ED"Facts" is an initiative of the U. S. Department of Education to base education policy on reliable performance data provided by state education agencies. Among its many data items, ED"Facts" houses school-level counts of students disaggregated by state-defined student economic status, typically free and reduced-price lunch…

From year to year, child welfare directors allocate resources in the hope that their efforts will improve children's outcomes. Recently, with the help of the federal government, states have invested significant resources in the sort of information technology needed to run a smarter, more accountable child welfare system. In addition, science has…

Assessing results of grants programs is illustrated with evaluation activities of the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. Methods considered are ex-ante peer review of proposed work, ex-post peer review of completed work, publications-based methods, and "look-back" methods tracing contributions of past work and…

Policy implications stemming from empirical analyses that evaluate national federal compensatory programs are clouded because negative findings could be due to either the nature of the educational process or the inadequacy of the data collection and analysis technique. This paper constructs a framework within which the separate effects of each are…