Faced with rising demand for information about early childhood programs, states need to find tools and strategies to monitor the progress of and to identify high-quality early childhood programs. In response, REL Mid-Atlantic convened a regional workgroup for state personnel who work with the systems containing early childhood data. The workgroup…

Examines the role of self-regulation in the establishment of an informational privacy policy. Discusses information technologies and changes in commerce; personal information in databases; demands for accountability; institutional and enforcement models; legislation; government failures; self-regulation and the individual; and potential problems…

In response to legislative mandates calling on educational institutions to become more accountable for monies spent, a number of community colleges in California have implemented research and data collection models to help them answer state and local questions about institutional effectiveness. However, there is a significant difference between…

A six-stage evaluation model is described for gathering data concerning the relative cost-effectiveness of alternative professional development activities which share common objectives. The model specifies the type of cost effectiveness data to gather and the analysis procedures to use in comparing the relative costs and effectiveness of the…

Opponents of school choice argue that private schools are not "accountable" because they are not subject to detailed oversight by a regulatory bureaucracy. They claim private school employees can be expected to engage in abusive and criminal behavior more frequently. School choice supporters respond that parents hold private schools…

The educational community is recognizing that it has had little direct control over or knowledge of educational data collection. The objective of this paper is to present a description of presently collected financial data collected by a state education department. An entity set model is used to create a relational view of the data to facilitate…

To meet accountability challenges from a customer-satisfaction perspective, an urban institution of higher education has developed an integrated approach to studying the freshman year experience in order to develop comprehensive outcomes measures for assessing freshman success. Multiple sources of data (freshman satisfaction survey data,…

This paper explores educational productivity in Texas as it relates to the development of an educational productivity model based on information in the Accountability System of the Texas Education Agency. A number of educational inputs were identified that were found to be related to specific educational outputs. Stepwise regression analysis was…

In 1983, California's Los Rios Community College District developed the Student Flow Research Model, designed to bring together data on community characteristics, student characteristics, student and program performance, and former students' outcomes to answer basic questions related to institutional effectiveness. Over the years, the District has…