ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Skill Shortages in the Trades during Economic Downturns. Occasional Paper
Author: Oliver, Damian
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Numerical/Quantitative Data
Subjects: Supply and Demand,Labor Market,Economic Climate,Employment,Working Hours,Unemployment,Occupational Mobility,Apprenticeships,Building Trades,Engineering,Agricultural Occupations,Food Processing Occupations,Service Occupations,Technical Occupations,Telecommunications,Foreign Countries

During the recent economic downturn, media and industry reports of skill shortages in the trades continued to appear. The intent of this paper is to examine the evidence for skill shortages in the trades persisting during the economic downturns over the last 20 years, using various indicators. These include employment growth, vacancy rates, unemployment rates, apprentice completions and occupational mobility. This paper contains the following key messages: (1) There is no evidence of persistent skill shortages during downturns in the construction, automotive and engineering trades, and unconvincing evidence of persistent shortages in the electrotechnology and telecommunications trades, the food trades and hairdressing; (2) Declining numbers of apprenticeship completions account for much of the persistent shortage in the electrotechnology and telecommunications trades during the 1990s and 2000s, but apprenticeship completions (expressed as a proportion of employment) for this trade have now recovered to pre-1992 levels. If recent completion numbers are maintained, it should be possible to avoid future skill shortages; and (3) Very high job churn creates the perception of persistent skill shortages in the food trades and in hairdressing. Many food tradespersons and hairdressers swap employers but remain in their occupation. Two appendices are included. (Contains 22 tables, 21 figures and 4 footnotes.)
Stretching the School Dollar: A Brief for State Policymakers. Policy Brief
Author: Petrilli, Michael J.
Date: 2011-01-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Baby Boomers,Budgets,Public Education,Expenditure per Student,Budgeting,Public Policy,Policy Formation,Educational Finance,School Districts,Teacher Selection,Class Size,Teacher Salaries,Teacher Evaluation,Evaluation Methods,Financial Support,Teacher Retirement,Retirement Benefits,Expenditures,Small Schools,Resource Allocation,Learning Disabilities,Educational Policy,English (Second Language),State Standards,Educational Technology,Teacher Aides,Special Education,Academic Standards,Teacher Employment Benefits

After years of non-stop increases--national k-12 per-pupil spending is up by &quot;one-third&quot; in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1995--schools now face the near-certainty of repeated annual budget cuts for the first time since the Great Depression. In some states and districts, reductions will be dramatic--well into the double digits. And these new revenue-trend levels are likely to be semi-permanent, what with increased pressure on the public purse from the retirement of Baby Boomers, Medicaid and Medicare costs, debt payments, and other demands. The challenge for education policymakers is not only to cut carefully so as not to harm student learning, but, better yet, to transform these fiscal woes into reform opportunities: to cut smartly and thereby help schools and students emerge stronger than ever. This paper offers some fifteen ideas on how to do that, mostly drawn from a recent Harvard Education Press book developed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute: &quot;Stretching the School Dollar: How Schools and Districts Can Save Money While Serving Students Best.&quot; These ideas are: (1) End &quot;last hired, first fired&quot; practices; (2) Remove class-size mandates; (3) Eliminate mandatory salary schedules; (4) Eliminate state mandates regarding work rules and terms of employment; (5) Remove &quot;seat time&quot; requirements; (6) Merge categorical programs and ease onerous reporting requirements; (7) Create a rigorous teacher-evaluation system; (8) Pool health-care benefits; (9) Tackle the fiscal viability of teacher pensions; (10) Move toward weighted student funding; (11) Eliminate excess spending on small schools and small districts; (12) Allocate spending for learning-disabled students as a percent of population; (13) Limit the length of time that students can be identified as English Language Learners; (14) Offer waivers of non-productive state requirements; and (15) Create bankruptcy-like loan provisions. (Contains 7 footnotes.)
What School Administrators Can Do to Enhance Student Learning by Supporting a Coordinated Approach to Health
Author: American School Health Association
Date: 2010-10-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Child Health,Administrator Role,Educational Improvement,Change Strategies,Educational Change,Wellness,Educational Resources,Health Promotion,Comprehensive School Health Education,Integrated Services

Schools play a critical role in addressing the physical, emotional, social, and environmental factors related to health and well-being that can affect learning. Schools that adopt a coordinated approach to planning and problem-solving to meet students' needs are more likely to position them for success in school and throughout their lifetimes. This paper offers concrete actions that district and building administrators can take to support this approach to enhance learning and health.
Private Capital and Public Education: Toward Quality at Scale. Working Paper 2009-02
Author: Vander Ark, Tom
Date: 2009-02-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Research and Development,Educational Change,Educational Environment,Private Financial Support,Public Education,Educational Quality,Educational Technology,Equal Education,Incentives,Intelligent Tutoring Systems,Management Systems,Partnerships in Education,Government Role,Instructional Materials,Computer Assisted Instruction

