A well-designed professional development program can help first- and second-year faculty thrive in their new academic environment. Faculty developers must consider the length and frequency of such programs and their focus; requirements for participation; the role of mentors; ways to establish collegiality; and opportunities for developing the…

In 2002 the Council of the Great City Schools and its members set out to develop performance measures that could be used to improve business operations in urban public school districts. The Council launched the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to achieve these objectives. The purposes of the project were to: (1) Establish a common…

This work is part of a larger set of conversations on how philanthropic capital can better deliver potent results. This paper is intended for philanthropists and foundation staff who are interested in understanding not only which issues and interventions might put many more low-income people on an upward trajectory, but also how private donors can…

Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) is a well-documented, valuable, and integral part of agricultural education programs (Bryant, 2003; Cheek, Arrington, Carter, & Randall, 1994; Deyoe, 1953; Dyer & Osborne, 1996; Moore, 1988; Roberts & Harlin, 2007). Cole and Connell (1993) found that there was little research regarding the…

Student-Based Budgeting (sometimes called Weighted Student Funding, or Fair Student Funding, depending on the district) differs fundamentally from the traditional funding model, which distributes resources to schools in the form of staff and dollars designated for specific purposes. Student-Based Budgeting (SBB) allocates dollars to schools based…

Cross-sector cradle-to-career initiatives are increasingly central to communities' strategies to support children and youth. StriveTogether Cradle to Career Civic Infrastructure provides a framework for how a community comes together around a vision; improves and builds upon those efforts over time; and invests the community's resources…

Better information about how investments in education are influencing outcomes for students, schools, and districts is needed. The growing hunger for using financial data to answer more and evolving questions will require changes in systems, policy, practice, and culture. The problem at hand is that both people and systems have limited capacity to…

Merit Goods have always received handsome attention and allocation from countries which have witnessed a congruence between high significant economic growth and Human Development Index (HDI). The Emerging Market Economies (EMEs) have become significant manufacturing hubs by universalizing education and improving their Incremental Capital Output…

Foundations across the country engage in grantmaking to eliminate the opportunity and achievement gaps in K-12 public schools. Many of the strategies and investments that funders have supported in recent years focus not only on "more time" but also on "better use of time" in schools. This better use of time centers on outcomes…

In today's economy, according to a recent "New York Times" article, the value of what Americans get from digital technologies is not calculated as part of the gross domestic product. The GDP only measures the monetary value of the goods and services that Americans pay for, not the information that they gain by using technological…

The benefits of higher education over the past few decades have become increasingly apparent, as the unemployment rate for individuals with a college degree is consistently below their counterparts with only a high school education. With current economic conditions, however, concerns have emerged about whether the investments needed to increase…

This paper reports an investigation of governance issues in Italian academic spin-offs that arise from the need to balance the powers of two categories of partner: academic inventors and external investors (such as established companies and venture capital funds). The relationship between inventors and external investors, jointly pursuing a…

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters. The first chapter examines the effects of private equity investment on the firms that receive this investment in India. While private equity (PE) is expanding rapidly in developing countries, there is little academic research on this subject. In this chapter I exploit two new data sources and…

Challenges that face the academic research enterprise are numerous. These concerns include, but are not limited to: declines in extramural funding for investigatorinitiated research, an aging faculty workforce (the average age of securing a faculty's first R01 is over 42), insufficient funds to support faculty laboratories, and limited access to…

The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is the world's largest actuarial organization. This article describes the SOA with particular attention paid to its education and qualification processes and resources available for university and college programs.