ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
County School Districts: Research and Policy Considerations
Author: Illinois State University, Center for the Study of Education Policy
Date: 2009-04-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Consolidated Schools,Governance,School Organization,County School Districts,School District Reorganization,School District Size,Organizational Change,Educational Development,Educational History,Barriers,Case Studies,Educational Research,Organizational Effectiveness,Educational Policy

Since the days when the country was dotted with one-room schoolhouses, many changes have taken place in school governance and management. In 1940, there were over 117,000 public school districts in the United States. In 2000, there were fewer than 15,000, even though the student population of the country had doubled in that time. While school districts were merging over those six decades, in some states and regions the decision was made to unify school district boundaries with other municipal boundaries, particularly county boundaries. Today, county school systems are the norm in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, South Carolina, and West Virginia. Studying county school district formation inevitably involves reviewing research on school consolidation in general. In reviewing school consolidation studies over the past decades, researchers have identified several perceived benefits and liabilities of consolidated districts versus independent districts. Overall, the research can be summarized as follows: (1) Economies of scale are greatest when small districts merge; as districts get larger, at some point the economies plateau, and then expenses rise with greater district complexity. In other words, there is a &quot;point of diminishing returns&quot;; (2) Student performance is equal or better in smaller schools; and (3) Other considerations besides finances should be part of the consolidation deliberation. Appended are: (1) Sample Case Studies--County Consolidation; and (2) County School Organization by State. (Contains 22 footnotes.)
Building Innovation Capacity: The Role of Human Capital Formation in Enterprises--A Review of the Literature. Occasional Paper
Author: Smith, Andrew
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Information Analyses
Subjects: Human Capital,Innovation,Human Resources,Literature Reviews,Performance Factors,Performance Technology,Personnel Management,Institutional Role,Training Methods,Skill Development,Knowledge Management,Creativity,School Business Relationship,Free Enterprise System

This literature review examines the role of human capital formation in building innovative capacity in firms. The aim of the review is to develop a model of human capital development factors to be used as a basis for a larger research project where the factors that develop innovation capacity in enterprises will be investigated. The review finds that human capital stimulus factors are developed through appropriate human resource management practices, the learning and development system (in the enterprise) and the tertiary education system. The review also finds that the three key issues in developing human capital for innovation in enterprises are people, knowledge and creativity management. (Contains 1 footnote and 3 figures.)
Cognitive Rigor: Blending the Strengths of Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge to Enhance Classroom-Level Processes
Author: Hess, Karin K.
Date: 2009-03-07
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Educational Objectives,Classification,Matrices,Curriculum Development,Cognitive Processes,Test Items,Public Schools,Language Arts,Mathematics Education,English Instruction,Mathematics Instruction,Evaluation,Lesson Plans,Item Sampling,Mathematics,Work Sample Tests

To teach the rigorous skills and knowledge students need to succeed in future college-entry  courses and workforce training programs, education stakeholders have increasingly  called for more rigorous curricula, instruction, and assessments. Identifying the critical  attributes of rigor and measuring its appearance in curricular materials is therefore  fundamental to progress in this area. By superposing two widely accepted models for  describing rigor--Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and Webb's Depth-of-  Knowledge (DOK) model--this article defines cognitive rigor (CR) and introduces the CR matrix for analyzing instruction and enhancing teacher lesson planning. Two large-scale  collections of student work samples analyzed using the CR matrix are presented,  illustrating the preponderance of curricular items aligned to each cell in the matrix.  Educators should use the cognitive rigor matrix to align the content in their curricular  materials to the instructional techniques used in classroom delivery. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)
Infant &amp; Toddler Programs: The Workforce
Author: Child Care, Inc.
Date: 2006-00-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Infants,Toddlers,Early Childhood Education,Child Care,Child Caregivers,Caregiver Training,Employment Qualifications,Urban Areas

