Mission matters: The cost of small high schools revisited

With the financial support of several large foundations and the federal government, creating small schools has become a prominent high school reform strategy in many large American cities. While some research supports this strategy, little research assesses the relative costs of these smaller schools. We use data on over 200 New York City high schools, from 1996 through 2003, to estimate school cost functions relating per pupil expenditures to school size, controlling for school output and quality, student characteristics, and school organization.We find that the structure of costs differs across schools depending upon mission—comprehensive or themed. At their current levels of outputs, themed schools minimize per pupil costs at smaller enrollments than comprehensive schools, but these optimally sized themed schools also cost more per pupil than optimally sized comprehensive schools. We also find that both themed and comprehensive high schools at actual sizes are smaller than their optimal sizes.     

Research practices and scholarly communication in the digital environment

This paper examines changing research practices in the digital environment. A review of the literature and our own field research in Australia suggest that there is a new mode of knowledge production emerging, changing research practices and bringing new information access and dissemination needs. Adjustments will be required to accommodate these changes, but new opportunities are emerging for more cost‐effective and sustainable information access and dissemination. It will be necessary, however, to take an holistic approach and treat the creation, production and distribution of scholarly information, the management of information rights and access, systems of review and evaluation and the underlying infrastructure as parts of a single research information and scholarly communication system.