This Yearbook provides a unique and original assessment of the state of the art of cost-effectiveness analysis in education. It identifies key issues that need to be considered and presents original empirical studies to serve as models.

The past decade has seen increased attention to cost-effectiveness and benefit-cost analysis in education as administrators are being asked to accomplish more with the same or even fewer resources, philanthropists are keen to calculate their "return on investment" in social programs, and the general public is increasingly scrutinizing how resources are allocated to schools and colleges. Economic Evaluation in Education: Cost-Effectiveness and Benefit-Cost Analysis (titled Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Methods and Applications in its previous editions) is the only full-length book to provide readers with the step-by-step methods they need to plan and implement a benefit-cost analysis in education. Authors Henry M. Levin, Patrick J. McEwan, Clive Belfield, Alyshia Brooks Bowden, and Robert Shand examine a range of issues, including how to identify, measure, and distribute costs; how to measure effectiveness, utility, and benefits; and how to incorporate cost evaluations into the decision-making process. The updates to the Third Edition reflect the considerable methodological development in the evaluation literature, and the greater empiricism practiced by education researchers, to help readers learn to apply more advanced methods to their own analyses.

Cost-effectiveness analysis allows researchers and evaluators to determine if a particular program or policy has attained maximum effectiveness for a given budget. This book introduces cost-effectiveness analysis and gives readers step-by-step methods to plan and implement a cost-analysis study. It explains and illustrates the four major techniques : cost-effectiveness, cost-benefit, cost-utility, and cost-feasibility. It discusses choice of analysis, implementation, the nature of costs (including how to identify, measure, and distribute costs); measuring effectiveness, utility, and benefits; and, lastly the difficulties of including cost evaluations in the decision making process. Each chapter ends with exercises that enable readers to sharpen their ability to evaluate policy options and program effectiveness.

Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis aims to help healthcare and public health organizations make fairer decisions with better outcomes. It can provide information about equity in the distribution of costs and effects - who gains, who loses, and by how much - and the trade-offs that sometimes occur between equity and efficiency. This is a practical guide to methods for quantifying the equity impacts of health programmes in high, middle, and low-income countries. The methods can be tailored to analyse different equity concerns in different decision making contexts. The handbook provides both hands-on training for postgraduate students and analysts and an accessible guide for academics, practitioners, managers, policymakers, and stakeholders. Part I is an introduction and overview for research commissioners, users, and producers. Parts II and III provide step-by-step guidance on how to simulate and evaluate distributions, with accompanying spreadsheet training exercises. Part IV concludes with discussions about how to handle uncertainty about facts and disagreement about values, and the future challenges facing this growing field. Book jacket.

Annotation A training tool with several modules which include modeling worksheets. Training modules cover Assessing Policy Options for Teacher Training and Pay, Comparative Policy Analysis in Education, Management of Teacher Deployment and Classroom Processes and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Education.

Contemporary public policy assumes that the achievement gap between black and white students could be closed if only schools would do a better job. According to Richard Rothstein, "Closing the gaps between lower-class and middle-class children requires social and economic reform as well as school improvement. Unfortunately, the trend is to shift most of the burden to schools, as if they alone can eradicate poverty and inequality." In this book, Rothstein points the way toward social and economic reforms that would give all children a more equal chance to succeed in school. This book features: a summary of numerous studies linking school achievement to health care quality, nutrition, childrearing styles, housing stability, parental economic security, and more ; aA look at erroneous and misleading data that underlie commonplace claims that some schools "beat the demographic odds and therefore any school can close the achievement gap if only it adopted proper practices." ; and an analysis of how the over-emphasis of standardized tests in federal law obscures the true achievement gap and makes narrowing it more difficult.

Almost any economist will agree that education plays a key role in determining a country’s economic growth and standard of living, but what we know about education policy in developing countries is remarkably incomplete and scattered over decades and across publications. Education Policy in Developing Countries rights this wrong, taking stock of twenty years of research to assess what we actually know—and what we still need to learn—about effective education policy in the places that need it the most. Surveying many aspects of education—from administrative structures to the availability of health care to parent and student incentives—the contributors synthesize an impressive diversity of data, paying special attention to the gross imbalances in educational achievement that still exist between developed and developing countries. They draw out clear implications for governmental policy at a variety of levels, conscious of economic realities such as budget constraints, and point to crucial areas where future research is needed. Offering a wealth of insights into one of the best investments a nation can make, Education Policy in Developing Countries is an essential contribution to this most urgent field.