Children's earliest experiences set the stage for school success and adult productivity. In the first three years of life, the brain grows at breakneck speed, creating more than a trillion pathways for learning and development. By the age of three, 85 percent of the brain's capacity is in place, creating the ability to speak, learn, and reason. Early experiences also influence lifelong habits of learning and social behavior as well as the trajectory of emotional and physical growth. Parents are their children's first and primary teachers, but today half of all mothers are back on the job within a year of giving birth. Thus, many infants and toddlers now depend on other adult caregivers for their first lessons in everything from language to coping with frustration. National studies show that 39 percent of infants and toddlers spend more than 35 hours a week in care. Collectively, these changes represent an important next step in ensuring that all staff working with babies and toddlers have a basic understanding of child development, and health and safety, which is essential to promoting the healthy development of young children during the critical first three years of life.
Background Information for Think Tank on Planning, Governance and System Building Early Care and Education--NYC
Author: Boressoff, Todd
Date: 2008-02-07
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Early Childhood Education,Child Care,Urban Areas,Planning,Governance,Systems Building,Models,Leadership,Financial Support

This document provides some background on early childhood planning and system building around the country. Since mid-December, the author has been studying these efforts for Child Care, Inc. (CCI) interviewing national experts and reading widely. This outline provides insights and lesson learned from those inquiries. The goal at this meeting will be to work toward developing recommendations about how to jump-start a &quot;sustainable process of system building&quot; for early care and education in New York City.
Early Care and Education--What It Costs. Volume 1. Budget Series: Community Pre-K
Author: Child Care, Inc.
Date: 2007-06-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Early Childhood Education,Child Care,Preschool Education,Educational Quality,Costs,Budgets,Financial Support,Urban Areas,Community Programs,Community Organizations,School Space

The research on early childhood education is clear: Programs must be of high quality to produce positive outcomes for children. In recent years, educational economists have refined their analysis of &quot;high quality&quot; and identified the core components of successful prekindergarten programs: They employ qualified teachers who are properly compensated, and they also provide other support to assure that healthy development is on track, including health services, proper nutrition and family support. The new research provides a critically important framework for policymakers in New York City as prekindergarten expands. The city will only achieve the results the public seeks and children need if pre-k is funded at a level to support these core components of quality. The question of funding levels is growing ever more urgent as the city moves toward a coordinated system of early childhood education in all settings, including child care, Head Start and prekindergarten. This year, city officials have announced a new, long-range goal of making pre-k funding the primary source of public support for early care and education of four-year-olds. This new vision builds on the powerful partnership already established between the public education system and community-based organizations in delivering Universal Prekindergarten services. The city's new vision springs from a new state commitment to expand prekindergarten funding and make the services available to all four-year-olds on a voluntary basis. Given these new policy directions, there is a need to better understand the cost of providing early childhood education. Child Care, Inc. has prepared this policy brief as the first in a series to examine what it costs to provide preschool children with a high-quality early learning opportunity focused on all aspects on a child's development. This paper examines the community model for pre-k services. (Contains 8 endnotes.)
What Makes the UAE a Knowledge Society?
Author: Assaf, Mohammad Ahmad
Date: 2011-02-02
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Freedom of Speech,Intellectual Freedom,Access to Education,Educational Quality,Sciences,Scientific Research,Research and Development,Arabs,Culture,Learning,Innovation,Teacher Role,Futures (of Society),Foreign Countries

This paper starts with the idea that knowledge has become one of the most important factors to determine human development and explore the different requirements that need to be met by the government and the citizens of the UAE to succeed in building a knowledge society (KS). An explanation and examination of the five pillars of establishing a KS in the Arab World, as stated in the 2003 United Nations report, is carried out to study the possibility of creating a KS in the UAE. The present paper highlights the important roles teachers can perform to help students to become active members of the new society. (Contains 6 figures.)
Identifying the Channels through Which Head Start Affects Long-Term Outcomes
Author: Hyman, Joshua
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Preschool Education,Disadvantaged Youth,Cognitive Development,Program Effectiveness,Scores,Cognitive Ability,Federal Programs,Preschool Children,Outcomes of Education,Child Development,Social Development,Holistic Approach,Gender Differences,Child Health,Educational Attainment,Mothers,Income,Grandparents,Parent Influence,Family Environment,Affective Behavior,Health Insurance,Physical Health,Child Care,Family Structure,Locus of Control,Self Esteem,Depression (Psychology),Risk,Substance Abuse,Delinquency,Racial Differences

