to provide state financing of special education programs through a method referred to as "Census-Based" funding--an approach which involves allocated block-grant funding on an assumed basis of uniform distribution of children with disabilities across school districts. The…

This article provides the theory and application of the 2-stage maximum likelihood (ML) procedure for structural equation modeling (SEM) with missing data. The validity of this procedure does not require the assumption of a normally distributed population. When the population is normally distributed and all missing data are missing at random…

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new method for fitting item response theory models with the latent population distribution estimated from the data using splines. A spline-based density estimation system provides a flexible alternative to existing procedures that use a normal distribution, or a different functional form, for the…

This paper analyzes geographic patterns of population concentration and deconcentration among the foreign-born population during the 1990-2000 period. A goal is to examine whether the foreign-born population, including recent arrivals, are dispersing geographically from metro gateway cities into rural and other less densely populated parts of the…

Three conceptual approaches to estimating local child abuse rates using the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect data set are evaluated. All three approaches yield estimates of actual abuse cases that exceed the number of reported cases. (SLD)

Provides tabular information on demographic, social, and economic characteristics of people of Spanish background in the United States. Information is based on advance data from the March 1977 Current Population Survey. (DB)

Analysis of U.S. census data provides evidence that decreased labor force participation of older people, 1980 to 1970, was due to the disproportionate growth in numbers of persons aged 65 or older and the growing economic dominance of industries that provide relatively few opportunities for older people's participation. (Author)

Argues that the loss-function analysis used to adjust the census of 1990 depends on estimating probable errors in census and adjustment and that data from field-validation projects does not provide estimates accurate enough for the purpose. The loss-function analysis is actually driven by assumptions, not data. (SLD)