In this paper, the author sketches a vision depicting some of the ways in which technology could revolutionize the traditional school environment--with static, printed texts replaced by adaptive, digital learning and virtual learning communities supplementing seat time. He argues that any such transformation, however, is dependent upon investment and the incentives motivating public, philanthropic, and private funding. He notes that while public dollars are aimed at promoting equity and serving the neediest populations, the government has invested far too little in research and development while maintaining an &quot;ossified bureaucracy&quot; unable to adapt to changing needs. And, while young foundations have pressed non-profits to emulate for-profit business models, non-profits nonetheless have modest incentives to expand and often have great difficulty finding the capital necessary to do so. In short, he sees a dramatic increase in private, for-profit investment as an essential driver of real transformation. The author emphasizes the importance of for-profit education companies that can attract venture capital and that are better equipped to sustain and grow through profits and private equity. &quot;Private investment will not fix the problems with education,&quot; he writes, &quot;but education will not be fixed without it.&quot; These companies can bring new services to education--including supplemental online tutoring, digital curricula, adaptive assessments, and school management. The author believes that public-private partnerships can be harnessed to pursue both social impact and sustainable profits. But doing so requires reducing statutory and bureaucratic barriers while altering incentives so that such private partnerships can play more than a marginal role. (Contains 1 figure, 2 tables, 4 footnotes and 19 endnotes.)
Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own. Working Paper 2009-01
Author: Bauerlein, Mark
Date: 2009-00-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Graduate Students,Public Colleges,Teacher Student Relationship,Humanities,Higher Education,Publish or Perish Issue,College Students,Remedial Instruction,Community Colleges,Two Year Colleges,Faculty Evaluation,Tenure,Enrollment,Learner Engagement,Faculty,College Faculty

In higher education in the United States, teaching and research in the fields of language and literature are in a desperate condition. Laboring on the age-old axiom &quot;publish-or-perish,&quot; thousands of professors, lecturers, and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays, and reviews. Over the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year. But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around 300. At the same time, the relations between teachers and students have declined. While 43 percent of two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college students require remedial coursework, costing $2 billion annually, one national survey reports that 37 percent of first-year arts/humanities students &quot;never&quot; discuss course readings with teachers outside of class, and 41 percent only do so &quot;sometimes.&quot; These trends are not unrelated. Academic engagement on the part of students is a reflection of how much teachers demand it. But with the research mandate hovering over them, teachers have no incentive to push it. If the system favors publication, not mentoring, hours in the office in conversation with sophomores are counter-productive or even damaging to career and livelihood. Universities need to reconsider the relative value placed on research and teaching in the evaluation of professors. This paper offers several recommendations, including limiting the amount of material that tenure committees will review and creating a &quot;teacher track&quot; in which doctoral students are trained and rewarded for generalist knowledge and multiple course facility rather than a highly-specialized expertise. A bibliography is included. (Contains 52 endnotes.)
College Student Perception of the Dictionary of Occupational Title Scores for Their Chosen Occupations
Author: Myers, Elwin
Date: 2006-01-02
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Undergraduate Students,Student Attitudes,Occupational Information,Job Skills

This paper will discuss the results of a study in which junior-level college students were asked to select the Dictionary of Occupational Titles worker function numbers (Data, People, Thing), D.O.T. general education development numbers (reasoning development, mathematical development, and language development), and the D.O.T. specific vocational preparation numbers for the profession they hope to occupy after graduation. The student-selected numbers were then compared with the actual numbers compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor; the actual numbers were obtained by conducting thousands of interviews with practitioners in those professions. The results find that students often overestimate the work function requirements for their chosen professions.
Factor Scores, Structure and Communality Coefficients: A Primer
Author: Odum, Mary
Date: 2011-02-03
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Factor Analysis,Scores,Factor Structure,Computation,Methods,Regression (Statistics),Correlation

(Purpose) The purpose of this paper is to present an easy-to-understand primer on three important concepts of factor analysis: Factor scores, structure coefficients, and communality coefficients. Given that statistical analyses are a part of a global general linear model (GLM), and utilize weights as an integral part of analyses (Thompson, 2006; Thompson, 2004), terminology used for factor analytic procedures are analogous to terminology in other GLM analyses. Therefore, transfer of ideas beyond factor analysis to various other GLM analyses is anticipated. (Methodology) An introductory overview of meanings and applications of factor scores, structure coefficients, and communality coefficients is presented. Additionally, four methods for calculating factor scores are compared: (1) The Anderson-Rubin method (Anderson &amp; Rubin, 1956); (2) the Bartlett method (Bartlett, 1937); (3) the regression method (Gorsuch, 1983); and (4) the Thompson method (Thompson, 1993). Step-by-step instructions are provided for utilizing these four methods, with heuristic examples. (Recommendations) The paper concludes with recommended reporting practices and a recap of key ideas on factor scores, structure coefficients, and communality coefficients. An appendix contains: SPSS Syntax to Execute Factor Score Calculation with Regression,  Bartlett, Anderson-Rubin and Thompson Methods. (Contains 12 tables.)
Now What? Imperatives &amp; Options for &quot;Common Core&quot; Implementation &amp; Governance
Author: Finn, Chester E., Jr.
Date: 2010-10-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Elementary Secondary Education,State Standards,Educational Change,Foreign Countries,Governance,Evaluation,National Standards,Federal Legislation,Accountability,Academic Standards,Academic Achievement

