The goal of this brief is to provide school district and school staff with tools to help make more effective and efficient use of resources, particularly American Rescue Plan ESSER III funding. ESSER III funding offers districts and schools an opportunity to not only support their immediate needs of safely reopening schools to in-person…

The field of special education has become increasingly interested in and concerned about the costs associated with delivering programs and services to students. Yet, to date, there has been relatively limited data on the costs or return on investment of special education services and preventive interventions. There is an opportunity to learn from…

Community colleges are under pressure to increase completion rates, prepare students for the workplace, and contain costs. Colleges need to know the financial implications of what are often perceived as routine decisions: course scheduling, program offerings, and the provision of support services. This chapter presents a methodology for estimating…

Background: School-based screening for health conditions can help extend the reach of health services to underserved populations. Screening for mental health conditions is growing in acceptability, but evidence of cost-effectiveness is lacking. This study assessed costs and effectiveness associated with the Developmental Pathways Screening…

The common reporting of effect sizes has been an important advance in education research in recent years. However, the benchmarks used to interpret the size of these effects--as small, medium, and large--do little to inform educational administration and policy making because they do not account for program costs. The author proposes an approach…

Public sector economic analysis differs from private sector analysis in that the former assumes continuous functions and very small departures from existing conditions while the latter is generally concerned with large discrete either-or decisions. This paper (1) defines an analytic measure that relates effectiveness and cost so that the…

Concerned with the problem of determining program costs as part of the evaluation process, this article helps the practitioner arrive at useful conceptions of the term "cost" and procedures for assessing the costs of an educational program. Its purpose is to help design costing procedures for evaluation situations that are commonly encountered. An…

Program budgeting is a system that focuses on outcomes rather than on inputs, relates resources to outcomes, includes more than one time interval in the budget document, and states outcomes in measurable terms. If the assumptions underlying program budgeting are accepted, the system can be an effective tool for identifying new ways to do jobs…

Data suggest that the rhetoric about how local people can solve their own problems through gifts of relatively unrestricted money is open to question. (Author)

Efforts of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst illustrate the use of cost information in decision-making. The Instructional Cost Index can be used to determine the unit costs of instruction and, combined with information from an induced course load matrix system, can provide data on the costs of programs. (LBH)

This guidebook, the second in a series of three, (plus a linker's guide) is intended to aid educational personnel in the selection of programs and materials best suited for specific schools and needs. The first section of the guide enables educators to develop detailed estimates of the costs for each program under consideration. The second section…

Suggests that economic studies, insofar as they have for the past decade concentrated on the importance of rate-of-return analysis, have not contributed much to guide public policy decision-making. (Author)

This document discusses planning for educational development by means of a Planning, Programming, Budgeting System. A PPB system is defined and its basic operation is described. Various ways in which the broader purposes of governments may be classified in terms of their objectives are presented with emphasis on how the learning objective might…

This report explores the need for cost-benefit analysis in non-traditional education for the disadvantaged and presents practical suggestions and steps needed to carry out an effective analysis, based upon the experiences in the Community College of Vermont. Steps in such an anslysis include: (1) understand the informational needs of the various…

Better managerial control in terms of decision making and understanding the costs of a system/service result from allocating indirect costs. Allocation requires a three-step process: selecting cost objectives, pooling related overhead costs, and selecting costs bases to connect the objectives to the pooled costs. Argues that activity-based costing…