Education Commons^™

Do School District Bond Guarantee Programs Matter?, Michael Cirrotti

Economics Student Scholarship

The State of Washington enacted a school district bond credit enhancement program in 1999. Oregon did the same in 1998. I use data from the National Center for Education Statistics for a representative sample of states in order to examine whether or not these programs increased the likelihood that school districts in Washington and Oregon issued bonds. I isolate the programs’ impact in Washington and Oregon through difference-in-differences analysis to control for other variation in the data in ten other representative states during the same time period. The results suggest that state-level school district bond guarantee programs increase the likelihood …

Oral History Interview With Sim Teow Hong: Growing Smu, Teow Hong Sim

Oral History Collection

The interview covered: first involvement with SMU, finance administration, CFO, government funding, stakeholders, tuition fees, financial crisis, donors, campus development, facilities management, student hostels, parent, risk management, reputation.

Biography: Senior Vice President of Finance & Administration, SMU, 1999–2016

Sim Teow Hong graduated with a Bachelor of Accountancy from the former University of Singapore and worked as an auditor with the Ernst & Young public accounting firm for a few years. He then embarked on a banking career by joining the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase), Singapore. He worked with the Bank for 18 years, fulfilling different roles from …

The Massachusetts Early Education And Care: Professional Development Study, Anne Douglass, Alice Carter, Frank Smith

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

This study is a research-policy partnership. This study used workforce registry (n=55,768) and professional development attendance data to examine early educator characteristics and patterns of professional development participation in one state.

In the paper, we describe how these new workforce data can inform professional development. We present the concept of density in professional development participation, discuss its potential benefits, and highlight the utility of state-wide digital tracking of early educators’ patterns of professional development for informing policy. We suggest that professional development policy can impact professional development participation density, and can thus be used intentionally to promote investments that have …

Particularizing Universal Education In Postcolonial Sierra Leone, Grace Pai

Publications and Research

This paper presents a vertical case study of the history of universalizing education in postcolonial Sierra Leone from the early 1950s to 1990 to highlight how there has never been a universal conception of universal education. In order to unite a nation behind a universal ideal of schooling, education needed to be adapted to different subpopulations, as the Bunumbu Project did for rural Sierra Leoneans in the 1970s to 1980s. While the idea of “localizing” education was sound, early program success was undermined by a lack of clarity behind terms like “rural” or “community.” This was exacerbated by a change …