Over the past year, the nation's governors and state school chiefs have achieved laudable consensus around a set of math and English standards, developed voluntarily and without federal involvement through the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). Most states have signed on to them. More recently, the states have again teamed up--this time with federal funding--to develop new assessment systems that align with the common standards. What happens next? This is an enormously consequential question for American education, because charting the future of the Common Core (and the forthcoming assessments) is inseparable from some fundamental decisions about how the K-12 education system will be organized and governed. The authors asked experts from across the education sector to respond to a dozen perplexing questions on the future of the Common Core. They synthesize some of their collective input below. All final judgments, however, are solely those of the authors. The authors agree with Andy Rotherham that the three &quot;essential elements&quot; of any long-term Common Core governance arrangement are &quot;independence, representation, and transparency.&quot; But what form should it take and how should it evolve? After examining the many tasks that must be successfully undertaken if the Common Core standards are themselves to succeed, this paper lays out three different governance models: (1) &quot;Let's Become More Like France&quot;; (2) &quot;Don't Rock the Boat&quot;; and (3) &quot;One Foot before the Other.&quot; In the end, the authors call for a version of Model #3--a Common Core Coordinating Council (&quot;4C,&quot; or even &quot;Foresee&quot;)--that plays a temporary information-sharing and facilitation role but might morph into something more ambitious (and more permanent) over time. Partial List of Questionnaire Respondents is appended. (Contains 1 table and 4 footnotes.) [This paper was written with Paul E. Barton, Jeb Bush, David T. Conley, Pasquale J. DeVito, David P. Driscoll, Michael W. Kirst, Paul E. Lingenfelter, Paul Manna, Neal McCluskey, Mark Musick, Rod Paige, Judith A. Rizzo, Andrew J. Rotherham, Mark Schneider, Robert B. Schwartz, Eric J. Smith, Michael D. Usdan, and Gene Wilhoit.]
The State of State Standards--and the Common Core--in 2010
Author: Carmichael, Sheila Byrd
Date: 2010-07-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: State Standards,Mathematics Education,Language Arts,English Curriculum,Program Descriptions,Educational Development,Educational Assessment,Educational Indicators,Achievement Rating,Content Analysis,Position Papers,Educational Policy,Barriers,Performance Factors,State Surveys,Comparative Analysis,Audits (Verification)

This review of state English language arts (ELA) and mathematics standards is the latest in a series of Fordham evaluations dating back to 1997. It comes at a critical juncture, as states across the land consider adoption of the Common Core State Standards. These are the authors' major findings: (1) Based on their criteria, the Common Core standards are clearly superior to those currently in use in thirty-nine states in math and thirty-seven states in English. For thirty-three states, the Common Core is superior in both math and reading; (2) However, three jurisdictions boast ELA standards that are clearly superior to the Common Core: California, the District of Columbia, and Indiana. Another eleven states have ELA standards that are in the same league as the Common Core (or &quot;too close to call&quot;); and (3) Eleven states plus the District of Columbia have math standards in the &quot;too close to call&quot; category, meaning that, overall, they are at least as clear and rigorous as the Common Core standards. Appendices include: (1) Grading and Criteria; (2) Detailed Grades; and (3) 2005 to 2010 Comparisons. Individual sections contain footnotes. (Contains 12 tables and 2 figures.) [This paper was written with Daniela Fairchild, Elizabeth Haydel, Diana Senechal, and Amber M. Winkler. Foreword by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli is included.]
The State &quot;of&quot; State U.S. History Standards 2011
Author: Stern, Sheldon M.
Date: 2011-02-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: United States History,State Standards,State Surveys,Audits (Verification),Achievement Rating,Educational Assessment,Educational Indicators,Educational Quality,Academic Standards,History Instruction,Educational Objectives,Course Content,Program Descriptions,Position Papers,Educational Policy,Social Studies

