Significant variations in educational outcomes across both the spatial and socioeconomic spectra in Australia have been widely debated by policymakers in recent years. This paper examines these variations and decomposes educational outcomes into 3 major input factors: availability of school resources, socioeconomic background, and a latent factor…

Free Primary Education Initiative has been running for more than a decade and its purpose has been to help Kenya achieve equity, parity, quality and higher retention rate in primary schools. This study investigated the impact of FPE inputs on educational outcomes in Kenya. The objective of the study was to determine the rates of enrolment and…

Almost 7 million young Americans (age 16-24) are insufficiently attached to school or work. Based on conservative estimates, we can generate over $1 billion just by helping a mere 0.1 percent earn a high school credential and complete their first year of college through Back on Track Designs. This brief lays out the cost of setting up these GED-…

This policy brief outlines how national education accounts (NEAs) are created, and why they are a vast improvement over current financial tracking systems in the education sector. Examples from the health sector illustrate the benefits of national accounts for improving public services, and their ubiquity highlights the poor state of affairs of…

Resource allocation within education systems is approached from the perspective of economic theory and input-output processes. It is suggested that economic concepts of efficiency and productivity focus attention on factors affecting effective use of resources and should be systematically encouraged. (Author/MSE)

Input-output research has made valuable contributions to our understanding of schools; however it does not provide reliable evidence concerning how school resources should be allocated. Two input-output studies described indicate that the intuitions of experienced school officials should be heeded by researchers when designing input-output…

The effectiveness of schools and the levels of investment in schooling have been in question since the 1966 Coleman report "Equality of Educational Opportunity." Based on a theory of "knowledge-ability," this study challenges the assumption that given "inputs" will yield equivalent effects or "outputs." In…

A partial survey of the literature on the economics of vocational training reveals three important lessons on how evaluations may be undertaken using data on pay, inputs, and outputs. The first lesson is that social, corporate, and private returns to vocational training in developing countries appear to be high enough to justify expanding training…

This study explores some techniques that could assist education managers in their attempt to arrive at more optimal input and output mixes. The first part (Chapters 1-4) provides an overview of the input-output concept in relation to its employment in the educational setting, along with a review of the literature on the educational production…

This article contends that a new concept of education finance has emerged in response to substantial alterations in the U.S. education policy environment. The major distinction between modern and old is that the latter was principally concerned with arrangements of inputs in K-12 schooling. The former, modern-era education finance, is concerned…

The logic and methodological concepts behind the application of a quantitative methodology to the problem of effective resource utilization in the New York State suburban schools is detailed. The goal of the study was to determine the best composition of available "factors of production," measured in dollar amounts by function, that…