District costs for teachers' health insurance are, on average, higher then employer costs for private-sector professionals. How much of this is attributable to collective bargaining? This article examines the question using data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the state of Wisconsin. In…

School districts are spending millions on tutoring outside regular school day hours for economically and academically disadvantaged students in need of extra academic assistance. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), parents of children in persistently low-performing schools were allowed to choose their child's tutoring provider, and together with…

Objectives: This article presents a cost-savings analysis of the statewide implementation of an evidence-informed parenting education program. Methods: Between the years 2005 and 2008, the state of Louisiana used the Nurturing Parenting Program (NPP) to impart parenting skills to child welfare-involved families. Following these families' outcomes…

Very little of the professional development literature identifies its costs. Many say good professional development is expensive, but what is meant by expensive, and if so, expensive relative to what? This article shows that effective professional development is not expensive relative to overall spending and that its key elements and their costs…

Act, Sing, Play (ASP) offered music and drama tuition to Year 2 pupils. The aim of the programme was to evaluate whether music workshops had a bigger impact than drama workshops in terms of pupils' maths and literacy attainment. The evaluation was based on the hypothesis that participation in high-quality music instruction promotes educational…

Fieldwork is an important and often enjoyable part of learning in Bioscience degree courses, however it is unclear how the recent reforms to Higher Education (HE) may impact the future funding of outdoor learning. This paper reports on the findings from a recent survey of 30 HE Bioscience practitioners from across the UK. Their current level of…

The use of technology to facilitate education and the provision of an entire higher education degree has exploded in the last two decades. Social work educators have been a part of that trend and have started to utilize distance education (DE) technologies. There is a growing literature regarding the efficacy of DE instruction in social work, and…

This paper is directed to researchers who conduct and report education intervention studies. Its purpose is to stimulate and guide them to go a step beyond reporting the statistics that emerge from their analysis of the differences between experimental groups on the respective outcome variables. With what is often very minimal additional effort,…

School business officials are best equipped to lead in funding operating and capital needs because they understand the need for a methodical means of funding ongoing costs over time and the benefits of planning for future financial needs rather than letting emergencies dictate spending priorities. A capital-financing plan makes it possible to…

This article is critical of the implementation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) by institutions seeking the deep student learning often found in general education learning outcomes. Customized student interaction with an expert in the field is rendered impossible by the scale of mooc enrollment. Concerns are also raised about the economic…

Conventional wisdom holds that colleges and universities heavily subsidize their students. This assertion seems correct, given that total spending per student is almost always in excess of per student tuition payments. However, as the authors show in this report, the conventional wisdom is wrong because it inappropriately compares only one revenue…

The middle grades are a time of transitions for teenagers. Attending a new school, developing new friendships, meeting new teachers, and becoming more independent are all part of the middle school experience. This article is a case report of a school district's experience using interactive video-conferencing technology to educate and socialize a…

The value of a program can be understood as referring not only to outcomes, but also to how those outcomes compare to the types and amounts of resources expended to produce the outcomes. Major potential mistakes and biases in assessing the worth of resources consumed, as well as the value of outcomes produced, are explored. Most of these occur…

Launching and sustaining a laptop initiative is an expensive proposition. For that reason, districts often begin with modest pilots or roll out programs incrementally, a grade or two at a time. These days, few, if any, public school districts have budgets to finance full-service 1-to-1 programs. Instead, some seek outside assistance. Private…

An increase of over 100% in program expenditures for the Pell Grant program over a five year period of time, from $14.7 billion in the 2007-08 award year to $33.4 billion in the 2011-12 award year, places an otherwise popular program under scrutiny. This article considers the factors and options informing federal policy related to the Pell Grant…