This study is the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's first review of the quality of state U.S. history standards since 2003. Key findings include: (1) A majority of states' standards are mediocre-to-awful. The average grade across &quot;all&quot; states is barely a D. In twenty-eight jurisdictions--a majority of states--the history standards earn Ds or below. Eighteen earn Fs; (2) Just one state--South Carolina--has standards strong enough to earn a straight A; and (3) Six other states--Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and the District of Columbia--earn A-minuses, and three more received grades in the B range. Still, this means just ten states--or about one in five--get honors marks. The study also reviewed the framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress's (NAEP) U.S. history examination and found it deserving of an A-minus. Thus, there are several national models--from the strongest state standards to the NAEP--that lagging states could and should emulate going forward. Appendices include: (1) Methods, Grading, and Criteria; and (2) Detailed State Grades, 2011. Individual sections contain footnotes. (Contains 8 tables.) [Foreword by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Kathleen Porter-Magee.]
Renewal and Optimism: Five Years as an Ohio Charter Authorizer. Fordham Sponsorship Accountability Report, 2009-10
Author: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Date: 2010-11-29
Type: Numerical/Quantitative Data
Subjects: Charter Schools,Accountability,Leadership,Academic Achievement,Comparative Analysis,Governance,Technical Assistance,Educational Quality,Educational Indicators,Federal Programs,Reading Achievement,Mathematics Achievement,Educational Improvement,Educational Change,Federal Legislation,Educational Philosophy,Writing Achievement,Science Achievement,Social Studies

As the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation chronicled in its last year's Fordham Sponsorship Accountability Report, &quot;Seeking Quality in the Face of Adversity&quot;, the 2008-09 school year was a brutal one during which schools, and their peers, faced many existential threats. The 2009-10 school year was Fordham's fifth year as a charter school authorizer (aka, sponsor) in the state of Ohio. As such it marked a milestone in its sponsorship efforts because it was the first time it had to make contract renewal decisions for its sponsored schools. In June 2005 the foundation issued five-year sponsorship agreements to the following schools: (1) The Dayton Academy (now called Dayton Leadership Academies: Dayton Liberty Campus); (2) The Dayton View Academy (now called Dayton Leadership Academies: Dayton View Campus); (3) Phoenix Community Learning Center; and (4) Springfield Academy of Excellence. In each contract the foundation shared expected achievement targets for each school over the term of their five-year agreements; all of which expired on June 30, 2010. This report looks at other academic growth factors in making the foundation's renewal decisions (see overview of Fordham-sponsored schools in 2009-10), and takes into consideration school performance in comparison to the schools children would attend if they were not in a Fordham-sponsored charter school (these data are reflected in the individual school profiles in the second portion of this report). Exhibit 4: Academic Performance Plan for Primary and Middle Schools (One-Year Term) is appended. (Contains 11 tables and 5 figures.) [For &quot;Seeking Quality in the Face of Adversity: Fordham Sponsorship Accountability Report, 2008-09&quot;, see ED508050.]
Number of Physics Faculty: Results from the 2008 Survey of Physics Degree-Granting Departments. Focus On
Author: Ivie, Rachel
Date: 2009-10-00
Type: Numerical/Quantitative Data
Subjects: Physics,College Faculty,College Science,Science Departments,Tenure,Bachelors Degrees,Doctoral Degrees,Masters Degrees

Between March 20 and July 8, 2008 (the spring semester of 2008), the authors contacted each of the 763 departments in the US that award at least a bachelor's degree in physics by e-mail, mail, and certified mail. They received responses from 713 departments (93%). This report describes their findings. (Contains 3 tables and 3 figures.)
Is the U.S. Public Service Academy a Good Idea? Two Views: The Case for a U.S Public Service Academy. How Not to Fix the Civil Service. Working Paper 2008-01
Author: Asch, Chris Myers
Date: 2008-00-00
Type: Opinion Papers
Subjects: Service Learning,Public Service,Higher Education,Military Schools,Military Service,Partnerships in Education,Federal Legislation,Public Sector,Surveys

The idea of creating a national university is not new. More than two centuries ago, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson advocated for a national university. Today--energized by concerns about the performance of civil servants and the need to recruit a new generation of talent into key federal, state, and municipal positions--a new proposal to launch a U.S. Public Service Academy has drawn much attention The proposal for a federally funded Academy is modeled on the existing military academies and would offer students a free four-year college education in return for five years of public service. In light of the need to recruit a new generation of talent into key federal, state, and municipal positions, two scholars debate the merits of a Public Service Academy. In &quot;The Case for a U.S. Public Service Academy,&quot; Chris Myers Asch, a cofounder of the Academy, makes the case for the Academy by addressing seven critiques that are commonly raised against the idea. In &quot;How Not to Fix the Civil Service,&quot; Philip I. Levy, a resident scholar at AEI and one of the Academy's skeptics. raises broad questions about the value and feasibility of tackling the public service challenge by launching a new institution. (Contains 33 footnotes and 2 figures.)