Evidence is provided to illustrate that the current level of spending on books by English secondary schools is low with regard to maintaining existing book stocks and that parental expenditure is not making up the shortfall. An analysis of the inspection regime suggests a tendency to emphasise information and communications technology (ICT) to the…

Britain's higher education institutions (HEIs) face fundamental and unprecedented competitive pressures due to lower government funding (Cm 5735, "The Future of Higher Education," Department for Education and Skills, 2003) and a government agenda focused on a "widening participation agenda". We employ the resource-based view (RBV) of strategy…

Under President Bush's proposed fiscal 2006 budget, the federal Head Start program would get a $45 million increase in funding. That money, however, would go for a project involving only a handful of states, not to increase the main program educating preschoolers. The proposed increase to Head Start's fiscal 2005 budget of $6.84 billion would go…

This article illustrates a fundamental challenge faced by the charter school movement. Charter schools are publicly funded, yet privately managed under the terms of a charter with a governing body, whether it be the state, a local authorizing board, a local school district, or a university. Even though charter schools are public schools, and often…

Assume that there are two types of knowledge, global and local. This paper considers a university in a developing country that allocates finite education resources to the delivery of these two types of knowledge. We provide the optimal resource allocation that maximizes social welfare. We show that, by imposing a minimum resource allocation to…

An increasingly important performance measure for university administrators is mean time to graduation at the department level. In this study, the authors examined whether a student's major is a significant variable in predicting time to graduate. If students in one major take much longer to graduate than do those in another major, administrators…

Purpose: To suggest an approach to program costing that includes the approaches and concepts developed in activity based costing. Design/methodology/approach: The paper utilizes a hypothetical case study of an Executive MBA program as a means of illustrating the suggested approach to costing. Findings: The paper illustrates both the benefits of…

High-Definition Television (HDTV) is a new standard for broadcasting. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been working on the new standard for many years and has mandated that broadcasting stations be fully operational in HDTV by 2006. This is the dilemma for community colleges as they approach the deadline for the conversion to the…

This report marks the second release of library statistics data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). It contains data on state library agencies in the 50 states and the District of Columbia for state fiscal year (FY) 2007. The data were collected through the State Library Agencies (StLA) Survey, the product of a cooperative…

While there is a wealth of research on school finance equity and adequacy, and school finance theory clearly documents differences between the two concepts, no study has examined whether the reforms engendered by each approach actually differ in terms of resource distribution. This study examines the issues using district level data on expenditure…

California's school finance system is long overdue for reform. The authors propose a new system that is more rational, more equitable, and, they believe, politically feasible. At its core, their proposal aims to link district revenue to student needs and regional costs while ensuring that all districts are held harmless at current funding levels.…

In this paper, a companion piece to "Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools" (ED544382), the authors analyze small high school spending in three urban districts--Baltimore City, Boston, and Chicago--to understand whether it is higher than in larger schools; if it is, why it is different; and the policy…

To help students meet the demands of society, the University of Houston is using the framework of learning communities and constructivism to create a cross-disciplinary approach to teaching to provide media-rich thematically linked courses to engage a diverse student population. A case study investigated three semesters of thematically linked…

There has developed moderate discussion in European higher education about the use of performance indicators for both accountability and evaluation purposes. This paper begins by summarizing governmental expectations, institutional objections, and several of the controversies surrounding performance measures. We then report on using performance…

In the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is an international comparative learning assessment measuring young people's knowledge and skills, Finland has been ranked at the top in the two rounds conducted and reported so far. In this article, the authors examine the discourses within which Finland's PISA results have been…