The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, or Global Goals) and their associated targets set out by the United Nations in 2015 explicitly seek to address some of the largest challenges facing children around the world. Early Childhood Development (ECD) interventions have been found to improve adult health and education levels, reduce crime, and…

The confluence of the agreement on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, or Global Goals) in 2015, and the increased attention being paid to the role of non-traditional actors in contributing to shared prosperity, provide a unique opportunity to focus attention on attempts to identify promising new solutions to the barriers that impede the full…

While policy-makers in Britain can justifiably lay claim to creating the term NEET to define young people who do not engage in formal learning, training or employment, the high number who fall into, and remain in, this category continues to challenge them. This, in part, is attributable to the extended use of the term NEET to capture all young…

The purpose of this article is to provide an assessment and analysis of public sector performance contracting as a performance management tool in Kenya. It aims to demonstrate that performance contracting remains a viable and important tool for improving public sector performance as a key element of the on-going public sector transformation…

In state needs assessment meetings held in late June 2008, the leadership of two Central Region state departments of education, South Dakota and Missouri, asked Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Central to determine how the states in the region evaluate their supplemental educational service (SES) providers. Specifically, these SEA staff…

Objective: This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of a contingency contracting program to eliminate nocturnal enuresis of three children ages 5 to 12. Methods: The program was implemented by the children's primary caregivers, two of whom were foster parents and the third a case worker in the foster care system. The program was a package…

During the spring of 2004, the State of Colorado enacted legislation that fundamentally changed the mechanisms through which it financed its public higher education system, beginning with the 2005-06 academic year. Rather than appropriating funds directly to institutions, the legislation created the College Opportunity Fund (COF), the principal…

An evaluation of the successes and failures of performance contracting in a Gary, Indiana, school. (RA)

A description of Educational Development Laboratory's approach to performance contracts. (JF)

This speech discusses the planning for and the implementation of the O.E.O. performance contracting experiments. The author argues that it was not performance contracting, but the O.E.O. experiment which failed. The author blames this failure not so much on the poor evaluation design, but rather on the number of interface problems which arose…

This article considers the impact of a major government initiative to reward and promote excellence in teaching and learning in higher education. The proposal to create Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in England's universities and colleges of higher education was first announced in 2003. A two-stage bidding process took place over…

This report describes the national Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) performance contracting experiment and three of its local programs. It also briefly outlines one state-level development in performance contracting. In the OEO experiment, 20 school districts were selected to represent diverse geographic settings; the common elements of the…

Summary of address to 1971 AFT-QuEST Truth-&-Soul-in-Teaching" conference. (RT)

This report describes the methodology and results of the "incentives only" experiments at Mesa, Arizona and at Stockton, California. The incentives only experiment -- one facet of the performance contracting experiment -- involved contracting to provide incentives to teachers and students, rather than contracting with particular private technology…