The purpose of this Information Aid is to alert school officials to changes and revisions in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), to familiarize them with differences between the former CPI and the new and revised indexes, to demonstrate how the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) computes changes in the CPI, to indicate appropriate uses of the CPI,…

The proposed New York State Cost of Education Index would be a statistical measure of the price changes in the goods and services purchased by local districts. Data would be available on a regional basis. Many statistical procedures and theoretical considerations involved in constructing such an index are similar to those used for the Consumer…

This publication summarizes the history of cost-of-living (COL) adjustment clauses in salary contracts in private industry and the teaching profession, and then discusses the pros and cons of including COL clauses in teacher contracts. The merits of COL clauses are examined from the viewpoints of both employees and employers. Included are a number…

A means of generating an interstate cost-of-living (COL) index from market basket data collected at the standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA) level is described. Models developed for four regions explain differences in the COL among over 180 SMSAs. An adjusted average teacher salary for each state is also generated. (TJH)

This paper describes the need of educators for small-area data on low-income populations, how it has been met in the past ten years, and some of the steps that have been taken to improve the effectiveness of the data for federal purposes. The first section concentrates on how concern for the low-income pupil is translated into a quantitative…

The Composite Indicator of Changes (CIC) in average salaries and wages paid by public school systems is a statistical measure based on data collected and reported annually for 28 of 32 public employee positions that gauges and compares salary changes and analyzes salary trends in individual school systems, groups of school systems, and nationally.…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) commissioned the papers in this publication to address advances in measuring education inflation and adjusting for it, as well as to examine the emergence of a new focus on school spending, rather than school district spending, as well as new, private sources of funding for public education, and…