Head Start is a federally funded preschool program for poor children designed to help close the gap between those children and their more advantaged peers before they begin public schooling. Given that Head Start appears to have positive long-run impacts on its recipients, a natural and important next question to ask is: What are the channels through which Head Start improves these long-run outcomes? In other words, what skills, behaviors, attitudes or circumstances does Head Start influence that result in these long term benefits? One possible explanation is increased cognitive ability. However, researchers have shown that cognitive test score gains due to Head Start participation fade away well before such long-term benefits are realized (Currie and Thomas, 1995; Deming 2009). Another possible explanation is that long run impacts are due to improvements in &quot;non-cognitive skills&quot; such as self-esteem, social skills and motivation. Given that Head Start curriculum aims to improve the &quot;whole child&quot; and families receive a host of health and social services, this is a reasonable but unconfirmed hypothesis. The purpose of this project is to determine the extent to which cultivating non-cognitive skills is a mechanism through which Head Start successfully improves long-term outcomes. Results show that Head Start participation has positive impacts on particular non-cognitive traits of children, but has little if any detectable impact on the traits of adolescents. These results are driven exclusively by gains by female Head Start participants, which is consistent with past research that early childhood interventions have more lasting effects on girls than boys (Anderson, 2008) and that girls in general have higher non-cognitive skills than boys (Jacob, 2002). The results show suggestive but inconclusive evidence that these non-cognitive skills improve the long-term outcomes that Head Start has been shown to impact. (Contains 5 tables.)
Do the Effects of Early Childhood Programs on Academic Outcomes Vary by Gender? A Meta-Analysis
Author: Kelchen, Robert
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Meta Analysis,Early Childhood Education,Educational Objectives,Young Children,Gender Differences,Outcomes of Education,Preschool Education,Cognitive Ability,Academic Achievement

It has become typical for children to attend some type of early childhood education (ECE) before entering kindergarten. A recent reanalysis of Perry Preschool and two other prominent experimental ECE studies (Abecedarian and the Early Training Project) by Anderson (2008) comes to a provocative conclusion, finding that female participants gained substantially from the programs, but "the overall patterns of male coefficients is consistent with the hypothesis of minimal effects at best--significant (unadjusted) effects go in both directions and appear at a frequency that would be expected due simply to chance" (Anderson, 2008, p. 1494). Using data on a larger and more representative set of ECE evaluations, and rigorous meta-analytic methods, this paper investigates whether ECE programs have differential effects on boys and girls in three domains representing cognitive skills, academic achievement, and other school-related outcomes. The authors' preliminary findings of achievement, cognitive, and other school-related outcomes measured in evaluations of early childhood programs suggest that the broad achievement and school outcomes of boys and girls are quite similar, and that both genders benefit by approximately two-tenths of a standard deviation on the average outcome. Indeed, the difference is not only statistically insignificant, but also substantively minimal. This conclusion differs from Anderson's broad conclusions about boys experiencing minimal gains from ECE programs. Indeed, the authors' data suggest that boys gain as much from ECE as girls, at least on the range of outcomes available in their data. It will be important to determine whether this pattern of findings holds up across each outcome domain and regardless of the timing of the outcome measures. If these findings are robust to future alternative specifications, it suggests that early education programs neither exacerbate nor remediate any early gender advantages in cognitive and other achievement outcomes. Thus, if reducing gender disparities is a worthy educational goal, other policies and practices will need to be considered. (Contains 2 tables and 5 footnotes.)
Which Combination of High Quality Infant-Toddler and Preschool Care Best Promotes School Readiness?
Author: Li, Weilin
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: School Readiness,Toddlers,Infants,Child Care,Educational Quality,Academic Achievement,Intelligence Tests,Preschool Education,Correlation,Early Childhood Education,Child Development,Cognitive Development

