Each year, school districts in every state are required to file various financial reporting forms with their state education agency. Although these documents are often viewed more as a nuisance than a useful planning tool, they represent a wealth of information rarely exploited to full advantage by state or local policy makers. The research…

The Colorado Department of Education undertook the establishment of an educational quality database that would contain the information necessary for measuring the effects of various efforts at educational improvement. Five major planning concerns had to be resolved before the database itself could be established. First, it was determined that…

South Carolina's first major dropout prevention initiative began two decades ago when leaders became more interested in the industrial development of the State. A 1966 study found that black youths were experiencing a dropout rate of 72%, while that of white youth was 48%. Statewide efforts taken in the early 1970's to alleviate this problem were…

The paper presents an overview of enrollment in college-level geography courses from 1949 to 1978 and predicts enrollment trends for the near future. All data are based on the Directory of College Geography of the United States. First published in 1949, the directory lists all college and university departments offering geography, the size and…

The educational community is recognizing that it has had little direct control over or knowledge of educational data collection. The objective of this paper is to present a description of presently collected financial data collected by a state education department. An entity set model is used to create a relational view of the data to facilitate…

An approach to obtain disciplinary specific salary information for the institution of higher education budget process by mid-winter is considered. The approach involves using current year institutional mean salaries and prior year relative average salaries by academic discipline to provide "current" salary comparisons by academic…

The evaluation of federal programs such as the migrant education program causes a dilemma for state education agencies. The law places the prime responsibility for establishing, and accounting for, quality programs on state and local education agencies. However, no explicit directive requires that this be done in a uniform manner. A lack of…

Like the Elementary Secondary Education Act Title I, the Education Consolidation Improvement Act Chapter 1 requires school districts to determine at least once every 3 years whether Title I achievement gains are sustained over a period of 12 months or more. A local education agency (LEA) has considerable flexibility in the approach it takes in…

At the request of the Oklahoma Department of Education, the Technical Assistance Center 3 West conducted a statewide review of local Chapter 1 evaluation data to provide possible explanations for the unusual standardized test score gains or losses reported by a number of local school districts. During the two months of quality control visits, 35…

This paper documents the multistep procedure used by the Louisiana Department of Education, Bureau of School Accountability to correct and verify the data that drive the state's statewide school performance indicator program, the "Progress Profiles." The paper also reports the findings of a nationwide survey in which state departments of…

A management information system model was designed to provide data for planning, directing, and evaluating programs for the National Origin Minority Education (NOME) office of the New Hampshire Department of Education. NOME is federally funded to provide training to local school district and community members regarding the educational needs of…

A 1973-75 federally sponsored study, undertaken by the State of Connecticut and the University of Connecticut, was conducted to determine the employment opportunities for vocational agriculture graduates as well as available community resources for vocational agriculture programs in the State. Objectives of phase 1 of the project were to: (1)…

The Florida Information Resource Network (FIRN) is an effort by the Florida education community and the Florida Legislature to provide an electronic link among all agencies, institutions, and schools in the public education system. The communications link, perhaps one of the most advanced in the nation, has three purposes: (1) to provide equal…

This paper reports research which utilizes a qualitative approach in order to document and describe the process of complex organizational conflict. Qualitative research methodology and conflict sociology can be relevant to analysis of organizational processes. The qualitative approach is interpreted to include techniques such as observation, event…

As a step in considering the addition of dropout statistics to the Common Core of Data (CCD) collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, telephone and personal interviews about the feasibility of implementing a standard national dropout statistics collection were conducted. Interviews were held from May through September of 1990…