Graduation rates have become a prominent feature in the landscape of high school reform and within the larger world of educational policy. Studies conducted over the past several years have repeatedly demonstrated that far fewer American students are completing high school with diplomas than had previously been realized. Whereas the conventional…

A recent series of papers has renewed interest in the question of whether consumption data are superior to income data for poverty measurement. Although the Census Bureau has provided researchers with an experimental series of variables that can produce a comprehensive income measure, this resource has not been fully exploited in previous…

The Center for Applied Linguistics, in its function as a clearinghouse for linguistic information, maintains a set of language files, limited to some 300 languages which have been selected from among the 3,000 to 4,000 in the world for their socio-political importance from an American point of view. The present list, compiled from these files,…

Recent surveys and plans for future statistical collection in all types of libraries are discussed. (KV)

A program is under way to assess the educational attainments of American students. (CK) Aspect of National Assessment (NAEP) dealt with in this document: Program Description (Progress Report).

Disabled staff are largely invisible in the lifelong learning sector. There is a belief that they are underrepresented in teaching, but there is little clear statistical data on the numbers of staff who have disclosed a disability. The Commission for Disabled Staff in Lifelong Learning, launched by NIACE, aims to investigate and report on current…

Ensuring safer schools requires establishing good indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the nation and regularly updating and monitoring these indicators. This is the aim of this report. This report is the thirteenth in a series of annual publications produced jointly by the National Center for Education Statistics…

Complete College America and FutureWorks conducted an analysis of certificate production, the value of the certificate program, and the economic benefit it provides to the region and nation. The conclusion, based on labor market demand and both personal and economic returns, is that certificates count and the policy and trends around certificates…

This report seeks to answer four questions about data used every day in comparing higher education in the United States with that in other countries, particularly the 30 advanced post-industrial democracies, including the United States, that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These questions are: (1)…

In 2006, there were an estimated 181,000 low-income children in the province, with British Columbia (BC) reporting the highest before-tax child poverty rate (21.9%) in Canada (15.8%) for the fifth year in a row. This was the news in the "2008 Child Poverty Report Card" recently released by the First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy…

To help explain why some young people move from recreational drug use to substance abuse, twelve in-depth interviews were conducted with young people who had experienced problematic substance use. The data were supplemented by statistical data on 111 young people. The researchers found a variety of "structural" factors that help explain…

This document presents data that describe collections, expenditures, personnel, and services in 65 medical libraries at Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions throughout North America. In 2006-2007, the reporting health sciences libraries held a median of 244,188 volumes, spent a total of $244,188,020, and employed 2,395 FTE…