The general-equilibrium effects of performance-related teacher pay include long-term incentive and teacher-sorting mechanisms that usually elude experimental studies but are captured in cross-country comparisons. Combining country-level performance-pay measures with rich PISA-2003 international achievement microdata, this paper estimates…

Because of the importance of developing highly skilled school leaders, statewide assessments of 784 Texas public school administrators were compared to determine how leadership skills varied by type of campus (urban, suburban and rural) and by campus student achievement ratings. Important findings indicate differences exist by campus type and by…

This report compares plaintiff and nonplaintiff school districts in "Council for Better Education v. Wilkinson" and "Rose v. Council for Better Education" as regards the equity and adequacy outcomes resulting from rulings of the Kentucky Supreme Court and subsequent implementation of the Kentucky Reform Act (KERA) of 1990.…

This report is based on a study in which a regression model was constructed to increase accuracy in enrollment predictions. A model, known as the Modified Regression Technique (MRT), was used to examine K-12 enrollment over the past 20 years in 2 New Jersey school districts of similar size and ethnicity. To test the model's accuracy, MRT was…

This study assesses three methods of forecasting school enrollments: the cohort-sruvival method (grade progression), the statistical forecasting procedure developed by the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Institute, and a simple ratio computation. The three methods were used to forecast school enrollments for kindergarten through grade 12 in a…

This paper examines the level and inequality of annual per pupil expenditure in the public school systems of the United States and Canada as a function of the centralization of financing. The effect of centralized revenue collection was tested empirically using a sample consisting of the American states and Canadian provinces, while controlling…

In 1983 a number of reports were issued calling for the reform of elementary and secondary education in the United States. This paper describes a methodology for a study that will compare and contrast reliable information across the southeastern states about the implementation of actual reform initiatives, using a framework of 41 major categories…

The Missouri School Profile System is composed of six profiles drawn from pre-existing databases, with the data organized in a manner useful to school districts for comparison purposes and returned to school districts for their use. Use of such a system should reduce or eliminate the need for special school district studies of finance or pupil…

The School District Data Book (SDDB) of the National Center for Education Statistics contains data on local education agencies that make it possible to compare data aggregated at district, county, state, and national levels on hundreds of variables. The development of the SDDB has provided an efficient and powerful tool for use in planning and…

Since educational statistics, which are relatively easy to obtain, can only attempt to measure "quality," this paper asks how quality in higher education is assessed and how educational rankings, which are defined as benchmarks or attempts to measure, contribute to this process. The paper notes that while attempts to rank institutions of…

The School District Data Book (SDDB) of the National Center for Education Statistics contains data on over 15,000 local education agencies (LEAs) that make it possible to compare data aggregated at district, county, state, and national levels on hundreds of variables. The SDDB was used to examine differences between the Topeka (Kansas) public…

The School District Data Book (SDDB) is an information resource from the National Center of Education Statistics that contains social, economic, and administrative data for each of the 15,274 public school districts (local education agencies, or LEAs) in the United States. This paper addresses the information and capabilities of the SDDB that can…

Some of the issues faced by institutions as they attempt to design a system of constructs that reflects the diversity of their schools are addressed. The choice of statistic, percentage passing versus mean, used in reporting test results can impact the allocation of services to subpopulations in the school. Percent passing statistics tend to focus…