This paper aims to test the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 (H1): Everything else the same, high quality infant-toddler care will increase children's cognitive scores immediately (i.e. at 24 months of age). However, without subsequent high quality preschool, children with high quality infant-toddler care will not have higher cognitive and achievement scores when formal school begins (i.e. at 54 months of age) than children with low quality infant-toddler care. Hypothesis 2 (H2): Everything else the same, high quality preschool will positively affect children's cognitive and academic scores immediately (i.e. at 54 months of age). In addition, the combination of high quality infant-toddler and preschool care will produce higher cognitive and achievement scores at 54 months of age than the combination of high quality preschool but low quality infant-toddler care. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Everything else the same, high quality child care in both infancy-toddlerhood and preschool stages will produce higher children's cognitive and academic scores at school entry than any other child care quality combinations. The major finding of this paper is that high quality infant-toddler care itself does not affect child outcomes in the long run without subsequent high quality preschool. High quality child care in the very early period can raise the immediate cognitive outcomes by 0.16 to 0.19 SD. However, this impact is found to fade out within two or three years if there is no high quality child care following. Regardless of the infant-toddler care quality, high quality preschool positively affects children's cognitive and academic scores at school entry. That positive effect is augmented for children with high quality infant-toddler care and higher cognitive scores at preschool entry. This implies a positive association between marginal productivity of preschool investment and the cognitive skills developed during infancy-toddlerhood. Therefore, to invest only in high quality infant-toddler care without subsequent high quality preschool is not productive in the long term. High cognitive and academic scores at school entry require consistent high quality infant-toddler care and high quality preschool. Findings of this paper suggest the desirability of spreading investment across early childhood periods as opposed to front-loading investment on infant-toddler care. (Contains 4 tables.)
Methodological Differentiation in Assessing the Value-Added of Florida's Interim Reading Assessment System to Predicting FCAT's Mean Proficiency
Author: Foorman, Barbara R.
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Achievement Tests,Reading Comprehension,Reading Tests,Scores,Prediction,Bayesian Statistics,Computation,Correlation

In Florida, mean proficiency scores are reported on the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT) as well as recommended learning gains from the developmental scale score. Florida now has another within-year measure of growth in reading comprehension from the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR). The FAIR reading comprehension screen is administered three times a year in a computer-adaptive system to students in grades 3-10. The authors' objective in this presentation is to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the correlations between FCAT and the FAIR reading comprehension scores (FCAT success probability and reading comprehension ability)?; (2) What is the value added of the FAIR reading comprehension screen to prior FCAT?; (3) Does the FAIR reading comprehension screen significantly reduce identification errors above and beyond prior FCAT?; (4) What is the value added to predicting FCAT of using Bayesian mean estimates of growth in FAIR reading comprehension compared to difference scores?; and (5) What is the value added to predicting FCAT of using Bayesian mean estimates of growth and prior FCAT scores? Findings reveal that there ways to improve on the traditional &quot;mean proficiency&quot; approach to accountability. The FAIR reading comprehension screen correlated highly with FCAT reading scores. Incorporating the autoregressor of prior FCAT and FAIR performance at the winter assessment into the prediction of current FCAT accounted for up to 7% unique variance. The Simple Difference approach to measuring FAIR growth accounted for up to 2-3% unique variance above and beyond the model which included the FCAT autoregressor and winter performance on the FAIR. Such improvements in FCAT prediction lead to (a) reduction in false positives in classifying student risk and (b) better placement for reading intervention. (Contains 5 tables.)
Colorado Commission on Higher Education Report to the General Assembly: Teach Colorado Grant Final Evaluation, 2009-2010
Author: Colorado Commission on Higher Education
Date: 2011-01-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Higher Education,Teaching (Occupation),Incentives,Scholarships,Grants,State Legislation,Teacher Education Programs,Annual Reports,Program Evaluation,Program Implementation,Program Effectiveness,Disadvantaged Schools

This report is prepared pursuant to Colorado Revised Statute Section 23-3.3-901 to describe the monies allocated as part of the 2009-2010 Teach Colorado Grant Initiative and how the scholarships met the intent of the initiative. Senate Bill 08-133 established the Teach Colorado Grant Initiative (TCGI) to give financial incentives to college students to enter the teaching profession and thereby increase the number of teachers in high-need content areas, including but not limited to mathematics, science, special education, English language acquisition, music and world languages. Under the new law, the Department  of Higher Education (DHE) is authorized to administer a program of grants to public institutions of higher education, which in turn create scholarships for high-ability students in approved teacher preparation programs who excel in high-need content areas and who demonstrate an  interest in or commitment to teaching as a career. It should be noted that the TCGI was not funded by the General Assembly for 2010-2011. (Contains 2 tables.)