This document reports on the State Comptroller's audit of records and procedures used in administering the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) at Onondaga Community College (New York). Onondaga certified 5,543 students for 11,723 TAP awards totaling $8,730,058 during the 1995-96 through 1997-98 academic years. The State Comptroller reviewed a sample…

At this hearing, part of a series of hearings on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Secretary of the Department of Education, Lamar Alexander, gave testimony designed to present the Bush administration's recommendations on reauthorization of the Act to the Congress. Before the Secretary's testimony the following…

This report explores educational accountability in the United States, specifically accountability in vocational education. Section 1 provides a brief overview of the history of evaluation activity in federal educational programs and sets the major accountability, evaluation, and performance provisions of the 1990 Perkins legislation in that…

A study was conducted to identify key long-term research areas for Nebraska's vocational education community. The Delphi survey technique was used with 22 Department of Education personnel, 18 of whom completed both rounds of the study. A 1-5 Likert rating scale was used to identify 23 research topics, which were thematically clustered into the…

This monograph presents six papers that analyze the current state of research and practice in continuing professional education. Papers address: (1) the problems confronting effective research and policymaking presented by the diverse and unorganized nature of the continuing professional education enterprise; (2) what is known concerning the…

Although only Ohio has issued statewide standards for noncredit continuing education and a few other states have looked at such a process, most of the literature on student outcomes focuses exclusively on degree-credit programs. A college, university, or state system might want to assess continuing education outcomes for the following reasons: to…

This study focuses on school report cards as an accountability tool, and on how their use interacts with one of the most persistent problems facing the public education system, i.e., the continuing underachievement of minority students. The paper looks specifically at the issues concerning the desirability of reporting student performance by race…

This document examines the accomplishments of California's educational reform movement (1983-1993) in the context of the five major recommendations outlined in the 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk." A more comprehensive view of the state's systemic reforms is also provided. The five goals included the following: (1) strengthen graduation…

This book presents a broad vision of the moral foundations of teacher professionalism by linking the professional role of the teacher, the moral demands it makes, and the practical arts of teaching to the institution of education and its contemporary problems. The moral foundations of teaching are expressed in four dimensions of…

This paper is a guide to self-assessment of campus information technology services and includes an assessment questionnaire and guidelines developed by CAUSE and EDUCOM. An introduction stresses the role of self-assessment in an overall quality improvement plan. The following section argues that pressures for higher education accountability and…

This paper focuses on how teachers and administrators share a commitment towards the general principle of accountability in regard to efficiency in educational programs. The notion of efficiency is shown to have limited application to complex multidimensional processes, including those of classroom language learning and of language program…

A number of Federal education reform initiatives, either enacted or under consideration by the Congress, provide schools with regulatory flexibility. In response to two Congressional committees, this study had the following objectives: (1) describe state regulatory flexibility efforts; (2) describe how schools used flexibility to attempt…

During the last few years, there has been a general emphasis in higher education on quality issues and the use of outcomes measures to assess institutional effectiveness. The quality emphasis in education suggests that previously defined performance standards are met through a review of outcomes assessment. This emphasis on outcomes measures…

Cooperative learning (CL) is reviewed as a tool for helping educationally disadvantaged or limited-English-speaking students. A review of meta analyses and literature on CL indicates its effectiveness when both group goals and individual accountability are incorporated into learning methods. The achievement gap between traditional majority…

Efforts to assess institutional effectiveness not only enable community colleges to meet accreditation mandates, but can also serve as a catalyst for institutional renewal. Institutional effectiveness has become an important topic for the 1990s as a result of past neglect of accountability, new legislative mandates for education, changes in…